Still absorbed with his recent humiliation, Kamltl was at first oblivious to what the woman was saying. But when it registered, he was startled from his engagement with his injured self.
“You are a university graduate? I would never have guessed …”
“Why? I don’t have a mark on my forehead?” the woman said rather sharply before laughing and extending her hand. “My name is Nyawlra. Grace Nyawlra, but I prefer Nyawlra by itself.”
“I am Kamltl wa Karlmlri. But there was a time I used to be called Comet Kamltl.”
“Comet? That is a new one.”
When I was a kid I read somewhere about stars and something about comets streaking across the sky, and I said: That is my Christian name.”
“Comet? A Christian name?”
Why not? It is as European as your Grace.”
When I was in Brilliant Girls High School I was in charge of saying grace before meals. We thank you Jesus for the food we are about to eat, etcetera. The other students started calling me Grace, and soon after I adopted it as my own, replacing Engenethi.”
‘Engenethi? A version of Ingrid?”
“I believe it’s derived from Agnes.”
“Engenethi? Ingrid or Agnes? A Christian name?” It was his turn to wonder aloud.
Well, it sounded European,” she said. “All European names are Christian, African ones are satanic,” she added with a wry smile.
“Is that what you got from that novel you were reading, Shetani Msalabani, Satan on the Cross—or is it Devil on the Cross}”
When did your eyes steal away to what I was reading?” Nyawlra asked as she touched her handbag to indicate that the book was still in there.
They both laughed and for the first time in a while Kamltl felt the heaviness inside him lighten, and he was now attentive to her story.
Grace Nyawlra had gone to Eldares University, graduating with a degree in English, history, and theater arts. She could not find a job for a long time. She sustained herself with all manner of temporary ones. Even so, what helped her to get these tempas, as they are called, was not her degree but a computer course she took at the Ruler’s Polytechnic in Eldares.
“You and I could be called Twins in Trouble,” Kamltl said with a light tone.
“Twins on the Beat,” they said in unison, and stared at each other, laughing again.
“All the same, you have crossed the river of tribulations, haven’t you, for you now have a job!” Kamltl said.
“It’s hardly that. I’m simply passing time in this tempa, waiting for good luck.”
“When did you start working?”
“Not long ago. Let me see. Soon after the nation presented the Ruler with the special birthday cake. When was that?”
“I don’t remember,” said Kamltl. “I don’t keep up with politics.”
“You mean to tell me you were not there when the plans for Marching to Heaven were first announced?” Nyawlra asked.
Kamltl thought of telling her about his odd sense of smell. He did not like being in crowds, foul smells galore assailing his nostrils. But he did not talk about his curious sensitivity. He had not attended the ceremony because he had gone into the forest to pick wild berries.
“I wasn’t there, but I heard rumors about it,” he said.
“About Marching to Heaven? Or about the snakes?” But as soon as she had uttered the questions she looked at her watch and jumped to her feet. She did not notice Kamltl wince at the mention of the word snake.“It’s getting late. I must get going,” she said.
“Where do you live?” Kamltl asked.
Nyawlra paused, dwelling on the question and its answer.
“In Santalucia, two rooms and a kitchen. What about you?”
“Bahati,” he said and did not give details.
While they were clearly reluctant to talk more about themselves, they seemed as reluctant to leave each other’s company.
“I have to get home before dark,” Nyawlra said again. “Now that you know my place of work, if you ever find yourself with time to spare, you can come over for lunch. I know many nice fish and chips places around here,” she said, and left.
Kamltl followed her with his eyes until her figure was lost in the massing crowd.
Her presence and their talk had taken him away from his troubles, but now they came back with a vengeful fury. He indulged in self-pity edged with self-contempt. Why did I lie to her about Bahati? I wish I had told her straight out that I did not have shelter for the night. I should have asked her to let me stay in her place tonight or asked her for dinner tonight instead of lunch in the future.
He rose and walked toward the city center. Many shops were now under lock and key. Elsewhere armed security guards reported for night watch. It was as if the city were at war. His parents used to tell him that in the olden days in the villages and the countryside, they never even bothered to lock their doors, pulling them shut only to prevent stray animals from entering. He jumped to one side to avoid colliding with two men who were pushing empty mkokoteni carts, racing toward Santamaria Market.
Soon he reached the market, where hand- and donkey-pulled carts were competing for customers and the right of way, as were a motley assortment of rickshaws pulled by bicycles, scooters, and mules. The scene reminded him of a street in Old Delhi where ox-pulled carriages competed for the right of way with cows, tricycles, decrepit motor vehicles, and of course the latest models. He thought, Why don’t I look for a cart and start bearing loads for a fee like all these others? But even a mkokoteni costs money. Besides, unlike picking through garbage or begging, this trade could not be done surreptitiously; it would be embarrassing for a Masters of Business Administration to be running about with a mkokoteni hand-pulled cart, shouting for customers.
