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1
In my first year of primary school, the day of the week I most looked forward to was Tuesday. Lessons began with my one true indulgence, swimming in the baby pool, the happy realm of my early aquatic adventures. For this class, I wore a teeny tot’s blue swimsuit and orange armbands, all included in my uniform starter set from School Outfitters. My armbands always gave off whiffs of newness with each little blow of air I puffed out of my cheeks, before pushing in the plastic buttons and pulling them on. Sometimes, I couldn’t pull them to the top of my arms because I’d blown them too tight, and the teacher would let out some air, yank them up, blow into them until they fit snugly, and plug them.
My classmates and I waddled into the pool in single file, like a tuxedo of penguins, arms sticking out to the side. When my turn came, I eased myself down slowly; one step down, pause, another step, pause, until I was standing in the pool with my hands in the air, getting used to the cold water as I lowered myself, a breath at a time. I was always conscious about not getting hurt, and it was only once I was immersed in the water, with space to splash about, not too close to the edge, that I felt the freedom of water. The cement and some cracked tiles of the pool casing could scratch and cut, but the water itself was like a womb, gentle and without beginning or ending, for a time.
On the rare occasion of having forgotten my armbands, I swam with the inflatable tube, giddily meandering through my classmates, chiming into the cacophony of squeals. Much as I could stand in the baby pool, the awesomeness of the challenge was making my way through the water from one end to the other, lengthways or widthways, depending on the lesson of the day. The pool was my safest and most joyful place, a cocoon of bliss, and I didn’t have a care in the world when I was in it.
Ever the late bloomer, I was one of the handful left in the baby pool once my classmates started leaving for the big pool. I wasn’t ready. I knew it was only a matter of time, but I couldn’t fathom leaving the baby pool, and my apprehensions dulled the experience in my sanctuary. To add to my anxiety, I couldn’t see what was going on in the big pool from the baby pool. The two pools were separated by a fountain and diving blocks.
The big pool was as wide as the baby pool was long, and it was twice or thrice the length of the baby pool. I had never paid attention to the big pool and it existed as an amorphous, peripheral water body that was blue on some days and dark green on others. There was no telling how deep it was and what was in it other than water. It was mysterious and I was afraid of it. So on the day my turn came and I was guided to the shallow end of the big pool, I went with trepidation. I was being taken from what I had acclimatised to for one year and was now expected to swim without armbands.
I was six years old and it was 1980.
***
Loreto Convent Msongari was an all-girls school.
I don’t know whether my abuse by the watchman at home when I was still in kindergarten made me uncomfortable around men or boys, but now there was safety in the daily rituals of drop off, playing rope or kati or shake, assembly, raising the flag, singing the national anthem, the scouts parade, prayer, lining up to attend the day’s first class, and learning. The presence of prefects, teachers, nuns, the chapel, playground, climbing frames and sand pits made school my favourite pastime. My classmates were kind and respectful of the space. Some children were quiet, others loud, and regardless of ethnicity or racial affiliation, social status or temperament, there was inclusion and belonging.
I stayed close to the edge of the big pool.
I would come down the stepladder and shift myself to hold on to the concrete edge, which was quite high, and stay there until the teacher came and pried my fingers away. I had to let myself drop deep enough to stand on my toes, which I barely could without the water coming to the top of my head. My swimming cap had a band that went from one end below my ear under my chin and fastened on at the other ear. This helped me feel a bit more in control, in a strange way, and I put much effort into keeping my head above the water’s surface, only tipping my face forward into the water, eyes closed.
I would tiptoe, release, kick and splash, face down, tiptoe, wipe my face, release, kick and splash, and then come back to the edge and hold on to catch my breath. There was no going back to the baby pool, and this new experience was not straightforward at all. There was no predictability or time to rest and lose myself in thinking about nothing. I had to figure out how to let go and come back to the ledge, and not hurt myself. I also had to be mindful that I was in a train of other swimmers, with others behind and ahead of me, and I couldn’t stay in one spot because we had to shuffle along in tandem.
I had barely gotten the hang of it when one day the teacher called me to the bench on the side of the pool. He didn’t seem to have anything of particular importance to say. Wondering what the point of his summons was, I turned around to walk back to the stepladder at the shallow end, and couldn’t quite believe it when I felt the grip of his hands clasping my frame on either side, just below my arms. He hoisted me up and hurled me into the middle of the pool.
