Are you home already?

Christmas is here. 2016 is gone. Well, almost gone. In a few days – that we will barely notice pass by because we will be all into celebrating and passing out – it will be a memory. Some will look back at it with sneer for the pain it has caused them. To put this in perspective, last week I asked someone close to me how her resolutions have shaped up through the year and she literally face palmed! She simply said, “At least I am alive Wesh”. And there is the catch. It means she got nothing going as planned but she’s all good with the fact that 2016 is over. The year wrecked her bad and now she is part of those who will simply sneer at it.

Others will definitely be fading in on the edge of paradise when beautiful nostalgia hits them as they reminisce 2016 and its good tidings. Like my friends who got hitched this year, akina Kay, William, Nash, and Makokha.  

Then some will want nothing to do with it. Like a bad omen, they will bury it in the ‘kaburi la sahau’ and seek supernatural indulgence to rid themselves of any misfortunes they might have dragged over from 2016.

***

My heart goes out to all those lives that we lost in the Naivasha tragedy. The lives of the men and women who woke up to go about their business with no idea it would be their last day to be with us. To walk the earth. I really don’t know what you tell a man who has lost two daughters and a brother all at once. Or parents to a couple that were on their way to honeymoon. May their souls rest in eternal peace.

***

And I also admit this year for me has not been all highs. There are moments when I have crawled in the shadows of disappointment and borne the staleness of dark days. Days when even my lucky socks wouldn’t help. (I have lucky socks people). I wore them this one dark day and I still lost a thao at an ATM machine. A thousand bob gone like that. Puff! Damn those socks! But really, I am referring to bigger issues of course. I am talking of days when neither kachumbari-topped mutura nor those samosas I eat at nicks could help. Even a massage couldn’t do it. Days that simply left a sour taste in my mouth. The kind of days I would scroll through my gram timeline and see those life quotes over flowery pictures or sunset photos and be like, “gerrarahia man”. The quotes would not mean much. 

But all those are now memories and my friends and I are still slaying over here.

So Christmas is here. How would you know? Well, there are dead giveaways. Just look around at the decorations. Everywhere. Garden city is magical with the enchanting lights, the Kamau guy hired to play Santa, the decorated trees and the enticing holiday sale banners. I actually tend to think Garden City peeps are living up to their ‘city of dreams’ slogan. Then I passed over at TRM on Friday to pay my landlord, Kinoti, his dues and either I have the wrong idea of paradise or TRM has somehow received a fax from the man up there giving them tips on what befits the word ‘heavenly’. Or I am just exaggerating. But the décor is impressive. 

Then there are the families. Kids are all over the place with beaming faces, ice cream guys making a kill on this, women in heeled shoes stacking things they probably don’t need in trolleys at Nakumatt and their men walking behind them with sulky faces from all the draining on the credit cards. Of course you’ll know the ones who’ll go nuts in January went ahead and thought carrying a debit cards over that holiday trip to Diani was not a bad idea at all.

But the most explicit part about this Christmas season is the traveling. Has anybody called you to ask “hujaenda ocha bado”? That call will somehow come up. We all get into the travel frenzy around this season. Hell even some of us – us here means western fellas (akina Kuchio and Matendechere) – carry their beds and sofa seats all the way to Butula and them come back with them in January! And are you going home by the way?

I know its cliché but I want to know where you call home. I want to know because I am just from a call with someone who I asked this question and to them there is ocha where parents and siblings are then there is home where their heart finds tranquil. Where their heart is not bleeding. And by the way it sucks the soul out of me when I hear the depravity in someone’s voice as they try to explain why they are swimming against the tide to people who only know reason as swimming with the tides. 

Explaining why ‘home’ is not home for them.

So where is home?

A million ways to put this but indulge me in my perspective.

For me, flowers or flower gardens or flower bushes, are the most astounding of preachers on the state of being home. 

Let first just talk flowers.

I oddly used to admire, still do, how flowers grow and live in their tribes and bloom over vast fields and wild groves. Even more I admire how each flower though constrained in a vastness of hundreds of others manages to stand out alone. And not the kind of standing alone that resounds ‘degenerate’. No. The standing alone that resounds accomplishment, like great men, men that tangle solitude and success together. In their natural form, flowers sway against winds that carry stories and secrets in equal measure but remain unmoved as their roots delve deep in the earth. And in all this strength and privilege such flowers are not lost on their course, they simply aim at a single thing; to excel in what their laws finds graceful, to be true to their form, to be the door through which nature smiles at us.

When you root out flowers from the ground they don’t hide anything. They show their struggle by their roots; the lengths they have gone to in order to sustain the beauty above the ground; the twists and turns beneath the ground; dodging rocks and all. Surprisingly in the most rugged grounds you find the most impressive flowers. 