Embarrassing? No, it would be humiliating …
The humiliation he had suffered on the premises of Eldares Modern Construction and Beal Estate came rushing back with such a force that for a few seconds he felt dizzy and had to still himself against the wall of the nearest building to keep from falling down. His heartbeats became drumbeats. His mind jumped from place to place, image to image, turning over and at times mixing up the different things that had happened to him in the last two days. He had tried to suppress his memory of some of the events, but there was no denying the return of the repressed. His mind was flooded with happenings, big and small, in the near and distant past, and he had to yield to them.
Like the case of Margaret Wariara.
4
Kamltl met Wariara on a bus soon after his return from India. They talked; they were attracted to each other; they became friends. Their friendship deepened, especially when it came out that they were from the same village, KTambugi, a few miles from Eldares, and they had attended the same primary school. But they had not known each other then because Wariara was in her first year and he in his last, about to go to a secondary school. And after his secondary education, he had gone to India. Wariara completed her primary education and she went on to Harambl Community High School and ended up with an Aburlria school certificate.
Years after leaving school she still had not landed a job despite her high school diploma now boosted by a secretarial course—typing, shorthand, and computer literacy. So at the time they met, Wariara was still looking for a job. The newly arrived Kamrö was bubbling with hope and told her not to worry. He thought that with two university degrees in his pocket, he would get a job in no time; he and Wariara would marry and start a family, and even if that failed to work he would still help her build her own life. But instead of any of that coming to be, they found themselves beating the streets together. Although each would try a separate turf, they would often take the same matatu from KTambugi to Eldares in the morning, and in the evening they would take separate transport back to KTambugi because there was no way of timing their different searches. In the evening they would meet to compare notes, and it was always the same story: No Vacancy. At first they met every evening to enjoy ea
ch other’s company and share their day’s experiences, often, in those early days, narrating some of their encounters in the city. They would burst into hilarious laughter over the twists and turns of their day’s quest, almost as if hunting for a job in the city jungle was an adventure. But as days and months elapsed and the ending of their stories never changed, they found themselves feeling embarrassed and even guilty about their own failures. They began meeting less and less. They could not explain it to themselves, but their failures were putting a strain on their relationship and they were drifting apart. Wrapped up in their own guilt and sorrows, they did not want to live the same pains thrice over: first in experiencing it directly, second in retelling it, and third in having to carry the burden of the other’s identical pain.
Early one morning as the sun was rising, Wariara told him: Look. Two blind men cannot show each other the way. Go your way and I’ll go my way and we should not try to find out where each is going. I want to go wherever fate calls.
They sat under a tree on a hill overlooking KTambugi village, and they were like any man and woman wooing under the shades while the cocks of the village were crowing and the dogs barking. It had been her call that they meet there before the break of day so that they could talk and still have time to catch their early rides to the city. It was also her call that he should take her under the dew of the morning. At first Kamltl was taken aback by this, because they had so far refrained from lovemaking in the hope that it would be a special gift to themselves on the dreamt day to come, a way of initiating themselves into their married life and sealing their union. He felt cheated out of a dream, a hope, a promise, and more so when the act turned out not to be so great, as if it had been forced on them. He felt as if he had swallowed dregs where he was expecting cool water. Her final call for a separation did not therefore come as a surprise, but still Kamltl kept quiet, he himself lost for words that could answer hers. What was he to tell her? Stay with me awhile longer and I will land you a job and right the wrongs of yesterday? He searched his heart and found that it was not in him to judge her in praise or blame. It was the way of the world, their world, and he did not even have the strength to weigh her words and try to suggest a way out. The sun was slightly higher up in the sky and the dew on the grass was beginning to fall. Kamltl stared at two grasshoppers and for a few seconds he remained absorbed in their hopping play. Far, far away came the sounds of two donkeys braying, as if in competition. Kamltl did not take his eyes away from the dance of the grasshoppers, even when he heard Wariara sing what would later turn out to be a song of farewell.
Happy were they
That gave up fishing in the lakes
And they became fishers of men
The tune was not happy—it was actually sad, at least in the singing of it. Even when it was over the tone remained in the air, and it made Kamltl feel tears at the edges. He raised his head to tell her that he loved her and that he would not bear any ill will toward her or presume to judge her choice of what she would do, but Wariara was no longer there. He wanted to say, Please don’t go, but he had nothing to call her back to, not even a sense of hope that things would be better tomorrow. So he sat there under the tree, the shade and morning dew of which they had shared, watching her go down the hill until he could no longer make out her form against the distant landscape. She never once looked back, and now Kamltl let his tears flow down his cheeks and did not make any effort to wipe them away.
He decided not to go to the city. But what was he to do with his time? Kamltl never took alcohol. Now he turned his pockets inside out and found enough to take to the nearest bar. Instead of walking about the streets of the city, he would stay indoors, a lone fixture at the counter. Maybe if he tossed down two or three beers he would feel good, and even if he failed to feel good, he would at least forget the turn his life had taken. He closed his eyes and gulped down the first bottle. He did the same with the second and the third. He stopped counting and he did not know how many he tossed down. He continued drinking thus for a week or so, as if he did not really want to wake up to reality, and as he did not have much money, he resorted to cheaper brews. There was a night when he drank so much of the brew that he could not tell how and when he eventually staggered out of the bar to the backyard and fell asleep, seduced by the warmth of his own vomit. When in the morning he woke up and found himself covered with his own spew, he decided that alcohol was not the cure for his problems, be they of the body or the spirit. But how could he have succumbed to the seduction, he often wondered, afraid of his weakness, and he thereafter avoided bars like the plague.