I recall being airborne and for a flash of a second, the water looked dark blue. There was no sound and I wanted to say something, but instead, I dropped into the water with a huge splash and sank. My sympathetic nervous system was activated. It was both fight and flight. I pushed myself up against the water with my arms, spluttering, gasping for air, and instantly began to splash and stay up long enough to orient myself. I felt mystified that I was actually in the deep end.
At the same time, I was also aware that this had happened through trickery and was outraged that even with the knowledge that I couldn’t swim in the deep end, my teacher still threw me into it. But my outrage was inconsequential. I first had to get to the edge of the pool, fast, lest I drowned. As far as I could tell, my teacher wasn’t bothered, and neither were the swimmers in the deep end, who weren’t coming to my rescue. I excused the drill squad in the shallow end because having been there, I knew they too were fighting for survival.
Here I was, in a whole new world, with no bottom to tip-toe on and no inner calculus of the distance from one end to the other, without an edge to hold on to. There was no estimating how many breaths, how many kicks, how much of anything I needed, and this meant that I just had to make it happen.
I swam without thinking.
I used my arms in no particular pattern or rhythm to keep my head above water because my legs were suspended vertically, and I did not know how to get myself into a lateral position to use them to kick and propel. I had to determine which direction I was going to move in and what I could see would be for seconds at a time, before my head went back down. I also had to push myself up to gasp for air, knowing that I was going back down.
It was a fight. I had to move too.
The shallow end was too far, the deepest end towards the diving board was too scary, so I decided to swim back to the edge from which I had been thrown. What I knew for sure was that something was working because I wasn’t drowning and I wasn’t thinking about asking anyone to come to my aid. I was just figuring it out, splashing my way to the edge. When I got there, I clasped the edge, drawing my body against the tiles. Panting, I looked back over my shoulder in disbelief. I had done it. My teacher was standing above me, looking down and smiling. “You can swim!” he exclaimed.
That’s how I started swimming in the deep end.
I got selected into the school swim team and joined a group of girls who had extra training outside of school hours. A former Olympian was commissioned to train us in Muthaiga, at the home of a family whose two girls were also on the swim team. She tied our ankles or wrists together with rubber bands and we swam that way to strengthen our kicks and strokes. Whenever we trained in school on early mornings, we worked on our dives from the diving platforms, or practised tumble turns or endurance drills. The idea was to use the breath as efficiently as possible and not spend too much time trying to breathe, whilst building our stamina, strength, and technique.
How many strokes did you do before you turned your head for air? How many strokes to the end to prepare to tumble, twist, and make sure there was enough space to fold your body and legs into a foetal position at the turn and be well positioned to meet the wall with your feet and extend your legs to push off?
In addition to anticipating how many strokes until the turn, you had to estimate when to take a breath before the turn because you would use the same breath to carry you forward after the turn, and then synchronise all of this with keeping your pace. Swimmers who didn’t do this got to the end of a lap, stopped, took a breath, turned and kicked off, by which time the swimmers ahead of them were literally flying underwater, gaining an advantage in speed and distance, before their heads or arms emerged a quarter way into the length of the pool, moving faster than the first lap. The level of submerged propulsion couldn’t be too deep or too high because your body had to move through the water, rising with one or two body waves, feet together like a tail fin for propulsion, back to the surface, smoothly and just in time to take the next breath.
***
Every year, we had a school swimming gala and competed for our houses. I was in Ball, the greenhouse. The other houses were Ward, Borgia, and Gordon, and their respective colours were red, yellow, and blue. Moreover, we on the swim team started competing to qualify for the amateur championships. Our meetings were mostly at Hospital Hill and Aga Khan High School, always on Saturdays. As soon as I arrived at the venue, I would locate the Msongari team and huddle there in a towel or T-shirt and swimsuit, waiting for my races to be called.
In a very proper English accent, “Twenty-five metres freestyle, heat one: Linda B—, S– Nj-erogee, Wo-nja Meechookee, blah, blah, blah…” would be announced over the loudspeaker.
As soon as I heard my name – Wo-nja Meechookee – I would have this urge to pee right before the race was about to start and we were lined up before the blocks for the fifty-metre races, or sitting in our chairs at the deep end for the twenty-five metres. I didn’t actually need to pee; it was a nervous tick I had, and I was habitually “dancing” before a race. I would bounce around, hopping from one foot to the other before it was time to get into starting position.
Once in the water, I would swim for my life, fuelled by my nervousness. I was a good swimmer so I would qualify in most cases. We especially needed to qualify for the fifty-metre single-stroke, the twenty-five-metre medley relay races and the twenty-five-metre races in each of the four strokes. The races and awards lasted all day, from morning till 5 p.m.
