The Way Sundays End

A story by NAOMI NDUTA WAWERU

Mami’s madness did not come with unkempt hair or bloodshot eyes. Neither did it come with losing clothes, eating papers and rubbish, and chasing after women and girls at Soko Mjinga Market like Ziporai the mad woman. And this bothered me more than it relieved me.

But what bothered me the most was how at the end of the day, Mami’s madness came to be a real thing because Baaba said so. Because he woke up one morning, positioned his huge glasses above his nose, cleared his throat twice, and said, “You are going mad. You need help.” As if he was introducing the scent of a new flower to her nostrils.

I like to think Mami started to lose her head the night we found you in Mama Banda's kiosk - a lone, double-roomed shack that stood at the edge of Soko Mjinga Market. It was surrounded by a stunted kei apple fence. The front served as a beer den, and we jumped over a few drunks scattered around the compound like logs of woods. The back room was where Mama Banda took babies out of girls’ bellies. 

“This room is what your sister chose to remove the baby growing in her belly. No pregnant girl comes in here and leaves in one piece,” Mama Hanna, our nosy neighbour said to me. 

She was trying and failing to stop Mami from collapsing next to where you lay - a makeshift bed whose worn sheets illuminated by an already dying paraffin lamp turned a gloomy orange-yellow. I can still see our misshapen shadows on the mud walls, you stumbling over your words, coming in and out of consciousness. Mami, bent over your fatigued body kept saying, “Breathe. God, you have to keep my daughter alive.” Gushes of blood were already drenching the sheets. Mama Hanna’s efforts to stop the bleeding ended in wands and wands of stained cotton wool around us. Two owls hooted in the distance just as Baaba arrived in his old Peugeot 504 to take you to Gwa-koigi dispensary. As we left the room with cobwebs the size of a fist, all I wanted was to ask you where Mama Banda took the baby that was in your stomach.

Baaba says Mami started to lose her head the day she almost set the whole of Gwa-Koigi ablaze. 

Em says, “Madness is a social construct. And sometimes people just need time to go back to their normal selves.”

If you ask three in ten people in Gwa-Koigi, they will tell you it was the day Mami almost strangled the askari in Cell One. How did she get in there? You may want to know. 

When the nurses sitting with Mami on the cold floors of the Gwa-Koigi dispensary took turns saying, “I am afraid we could not stop the bleeding in good time.” “The woman trying to remove the baby did some unprofessional work.” “Your daughter has left us.”, Mami took her time looking into each of their eyes. Five of them, each wearing a dirt brown, wooden rosary under their pale gray habits, could not hold Mami’s gaze.

“It is the will of God and we can not question it,” another nurse said.

“So He saw that my house is the perfect one to use as an example? Me, that has opened the doors of that church,” she pointed to the direction of a wooden chapel straight ahead, “and waited after everyone has left to close them? Have I not named all my children after His saints and servants?” She shot a tired glance at me, and I was grateful that I was wearing the shirt with the image of Saint Scholastica clasping her hands above her chest in supplication.

She reached for a knot on her leso, brought out a bunch of keys, and dropped them at the feet of the nurse with a broken toenail peeping from her John the Baptist sandals. 

She would wait for the fatigue of your sending-off ceremony to wear off, and one evening, she would fight Mama Banda in her kiosk and rip off her left ear in just one bite. The askaris, bribed by Mama Banda with a few rounds of beer, would lock Mami in Cell One and charge her with assault.

“If those idle askaris delayed a minute,” she would later say, holding onto the metal railings of Cell One, straining to see how much Baaba was giving the askari to set her free, “we would be dealing with another corpse.”

Upon her release, Mami intensified her endless prayer trips to St. Catherine of Siena shrine. Em, and I were always in tow before Em found a way to escape right before we boarded Kamaa’s face-me-i-face-you van with the terrible engine. We would only come to realise that he was not in the van with us when the conductor gave Mami more than the usual change. By that time, Kamaa would already be winning his battle with the famous potholes of Gwa-Koigi, throwing the bodies of 15 of us crammed into a 7-seater capacity van in every direction. 

But Em and I were there the day the white-haired gardener from St Catherine of Siena’s shrine slipped next to where Mami sat cradling her rosary, turned her head this way and that way like a thief, before telling her, “Set the girl's things on fire. And all the girl’s clothes. This will prevent the curse of unwanted pregnancies from spreading onto your daughter and her daughters.”

