Open Writing

Chapter 16
Teapot and the Kenya Police

I ask myself what is there of significance to tell you about the
two decades which elapsed between the time Jamila and I married
and the day I spotted Amina’s face gracing the pages of a UK broadsheet.
In the interests of brevity I should limit myself to events
which contributed to our leaving Kenya.

After her accident, Jamila proved tough and resilient. She had
more guts than I could ever have mustered. Within eighteen months
no one any longer really noticed that she was not as able bodied as
the next person. Within limits she danced unselfconsciously and
without obvious impediment; she played with our daughter like any
other mum. She swam (minus the prosthetic attachment of course!).
She took up golf at Muthaiga and to this day retains quite a professional
swing. I still marvel at the adapted swivel which gives rise to
this.

When we retired to bed at night, Jamila’s artificial appendage became
just a part of undressing. It seemed to me little different from
an old lady removing her false teeth before going to sleep, something
that we still laugh about. We resumed a normal sex life but there
were no further children. We talked about it of course: creating a little
brother or sister for Dalila. Somehow it didn’t happen. There was
no third pregnancy. It didn’t matter. After the accident our perspectives
changed. We seemed to have all we wanted in each other, and in
Dalila.

The business continued to thrive. We opened another Jamila’s in
Mombasa and then a third in Watamu (though logistics made big live
band appearances impossible at the latter). There was a tragic set
back in Mombasa. Some idiot smuggled fireworks in for the millennium
New Year’s Eve party. Perhaps our security people were at
fault. I don’t know. But I could almost have written the script. The
curtains behind the stage caught fire after a rocket thudded into
them. There was subsequent pandemonium as the the club began to
fill with smoke. Casualties were inevitable. Of the three hundred
revelers, eleven people died. Five were crushed at the main exit as
panicking guests trampled them. The rest were overcome by acrid
smoke inhalation.

There was a police enquiry of sorts, fused with KP31 attempts to
extort money from us if we didn’t want our license revoked. In the
end we managed to steer ourselves clear, not least because Jamila was
related to someone senior in the newly established Police Complaints
Commission. It was an awkward time for us. We worried too about
being sued by grieving relatives of the dead. In the end we were
found not to be at fault. Within six months, and thanks to an adequate
insurance pay out, we had re-opened in new premises on the
Salim Mwamganga Road.

Dalila has grown into a beautiful, accomplished young girl, even
if I say it myself. We’d initially sent her to Greenacres in Nairobi but
she didn’t like it as much as we thought she would. One day, seemingly
out of the blue, she asked ‘Daddy, can I go to boarding
school?’ I was taken aback. I wanted my little girl to stay with us. It
wasn’t just a notion of hers, however. She was adamant. Kenya, she
said, was starting to stifle her. She wanted to include in her upbringing,
a taste of my own background. To be in England or Scotland, if
only for a few years. We could always catch up during the holidays,
she’d insisted.

Jamila was quite relaxed about it. Some Africans quite happily
‘contract out’ their kids to distant relations in times of economic
hardship, or if the child is to be educated in a foreign land. Greenacres
after all, was full of Ugandan, Tanzanian and Seychellois pupils,
all of whom had an auntie, uncle or whatever who served as ‘guardian.’

So we agreed to look for somewhere suitable in England, judging
that north of the border would add too many hours to our visiting
schedule. We knew we’d miss Dalila terribly. At age thirteen, we
packed her off to the Royal High School in Bath. She settled in no
time and was popular among the other girls. Perhaps it was the curi-
ous mixture of English, Kiswahili and Kikuyu spoken in our home
that gave her the ear for it. Dalila turned out to have a gift for languages.

Spanish was a cinch, and she started to learn Mandarin (‘the
Chinese will soon dominate the world,’ she told me on her first
summer holiday back in Nairobi. ‘They already have their red flag
draped over the entire continent of Africa and are plundering its resources
far more ruthlessly than any former colonials!’ – quite a
speech, I thought). She learned to play the violin and joined a school
orchestra which performed occasional concerts at different city venues.

In the sporting arena she became proficient at judo and net ball.
Mandarin and judo! They never had such things when I was at
school!

While our daughter was off enjoying herself in the south-west of
England, Jamila, Teapot and I moved house. I’d always wanted to return
to Karen. We’d half heartedly looked at properties there from
time to time but found nothing to our taste. One day I spotted an
advertisement in The Standard which read simply: ‘For Sale: Old
stone house in Karen. Needs work. Contact Joseph Kamaru. Telephone
........’. I could hardly believe it. We knew Joseph well by then,
as he had played several gigs in our clubs.

We went to see the place immediately. It was pouring with rain
that day. Joseph was standing under an umbrella at the gate and ushered
us into the weed encrusted driveway.

‘Ayee, Stewart. Jamila my darling,’ he said, taking liberties with my
lovely wife’s lips. ‘If I had known you wanted my house I could have
saved that advertising fee,’ he chuckled.

‘Well we haven’t seen it yet,’ I countered as we dashed in from the
rain.
When we got inside, water was running down the living room
walls. There were holes in the ceiling and I heard the scampering of
tiny feet above us – rats, I thought. There was rot in the floor boards
and the kitchen cupboards had disappeared altogether. ‘Vandals,’ said
Joseph, easily, by way of explanation. French doors to the rear
looked out onto about two acres of ground. We could see the
Ngong Hills in the distance. Like many a garden in Nairobi, it contained
several mature jacaranda trees. I loved them. These were a colonial
legacy I was thankful for (and make me wonder what the
bloody Chinese will leave behind in fifty years time. Perhaps only the
roads they had constructed to ease their extraction of minerals and
hardwood. And then wasteland).

The house would have been little different to Blixen’s own, I
thought. It was just perfect, or could be with devoted care and attention.

‘Stewart, you are not good at obscuring your emotions,’ Joseph
said, almost as if he was singing the line. ‘I can see that you want my
house. Don’t worry. You helped me a lot in the early years. I’m going
to give it to you for a good price.’

‘You’ll need to. We’ll have to spend a fortune doing it up.’

‘Ah no. A nail here and there should fix it up nice for you.’

‘Pah!’

We agreed a price there and then. Within a week the sharks had
attended to the legal side of things. Six months later, after a complete
renovation, we moved in. It was a dream come true, even if the
dream was soon to be shattered.

**

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