Students from schools across the country participated in these races, with friends and family watching from the viewing stands. In between races, there were gatherings around vendors of paprika mangoes and peanuts wrapped in newspaper cones, ice lollies that made your lips green, red, or orange, or chocolate-covered ice creams; plain vanilla or with nuts. I never ate before I swam because I was too anxious, and I also didn’t stay long enough after meets ended because it was custom for the driver to arrive early to take me home. My pool wins were recognized on the award blocks, where we had medals placed around our necks and received a certificate if we came first, second, or third. I learned not to fixate on accomplishments. Once they happened, that was that.
***
The driver usually waited for me in the parking area, radio on, seat reclined, asleep or smoking cigarette butts stored in the ashtray. I’d jump into the back seat of the car, the pleather upholstery baked by the afternoon heat. The driver’s seat would go up, and after checking that my seat belt was fastened, he would start the engine to embark on our journey. From Aga Khan High School, we went down Waiyaki Way onto Forest Road, down Murang’a Road through Karura Forest on Kiambu Road, and finally to Ridgeways.
The drive home was dreamy, with low-volume African music playing on the stereo.
They stirred something that seemed so enigmatic which I felt from my belly to my throat, and much as I yearned to, I couldn’t talk about this feeling, which wasn’t acknowledged at home. I also lacked the vocabulary or practice to unpack emotions.
Much as I liked African melodies, I didn’t understand the songs because they were either in Lingala or Bemba or another African dialect. The compositions were timelessly nostalgic and a trippy escape through rhythmic conga and drum percussions, trumpets, African guitars, and vocals.
With the window partly down and the music blending in with the breeze, I would drift off into a nap, the warm air and sun on my parched face, opening my chlorinated and tired eyes now and then to see how far we were from home. As soon as we arrived, I would snack, have a bath, read a book or study, have supper with my brother and mother, then settle down to watch a late-night movie on the telly or sleep early, ready for church on Sundays.
On occasions when my father was home, he would call my brother and I to join him in the TV room for some boiled meat. It was pressure-cooked with salt and herbs, and it was soft and easy to chew. “Mistaaa, Miss Wanja, come and have some meat!” he would call out when the platter was brought to the table on a chopping board, with a knife, salt, toothpicks and serviettes.
We would bolt down the stairs.
I loved this because this was time spent with my father, considering he was upcountry most weekends being MP for Kangema. For me, my father would cut little bits without fat and say, “Here Miss, this is for yooou.” The last part of our little feast involved tipping out the marrow, as a sort of surprise because we never knew how much there would be. We might play Monopoly, draughts, Checkers, snakes, or Ladders.
If he was home, it was given that my father watched WWF wrestling, and if there was a Western on, we would stay up, huddled under a blanket on the couch, and watch that together. I always fell into a light sleep, stirring every now and then to check if he was still there. Eventually, my father would tap my shoulder gently. “Miss, it’s time to go to bed,’’ he would say in his deep baritone. ‘‘Go on. Go to bed. Good night.”
On Sundays, we dressed up to go to church.
I liked church and the messages for contemplation that came from the sermons. I sang in alto and because there were so many voices from the congregants and the choir combined, if I careened into soprano territory, off-key, it didn’t matter.
Save for the choir and hymns in English and Swahili, some services were a blur.
It didn’t matter because a huge part of going to church was the space it created to go inward.
Church was sacrosanct.
It allowed me self-reflection and earnest prayer, and even though we went there as a family, I experienced my personal communion with God. I liked the ceremonial use of frankincense and myrrh and the strange smell of it. I felt the same when I attended chapel in school on Thursdays. I found church grounding and it gave me a deep sense of belonging with the Divine. I knew that I was seen by the Unseen.
***
One day my mother pulled me out of training, unexpectedly, saying it was too much of a bother and that I wouldn’t swim with the team any more. My swim teacher had a word with her, but my mother was adamant. At this point, I had only butterfly left to qualify for the amateur championships. I was top of my class in academics, and I couldn’t make out what the issue was. Previously, my mother had gotten my hair cut because she said it was too much to take care of with swimming. I didn’t resist then or now. My opinions about my hair or swimming were not solicited and I didn’t have the language or agency to refuse.
I also didn’t allow myself to feel the disappointment of this.
What would I do with it if I did?