I was nibbling a blade of grass when the woman added, “You will stop seeing her. Send that young girl to rest.”

The veins on the woman's temples looked like they were dancing to a soundless musical. They made what she was saying believable.

At a distance, two swans danced around a weed-worn pond, and I almost heard Em mouth another of his theories on how two innocent swans were witnessing the stupidity of a species a million times intelligent.

“Ghosts exist in a Home Alone film only. Not in Gwa-koigi,” he said.

“Tell that to your mother.”

“I love my life today. I’ll keep it to myself.”

He moved on to study the rest of the rich bird species on every possible tree, leaving me to study each pop of veins on the woman’s temples and wonder what curse I was to inherit from you.

And one morning, when the dust had stopped gathering ‘peculiarly’―Baaba had said to give a flowery word to Mami’s premonition―on the graveyard, the woman’s words switched to a doable thing.

The medicine cabinet by her bedside was the first to go into the fire.

“I am no longer interested in treating this madness that comes with multiple headaches,” she said.

The church women start coming to our house after the burning of your things. They start trooping at around three o'clock. Each of them passes where Baaba and I sit, under the huge Mutarakwa tree outside the house. They do not seem to care for the peel of the paint on the house walls, nor the portrait of Mother Mary hung at the entrance of the house, which is beginning to wear from the weather. On one side of the portrait, Em has scribbled Heaven is not here on earth with a black Bic pen. The fluorescent electricity bulb is beginning to gather dust. The two earthen vases near the door - oval shaped but a little round at the center - holding the slender flower stalks Mami harvested from St. Catherine of Siena’s shrine garden and insisted on planting herself, need a little dusting. The recently replaced Mabati roofing looks like the scalp of a cleanly shaven head against the afternoon sun.

They will ask me when I knew Mami’s head would never be okay. I will point them to the night Baaba carried you out of Mama Banda’s kiosk. Mami sat with you on her laps in the backseat, and did not stop talking in tongues until we drove into Gwa-koigi dispensary. I will point them to when the nurses snatched you from her hands like you were a burning thing. When the nurses declared you dead, wrapped you in black polythene, and Mami stripped right in the middle of a disinfectant-prone ward in the Gwa-Koigi dispensary.

I will remember the arch of the full moon when Baaba rushed to cover her. The smell of formalin that accompanied your body after they trailed you to a waiting hospital van.

Mami kept rolling on the floor and patting her bosom like one cooling down a riotous toddler’s tantrum. She lodged at Baaba's feet. He squeezed into the slight space left by the single hospital bed, stretched his arm to encircle her, and she sobbed into his polo shirt. The wardroom bulb was flickering. And Baaba's eyes beneath his glasses looked like they were fighting down tears. 

“If she did not want the baby, did she have to kill it in a dingy kiosk with no humanity even in its walls,” she asked.

I thought I saw Baaba nod. When he took his glasses off, his eyes were as dry as the stretch of grass that would burn the next week.

The land around the patch was where you and I sat on Sunday afternoons. We would build makeshift mansions from pebbles and bamboo sticks. On that patch, enclosed with pebbles arranged in a rectangular box, you would always play the mom. I, your only kid.

I remember the season I started losing you. The Sunday I sat in our mansion and you did not show up. I would find you in our room, your thighs sticking out of your pink shorts, your legs crossed, and a copy of Drum Magazine in your hands.

I asked, “What did I do wrong?”

You said, “Find another girl to play with. I am now a big girl.”

I peered through the bottom of the magazine at the two mounds of breasts that were beginning to form and fantasized about chopping them off.

We did not exactly see eye-to-eye after that. And when Baaba announced that you would be joining the city university, I was happy to never have to share our room with you again. If you ask me now what I wish for the most, it will be for you to never have left the bed that morning.

The day Mami burned your things, the sun had risen with the intention to burn everything on its way. If anyone could say there was turmoil brewing in Mami’s head that morning, they would have to run a fingertip on the ground, lick it, and raise it skyward to swear they were not cooking up things.

