Sunny Days In Nairobi.

The day I was born it poured with rain. Well it probably didn’t, it doesn’t rain much in Nairobi and certainly not in December, it’s just I can’t imagine being born on a sunny day. The day I was born the rain didn’t come down in buckets, the drains didn’t flood or clog with rubbish. In fact the sun shone down hard on my pregnant mother’s head as she walked, hemorrhaging down her legs, to the hospital. I’m sure in her heart it rained.

 

My father was a gambling man, a man obsessed with trying his fortune at games with sinister names. Black Jack. Roulette. Pata Potea. Potea being the operative word.

 

My mother, not yet knowing the difference between love and the necessity of mistrust, took off her gold band commitment, when her fingers became too swollen to accommodate it and put it on the edge of the basin in the bathroom. Her baby fund – her civil service life savings – she ‘hid’ under the mattress or in the cookie jar or somewhere equally cliché and when her pregnancy bladder and her swollen feet had her distracted, he took the money and her commitment and skipped off to try his luck. Did he mean well? Who knows, but with a baby bleeding out and an empty pay packet on the table dear mother slipped her swollen feet into a pair of red rubber flip flops and began to walk. Kenyatta Market to MP Shah.

Baby Janet Amoit

 

I can’t imagine that the day I was born was a happy day but Decembers in Nairobi have always been sunny. There were no cooing crowds gathered around the bed. No pink baby booties sewn by doting relatives. No proud father or gushing aunties. Just my mother, cleaning her Caesarian scar with Hydrogen Peroxide, wondering if her baby – me, not quite seven months in the making, not quite ready – scrawny and pale; the baby he said was too fair to be his own (when he finally got back), was ready for the world.

 

It never rains, in December, in Nairobi – but if there was ever a day it might have, should’ve, could’ve rained, it would’ve been the day I was born.