Think of these flowers preaching, 

“I really don’t know who bore me. In our family we simply spread as pollen. Our fathers and our children are family but are also strangers to us. They may be here or far away. My family is thus all these flowers around me whether we rose from the same pollen grain or not. They are family because they are what I got for now. We stick together and refuse to die in storms. And all I do here is to live out to my full term. I share my secrets and pain with them and I keep my labour holy. I shine in the sun and look pretty in the rain. It’s what we do. We prevail in this and in this I have built my trust. A form of trust that carries my life.”

A flower is thus simply paying its eternal dues. Mother Nature puts the small plant through hell. But that only serves to refine the damn thing. To tighten the ‘family’ bond. In the end the uniqueness of each flower is curved out better in the face of adversity. After the stormy night, nothing looks better than a bunch – ‘family’ – of flowers in the morning sun. Their details are orgasmic. 

I know this is prolly starting to sound like those inspirational novels but hang in there, we are headed somewhere.

Ask any bride about the power of a flower and they will give you stories for days. Or ask a girl what a single rose can do and they will let you know of the inexplicable feeling that those red petals carry. Roses do things to hearts of women. And why are we happy when we are surrounded by flowers? I guess it’s because they remind us of our idea of homes. Flowers somehow feed our illusion of perfection. Actually a bouquet of flowers having flowers cut and trimmed together should tell you what family is all about. We all want to be like flowers; the centre of admiration; the focal point of those expensive Nikon cameras. Cameras owned by kick ass photographers kama Siloma.

So we go back to the question, where is home? 

In my view, I think home is many things and one thing too. 

Home can be somewhere we are headed, where we ought to be, and not really places where we have come from. Indeed as a flower rises from past it has no idea of, some of us rise from pasts that also remain vague to us sometimes. We have roots in mud and rusty places. Roots that carry our scars and our struggles but then these are not home. 

Home can be our crew; the niggas around you; the girlfriends you gossip with; the chama chics that you are building empires together or that person you confide in. The can be your family. And our aim in these families, as is in flowers, is to stand out at the end with a trail of success behind us and on a peak graced with peace. This is home. 

Home can also be the moments we share with the people we love and not really the place where these people are. It could be the journey we have to go through to create these moments. As flowers do, maybe remaining true to our form, our goal, and our purpose would be the perfect way to being at this home. To creating homely moments in time. 

Home can also be a feeling of safety and comfort. Like my phone-call friend’s idea of home.

Or it could also be the place where we get to wander around in boxers, play loud music, dance weirdly to Mercy Masika’s Mwema, eat unhealthy stuff and hold the serving spoon and sing Karaoke like a dying walrus. (I don’t do any of these).

And in the end? 

Well when we, like flowers, realise what is home for us then we become other people’s idea of home. We become a glimpse of paradise to those around us. We make them have an idea of what family is about. We show them that family is about those that stand with us, shape us to be better and those that fit in our garland: whether our veins run the same blood or not.

Vicissitudes are life. This I promise.

I have once not paid fare in a jav. Okay, done that more than once but I’ll just tell you about this one. I was headed to the office, it was a chilly morning and not particularly interesting. You know those mornings you wake up and take forever to get ready. You rummage through stuff to wear and trip over nothing – literally. Like the carpet just goes out of its way to catch your feet and wreck your toes. That’s of course after you’re done lying flat on the bed and contemplating whether you actually need work in your life. Si after all you can just go be a nomad and eat wild fruits as you herd people’s cattle somewhere in Maralal. But then you are really not cut out to be a wild herder so you just swallow hard and drag yourself to the shower. You encourage yourself that it won’t always be like this. That things will change. Or you will change things. You know, find a career that allows you to watch movies on Monday mornings as your peers struggle to stay awake on crowded jams on their way to offices they detest where they barely make enough money.

So, in the jav, the concodi did not ask for fare until when I alighted – this is not the usual case and so my natural instinct was to insist I paid him because I genuinely thought so. And I did so in a crude way because I shouted with a distinctive tone. With finality. Making him doubt himself and assume I paid. Then barely three steps late as I crossed the road, I fumbled over my trouser pockets and alas! The forty bob I had carried as fare was still there. Mixed reactions bequeathed me in that moment.

Did I just walk away with someone’s money? And bruised their heart while at it? Or did I just earn back all those overpaid fares in different javs? To hell with that guy?  Pay next time I see him? Haidhuru?

That incident has never left me. Still haunts me. (While some dimwits steal our billions and still find a way to sleep at night! – and only me and Boniface Mwangi seem to be fighting back and Chief Kariuki too).

I have written about it because yesterday I was – kupunga hewa in English – on our rooftop. Sitting on a three-legged plastic chair. Minding my own business. Cutting down my model-ish nails. Then I raise my head and this kid is staring at me. He was not just doing a normal stare, he looked at me like he knew all my sins. Made me feel as if he knew I walked away without paying fare from a jav. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. Like explain myself and stuff. I just thought I should write about it and make you feel bad for all those times you didn’t pay fare too. Yeah, I know you have done it too. It’s not right.

Anywho, that’s beside the point. 