She slouched in her cooking chair, tagging at a leftover meat strand in her teeth, waiting for the pot of porridge simmering before her to come to a boil. The final froth came and with it the turmoil. She squeezed through the bundle of burning wood and brought out the one stick that would raze the medicine cabinet to ashes.

No one stopped her. Not Baaba, who sat in his Makuti stool under the Mutarakwa tree, a newspaper in one hand, the other rubbing a spot beneath his glasses. 

Not Em, who kept the neighbours’ kids beginning to gather from getting too close to the fire.

The last bit of the medicine cabinet turned to ashes as we watched. The smoke rose into the air - a thin, pale gray phenomenon.

Mami’s veins popped on either side of her temples like separate pathways looking for a point to converge but failing. Her eyes seemed to be dressed in the embers of the fire razing before her - a fiery dark orange. She looked like the mythical creature in her tales who eats small girls that show boys their private parts. Her hands were propped to her waist like they were an extra pair of organs she was tired of carrying. Her feet looked like they were ready to break into a dance.

Other things went into the fire. The suitcase with your wigs. The wrappers you were tired of sewing patches onto other patches, and finally abandoned for booty shorts and mom jeans. The wooden frame with ingrained RnB artist faces, which held one end of our bedroom window to the other. You should have seen Mama Hanna, throwing her head this way and that way, looking for where your dresser would land. I wanted to walk to where it stood waiting to be thrown into the fire, carry it on my tiny back, and hand it over to her.

Certain things remained: The sun going down the Gwa-Koigi Hill as usual, as if it had not witnessed something hotter than itself raze the ground, the moon taking its place, the usual misshapen ball of lazy light, the portrait of Jesus with his wide judging eyes on the living room wall, the Bible holder, the missal, Baaba's drinking, the Supermatch boxes he littered all over the house. 

Long after the sun had gone down, Mami slumped on the veranda couch. I stretched my eyes beyond her sagging shoulders. The twin ranges that made the Gwa-koigi Hill stood at the edge of the village like armour― a gray hue the color of dull fur against a gradually darkening sky.  Two drunks mouthed slurred insults across the road that led to Soko Mjinga market. 

Baaba slumped on one of the suede couches in the living room. His Nike cap was propped too far down his face concealing his eyes. The radio was tuned to KBC Sundowner. When Brenda Fassie's Vulindela came on, I thought I saw him tap the fingers of his left hand on the arm of the couch and bob his head. I wanted to perch at his feet, look through the cap at his eyes, and ask, “Do you think Mami stopped being mad?”

The smell of smoke lingered long after everyone had retired to bed. No one else seemed to notice the silence in Em's thingira. That his JBL speaker was not blasting loud hip-hop music, threatening to bring the roof down. That his favorite plastic plate lay unturned on the dish rack. If I had guts half as daring as his, I would have slipped into my dark blue, skintight jeans, and my navy blue top with the image of Hannah Montana in dark sunglasses, and sneaked to join Hanna in Kevo's cyber cafe,  where we would watch All American on a pirated website. And I would ask her to teach me how to draw my eyebrows as neat and dark as Olivia's.

That night, I waited to see you. I did not. I lay awake, the loud clicking of the second hand of the clock in the living room an annoying backdrop. Your make-up kit was missing on the nightstand, and I wished I had saved the lilac-pink, orange-flavored lip gloss.

The church women now come to our house every Sunday evening. They wear the exact gay blue head wrap Mami will leave in when Baaba has had enough of her madness. In no time, they are scattered all over our compound as though they have lived here all their lives.

They gossip over the pots of simmering porridge. They belt out worship songs over the pounding of the maize meal. They recite the 4th round of the 9-day novena as they peel off the tender skin of roasted yam, over the crackling firewood, the mooing and bleating of calves and kids, and over the memorable tenor of Waweru Mburu’s recap of the previous night's Yaliyotendeka on Baaba’s Sonya Radio.

They will ask when I knew the burning of your stuff would not help Mami’s head. I will point them to when Em returned the next morning. He slipped into his thingira before anyone could hear him.

“Emmanuel, where did you disappear to,” I asked when he showed me a wad of hundred-shilling notes tucked in the inside pocket of his bomber jacket.

“The best trades happen in the night.”

His breath lodged on my face, a stale mixture of cheap tobacco and booze, garlic and boiled eggs, mint-flavoured PK and Big-g. I clutched my nose and moved two steps farther from him.