Kamltl never saw Wariara in Klambugi again. He continued staying in the village, but without Wariara life was no longer the same. Although in the last days of their friendship their review of their encounters in the city had become rarer and rarer, he still missed their occasional review of the day’s hunt for jobs. It was increasingly difficult and hollow to live in the village where everything, even matatu rides in the morning, reminded him of her. Besides, he feared that everybody was aware of his alcoholic spell. He too decided to leave Klambugi for Eldares for, as he reasoned to himself, a fisherper-son does not cast the net in the same spot or a farmer continue planting seeds in the same hole.
He continued looking for a lucky break in Eldares but without ever getting it and without even seeing any glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel of his life up to that point. In the first few months Kamltl thought about Wariara, often wondering where she was, what she was doing, how she was surviving, or even whether she was alive. But months and months of daily problems eventually removed any lingering images of Wariara from his mind. He had enough problems of his own without having to add to them by worrying about another free agent.
Yes, there were countless disappointments in his three-year search for a job, some heart-wrenching, but none had plunged him into such depths of humiliation as the fake job interview. Was it because it was the culmination of what had happened to him the entire day since morning? Indeed, were he a believer in witchcraft, curses, and evil spells, Kamltl would have taken what had happened to him in the morning as a sure sign that, right at the break of day, somebody had cast evil his way.
On waking up to start what he now called his day of humiliation, Kamrö had made an important decision about the way he would support himself in this cruel city. He would follow what he called Buddha’s footsteps, or at least those of his followers. The best hours for this would be in the evening when it was a little dark: he did not want any of his friends or former classmates to meet him in his new occupation, however holy. He therefore set himself two tasks for daytime: continue knocking at offices for a job and also look around for the most promising premises of his new occupation of begging. Market survey, he called it.
He started his scouting mission at the Buler’s Plaza, situated in the city center. Around the plaza were some of the leading hotels, the haunts of foreign clients, particularly tourists from Europe, America, and Japan. He passed by Angel’s Hotel and when he saw how crowded it was with tourists, even at that hour of the morning, he stopped, and the thought crossed his mind, Why don’t I take the first step in the imitation of Buddha here and now instead of waiting for the evening hour? His eyes moved along the crowded veranda all the way to Angel’s Corner, famous for its acacia bush around which were chairs and tables graced by waiters in white flowing dresses, red bandanas, and of course marching red fezzes.
It was then that his eyes fell on … who? Margaret Wariara? He had not seen her for more than two years, and now this! She was dressed in a miniskirt, high heels, and a brown wig. She stood holding hands with a white tourist whose hanging belly was held in place by two suspenders, waiting for the waiter to finish clearing and tidying up their table. And then Wariara turned her head and for a split second hers and Kamltl’s eyes met before she resumed her previous posture by her man. Both Wariara and Kamltl knew that they had seen and recognized each other, but they acted as if their eyes had not actuall
y met. They never exchanged a word, a look, not even an embarrassed gesture of recognition. Kamltl moved away quickly as if safari ants had suddenly bitten his legs.
He tried to make himself feel angry with her, but no matter how he tried he did not feel anger, for he could not see the difference between what he had decided to do, the Buddha way as he called it, and what she was doing at Angel’s Corner—the way of the fishers of men, as she had called it in the song of farewell. But the encounter with Wariara at Angel’s Corner did temper his earlier embrace of the Buddha’s way, and he decided to knock at more office doors and see if one of them would open for him to enter. One lucky break after more than three years of searching was all he needed.
And indeed, moving from office to office asking the same question, is there any vacancy, was what he did the rest of the morning, until the middle of the day when hunger drove him to the foot of the garbage mountain to see if he could find some cast-off tomatoes or the remains of any other edibles. What he liked about tomatoes, pineapples, and bananas was that no matter the dirt on them he could always peel off the skin and reach the clean content. As it turned out, he did not pick up anything because that was the time he collapsed and felt himself, or rather his soul-self, disconnect from the hungry body.
The two incidents, the encounters with Wariara and then with death, were what made him desperate to get a job before he had taken a step in Buddha’s way. He did not want his and Wariara’s paths to ever cross again in any angel’s corners in Aburlria or anywhere else. And it was this desperation that had made him ingratiate himself with Tajirika, ending up with his drinking dregs from the cup of humiliation.
5
Standing by the side of the road, pressing hard against the wall, he felt all his afflictions coalesce into one, and an intense pain suddenly jolted him away from the wall and onto the road again to beg. The first step in any enterprise is the most difficult, but procrastination was not an option. The only place he had to skirt was the Ruler’s Plaza, where he had seen Wariara and her new lover; otherwise it did not matter to him where to begin.