That kid was riding a small DMX bike, just small enough for him. And after he was done staring at me of course he went ahead to riding as if nothing happened. 

And by the way, in my moments of keeping up with kids, I have reason to believe they can decide to gaze at you with piercing eyes without flinching. They could be tapping their feet, deliberately, or solving a rubrics cube but still stare.

Picture this. You go to church on a happy Sunday in November. You sit in the middle of the congregation because you are an average believer. That means you don’t sit at the front because you want to watch the action from a distance and again you don’t sit too much far behind because you feel those seats are for people who come in just for appearances. But then, as you sit in the middle, in front of you is a family of four. A mom. A dad. A suckling boy and a girl that should be at the kindergarten age. That girl will be your nightmare for the rest of the service. She is the girl that will stare at you with a blank face all through.

So you pray and she is staring. You say words and her stare answers you back.

You: “Good lord I am grateful for the gift of life”,

Her stare: “Oh really! Are you grateful weird dude?”

You: “And I thank you for my family and friends”,

Her stare: “Yeah? Do you even call you mom anymore? And what friends? You barely talk with them.”

You: “Thank you for my country Kenya too.”

Her stare: “Ha! You didn’t even vote last time. Are you even Kenyan weird guy?”

You: “Today I repent for all my sins. Forgive me father”.

Her stare: “Sure. You better say sorry for the fare thing!”

You: “This I pray and believe”.

Her stare: “That’s it? Huh? You won’t even repent for the yogurt container you threw from the jav?”

By the time you get off church you’ll be sure to mark where the kid sits next time before settling down.

Anyway the kid on the rooftop rode in circles, then unfortunately hit on a corner and bumped his full weight on the concrete floor. I told him men don’t cry but he went ahead and cried. Which is okay because he is a little man and little men can cry.

This whole article was written because like that kid’s ride, vicissitudes are life.

It doesn’t matter the period. Day. Week. Month. Quarter. Year. Decade. It happens. One season you are on your bike. You ride fast and firm with the wind blowing over your hair making you feel good and all. You wave at us as we cheer your progress. Another season finds you fallen. Your bike hit a bump and you lost control and you’re lying head over gravel possibly writhing in pain. Crying as people try to tell you not to cry.

I hate for my posts to sound like life skill pieces off a therapist’s desk because I am no expert in life but then I can tell stories. Because stories are born from life. And stories give patterns.

I grew up somewhere I the rift. A place called Timboroa. I wrote about it some time ago. A quiet town, few people, vast forests and events for days. Every village has its elites and so did Timboroa. Not that elites there mean more than owning a car and affording daily meat bites but then it was the 90s and those were a big deal when the rest of us could barely travel more than once a month to the big town of Eldoret with public means. My father is a teacher and so like the rest of the middle class working citizens he would up and go to the town on paydays and once in a while if we needed something not within the confines of Timboroa. Or when my teeth raised hell for all the sweets I ate and we had to see Mr Dentist at Barng'etuny Plaza.  Which was rare anyway. So again elites were elites because they owned a car, a shop, a wholesale shop, a ‘god papa’ hat – whatever than name meant – which is similar to the one every Kikuyu musician wears to a video shoot. And because they went to the town perhaps thrice a week. Too often.

One such guy was known as Gakere – not sure of the name juu it’s been years. He owned a wholesale and retail store. A number of cars. The 90s sedans. A truck and had more money than a whole village could borrow in a month. Gakere was a supermarket cum bank for us. He kept a borrowing book at the counter where people’s names lay besides owned money for Kimbo, Kiberiti za Rhino, Unga, Sukari ya kupimwa and what not. 

I still picture that guy with his big belly trotting around the hood with his arrogance trying to keep up behind him. Yani he was arrogant enough to throw your order right at you. Like you order salt and he throws a packet at your face just because he could.

But then karma caught up with him.

He got broke. Not fast. Slowly. Like a migraine happening. His wealth wafted off with the winds.

He was left with nothing but tales of riches. Tales that we heard over and over again. Tales that will break hearts of his children.

His downturn of fortune was bitter.

Of course there are time when mutuality happens for good. Like our neighbor who lived in abject lack. Her son, Kimani, in his grind he got a way into the UN. Went to the infamous Somalia. His fortunes grew. Riches begged him to let them in and he did. He bought his mama a car. Then built a house. And in equal measure his wealth grew slowly and firmly.

Men will tell tales of success and of failure and will boast of their conquests as they hide their wounds and make it look easy. They will want to wipe off the blood and keep the smile. But entrenched within these tales are vicissitudes that you may never hear of. Or see.

The only consolation is that we pray to the good Lord that when it is our turn to be moved by the twisting kaleidoscope of life, we shall end up with lives flashy enough for social media. And in time we embrace stoicism and resign to the higi haga’s of life as they come through from the divine world.

The wise men, the Greek philosophers say, live in harmony with the divine. With the vicissitudes of life.