“You sold Sarai’s necklaces?”

“Cut it!” He inched closer and almost placed his hands over my mouth. Then a grin plastered itself on his mouth.

“Those, and a few other things no one will ever know about because Mami and Baaba think they went into the fire.”

I looked at his large afro, and could not rule out the possibility that it housed a whole genus of lice and fleas. Outside, the usual morning commotion of the chickens scrambling out of their pens had begun. The clanking of crockery and cutlery added to the commotion as Mami went about preparing breakfast. A sweet aroma of boiling masala tea leaves drifted into Em’s thingira adding to the list of smells I would start my day with.

I leaned on the walls, with posters of Bob Marley posing in his red, yellow, and white bandana, E-sir in beige baggy jeans, and some other people I did not know whose teeth―adorned with metal pieces―blared open.

“How do these people even chew food?” Em reclined on his unmade bed, his feet dangling, and I was tempted to join him there.

“Some of them are dead. If it makes you feel better.” 

Ok. Point-blank Em was amusing to listen to but that morning, his words felt like tiny porcupine pricks being aimed at my throat.

“So, in short, Mami will keep seeing Sarai in her dreams because apparently―” He lifted his head and glared at me like one would glare at a mythical creature. “―not all her things went into the fire. Thanks to your appetite for small, small monies.”

“Who still believes in witchcraft and ghosts in the 21st century!” He said it as if he was stating a basic mathematical formula, and I almost felt dumb.

He pouted and went back to laying his head on the bed. There were two pillows next to him, but he believed propping his head on one would make him a girl. A fly whizzed across the room and perched on his JBL Bluetooth speaker.

“Have you ever heard of just letting people be?” I drew quotation marks in the air with my index fingers, stressing the last four words and dragging them on my tongue.

He said nothing for a long time. The sun was beginning to peer from behind the Gwa-Koigi Hill. The air in the room was beginning to thicken.

“Sarai wanted to kill an innocent baby anyways,” he said, and I almost heard Mami’s voice asking him the whereabouts of his etiquette.

He looked tired as if he had spent the night digging out weeds from our five-acre coffee farm. A palm-sized leaflet he was given on the day of his confirmation peered from his half-open drawer. The image of the Virgin Mary painted on top of the leaflet was worn by that wrinkling of paper that either comes from the passage of time or neglect.

“Confirmed indeed,” I said.

Then, as one struck with a grand idea, I outstretched my palms towards him and made several taps on the ground with my left foot. 

“What?”

“My cut!”

“Or what?”

“Or the obvious. I will tell Mami that you stole her money and bet on Man-U again. And guess who she will believe? Me.”

“You girls!” 

He fetched some notes from his pocket, counted them, and dropped them at my feet. I picked them up, galloped away, and fantasized about the smocha I would devour when Mami sent me to the market later in the day.

After we tedded the husks on the dry patch, where nothing ever grows anymore, Baaba looked up and beyond where Mami sat on the grass engrossed in needlework and said, “We need a therapist for you. Just you.”

Mami continued humming to What shall I render to the Lord to please him? Her soprano made a mockery of Baaba’s alto.

Stitch in. Stitch out.

“I am talking to you, Mama Sarai.”

“What is a the-ra-pi-st,” I asked Em.

“A guy who fixes people’s heads right where they were before they left.”

“He thinks Mami’s head is a broken TV antenna. That he can climb on its roof and fix it?”

Another Stitch in. Another Stitch out. She hit a natural falsetto.

“He should know what to do with you.” Baaba reached for the back of his scalp and rubbed it before turning to a spot beneath his wide-rimmed glasses.

I imagined the man towering over Mami, with a toolbox exactly like the one Em walks around with, offering to fix people's aerials, kettle pots, charging extensions, anything to keep his hands from rotting with idleness.

“Does he think Mami’s head is a broken electronic that he can loosen bolts from and try for sparks,” I asked.

Em shrugged. His brow was raised in an extended arch as if it was now permanently drawn there.

“And does it have to be a guy?”

“I am a guy. I think like a guy.”

I fought the urge to rip his tongue out of his mouth.

The day the therapist came, I was nursing yet another beating from Mami.

“You want to bring another devil in the house,” Mami had said that morning, and I saw her eyes bulge just like the day she bent over you in Mama Banda's kiosk, a patch of your blood already staining her yellow wrapper, such that no one could tell who was bleeding between the two of you.

“No,” I said. “I am sorry.” 

“You want everyone now to say how I preach water yet drink wine. That I am raising prostitutes. Look at your sister and what she has done to me. I cannot walk the market with my head up anymore.”

“No,” I said. “I am sorry.” 

My apology was muffled by my sobbing. Alfie did not even touch me. All he wanted was to tuck a flower in my hair.

“Girls do not get pregnant by getting a flower stuck in their hair,” Hanna had said afterward when I narrated the ordeal to her.

Mami’s temper had cooled off as fast as the morning sun washed off the dew from the grass. But I was not ready for what she was preserving it for.

The therapist was a tall, slight man with glasses twice the size of Baaba’s. Em and I followed each of his footsteps in our compound. We wanted to be there when he fixed Mami’s head.

He did not look like the engineers at Soko Mjinga market at all, who wear dirty overalls and their hands stay stained with black oil all day. He did not even carry a toolbox in his hands. His pale blue Savco jeans were faded at the knee area and his black sharp-shooters had turned into a mud brown tinge from walking the famous dusty roads of Gwa-Koigi. His chin seemed to be joined with his neck. He kept his gaze low and often drank from a bottle of Dasani. He used words like cantankerous. Unfathomable. Unscrupulous. I scrunched my nose every time and made a mental note to check their meaning in the dog-eared Oxford Dictionary I inherited from Em.

A string of sweat traced a routeless pathway down the man’s forehead. It would double later when Mami would bring a pot of boiling water from the kitchen saying, “Leave now and carry that evil demon you want to put in my head with you, or you will forget the colour of your skin this day.”

After the man fled, Baaba folded the jacket he left―a fading beige, with chaffed collars probably from numerous hand-washing attempts―and shook his head at least 15 times before retreating to his chair.

A leaflet worn from multiple attempts at folding dropped from the inner pocket. I picked it up and read the words written in bold calligraphy:

HEAVEN’S GATE MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS CENTRE. 

Mami continued whistling her Catholic hymns, scratching her head with the free hand, the other on whatever chore she needed to complete.  Em would sell the jacket later at Soko Mjinga for half the estimated price.

The morning the tall, slight therapist with glasses twice the size of Baaba’s returned to take Mami to his hospital, Baaba, Em and I had looked for her everywhere. On the second day of our search, Mama Hanna scooped from the low door of her salon and said, “I have not seen her. I wish I could help you. But she has not come to open her shop,” and returned to braiding the head of a customer.

The women at the market turned their wary eyes off their wares for a minute and said, “I have not seen her.” “Have you tried the chapel?” “No, she hasn't been to church for six months now.” “Kamaa has not traveled to the city today. I do not know another way she could have used to get to St. Catherine of Sienna.” “Besides, the shrine is closed for the next two weeks. For renovation.” 

Mama Banda appeared from behind her beer kiosk, her wrapper loosely tied above her breasts, her headwrap tied too low down her face, concealing even her only ear. When she saw Baaba, she lowered her eyes, knelt at his feet and said, “ I have not done anything. I have not killed anyone.” Baaba looked beyond her stout figure at the drunks scattered in her backyard, and said, “We are looking for my wife, their mother.” “I have not seen her.” When we left the yard, she was still prostrate on the ground, her round breasts sweeping it.

The evening bustle of herders driving their cattle home found us at the heart of ngurumo, turning every coffee branch this way and that way. But the coffee bushes were not forthcoming.  Em was the one who pointed at a string of smoke rising from the roof of our house.

We found Mami perched in a corner of our veranda, her eyes concealed by a smoky darkness.

“What has that creepy woman from St. Catherine told her to burn this time,” Em asked, gritting his teeth.

“Where did you disappear to? We have looked everywhere for you,” Baaba said.

“This,” she said, her index finger pointing at the smoke rising from the remains of burnt wood pieces at the entrance of the house, “is the only thing I forgot to burn in this house for the sake of my head.” 

“You will kill us,” Baaba said, and Mami wailed herself sore as we watched a dark smoke rise too close to the roof.

I dashed into our bedroom, and I glared at its growing emptiness. A large space was left where our bed used to be.

The therapist and Mami left for his clinic in Kamaa’s van that evening. 

“Will she return today,” I asked Baaba.

His eyes were thrown at a distance, past Kamaa’s face-me-i-face-you speeding down the road that led to Soko Mjinga market and out of Gwa-Koigi.

“She will.”

The sun set, and the therapist did not return Mami. I would come to learn from Em that she would spend a few weeks in a mental wellness facility in the city. I squeezed into a corner of Baaba’s favourite couch that night, where I would spend the nights of the next two weeks breathing the smell his cigarettes left.

The church women have not stopped coming to our house. They wear the same dress Mami changed into the day the therapist returned to take her to his clinic— a jungle green, with identical flower bush patterns at the hem. The neatly folded pleats almost touched her sunset orange platform shoes, hiding her long graceful legs, and a recent burn scar. Two golden cuffs hang at the end of each sleeve like the rock at the edge of Kihunguro cliff, where Hanna and I sit throwing rocks at the river below it, pointing at the boys herding cows and goats across, fighting about the ones we would like to marry us when we grow bigger breasts, piles of firewood strewn to our backs waiting for us to carry them home.

Mama Hanna will lead the congregants in song, and they will join in. Her husky voice will sound almost like yours, and like I imagine cherubs would sound like singing for God. Their voices will blend and clash almost rhythmically.

There is not a friend like the lowly Jesus. No, not one! No, not one!

The voices will rise over the roof of our living room, buoyant enough to penetrate the heavens and bring them down. Maybe then, heaven will be here on earth, proving Em’s theory wrong.

I will tiptoe out of the living room and past Baaba's musical collection― Papa Wemba, Hugh Masekela, Fundi Konde, Joseph Kamaru, Mighty Salim. 

Past his book collection― Matigari, I Will Marry When I Want, Decolonising The Mind, Fundamentals of the Human Anatomy, DNA Structures, Genome Structures.

Past Em's math contest trophy resting on a stool with one crippled leg, my Science Symposium 2nd runners-up trophy.

I will clip the door to the lock behind me. Its squeal will be drowned by the singing. I will hop onto the bed, whose hinges still threaten to loosen from passing through the hasty hands of Soko Mjinga fundis, whose fresh wood varnish I still mistake for that of smoke, with the wrinkled bedding Em lifted from the stash of old clothes beneath his bed, and go back to reading the book Hanna downloaded for me on Wattpad. About a girl who scrolls through Tinder, memorizing where exactly down a particular profile she draws the line.

I will see you perching on one end of the bed, waiting to run a hot towel through my cramping abdomen, waiting to show me how to count my safe days, waiting to chase me away when Freddie calls, and call me back when you have finished talking, your long brown legs peering from your favorite blue fade denim shorts, your fingernails painted baby pink to match your toenails, a mixture of Rasasi and Dove deodorant on your V-neck pink shirt. I will want to touch your belly, the baby, and I will want to call Mami and say, “Sarai is back. You burnt her things for nothing.” But when I blink, I will not see you anymore. Instead, I will find myself asking no one in particular what happens to the baby in the belly when the mother dies. I think I will ask Hanna the next time I see her.

The church women will hit the high notes of There is joy in my heart, it is flowing in the river, and I will get to the part in the novel where the main character offers her innocence to a boy she did not find on Tinder.

The wind will graze through the roof and I will almost hear your full laughter in it. I will crane my neck to see its magnitude, and my eyes will rest on the graveyard now almost hidden by a green marsh of Napier grass. Beside it, an unevenly round, burnt, and sere patch on which nothing seems to grow anymore. Weeds will spring around it like guards to a territory. A sunbird will be pecking at something. A cross propped against the recently cemented slab will peer above the marsh, the words on it written in bold:     

Sarai Gathigia Murangiri, 

                          Sunrise: 09/09/1994.

                          Sunset: 24/04/2022.

And the Sunday will end as it always does in this house; “With unnecessary prayers,” Em says. “The only reason they come here to drink our porridge from our ceramic glass cups is because Baaba started receiving his coffee bonuses and he can pour money into their useless church projects. Otherwise, everyone can quote a verse or two from their huge Bibles on why Mami should not even breathe the same air as them.”

He is right. But he does not even wash his now coffee-brown teeth.