Two school terms went by without me training and then out of the blue, after a regular swimming lesson, my teacher approached me saying the championships were coming and the team needed a swimmer for the relay, and I was the only one he could think of to join the existing team. My mother had been clear about me not swimming, her word final, and so I asked him to speak to her. Whatever he said, my teacher’s intervention worked, because my mother allowed me to swim in this particular championship. It was important because, aside from the relay, I was also registered for the twenty-five metres butterfly.
Unbeknownst to me, the 4th All-African Games were scheduled to be held in Nairobi the following year and to participate, I needed to qualify for the amateur championships. The day came and it was a huge meet at Aga Khan High School – the older boys and girls were competing, and whenever they were there, it was the big leagues. There were swimmers from the likes of Aga Khan Mombasa, Rift Valley Academy, Hospital Hill, and St. Mary’s School.
I arrived at the venue at lunch break because I had to get my photo taken for a passport that morning. It was 1985, and I was about to go on my first cross-border trip to Zambia, using my own passport. I wore my swimsuit underneath my clothes because I sensed I would have to rush for my race once I got to Aga Khan. I was not happy with this photo-taking arrangement as there was a real risk of me missing my races. It made no sense to me why it couldn’t have been planned for another day. My displeasure was captured in the photo.
I was just in time for my heats, which were organised by age. The Msongari team was on the benches to the left of the pool, closer to the deep end. My teacher was pacing up and down holding the schedule in his clipboard, whistle hanging from his neck or in his mouth, calling out names, psyching us up. I was worried because I hadn’t trained but he encouraged me, telling me I would be fine. The loudspeaker was on.
“Twenty-five metres butterfly…blah, blah, blah, Meechookee…”
My race was called.
I needed to pee and I was up to swim. I remember at some point before the word “Go!” I stopped hearing the cheering crowd. Inside, a clear whispering voice that sounded like mine, only bigger, came up and said, “Use breaststroke legs.” In those days, you could use breaststroke legs for butterfly, but I had never done this before and had only witnessed it once and didn’t recall that person winning their race.
“Use breaststroke legs!”
It was louder.
“On your marks. Get set. Go!”
I dived in, gliding my body in a wave, gaining momentum, head out of the water, breaststroke legs. I didn’t stop to look at anyone else, and couldn’t hear anything other than the rhythm of my breathing. My arms were like paddles, up over my head to the front, down, pull, breaststroke legs, head up, inhale, repeat.
It was perfect synchrony.
I was cruising, and when I got to the end and tapped the wall and looked up and around me, first to the right and then to the left, I saw I had won the race. I couldn’t believe it. I had followed my instincts and won big. My victory was my own, and in that moment I learned I could pull myself to a level I had not experienced before by listening to and trusting the voice inside that got louder when I shut out the noise of the world around me.
***
The next academic year, two weeks into the term, I joined Hillcrest Secondary School for high school and was thrust into a new world that had mostly white students. Up to this point, other than figures of authority like nuns, I had very little interaction with white people, particularly those my age.
When we had sports matches at home or away back in my Msongari days, Hillcrest students seemed too different to even try and connect with. During netball matches, at the half-time breaks, our captains welcomed the visiting team to juice or tea and biscuits. We stayed on our side of the court and they on theirs, so we never really got to mingle. I was nervous. It gave me the feeling I felt when I first went into the shallow end of the big pool.
Unlike Msongari’s standardised uniform of red sweaters, white collared short-sleeved shirts and dark blue pleated skirts, Hillcrest students wore different coloured jumpers, bangles, beaded and leather bracelets, dangling earrings, different hairstyles, eyeliner, and generally looked much more colourful. Girls wore skirts or trousers. Our hairstyles couldn’t be outrageous in Msongari, and it was more common to have hair plaited in lines or held in ponytails. The primary school in Msongari was not fashion-permitting at all. At most, if a skirt were too small then it could possibly pass for a mini. Hillcrest was à la mode and the perfect environment for cultivating my self-expression as a teenager. I eased into this new system, in which I also found the academics different.
I had loved African history and learning about the geographies, civilizations and kingdoms of the continent at Msongari. What I was learning now was foreign to me; the European plague, Jack the Ripper, the agrarian and industrial revolutions, and so on. The learning style was also more integrative and a departure from Msongari’s rote method.
I was not prepared for this and had to work harder to adjust. I loved reading literature because we also studied poetry, and this is when I started appreciating the world of words. Most of all, I loved the friendships I formed.
My first true experience of sisterhood was with Wasma’a, my Egyptian other half. We met in my first class at Hillcrest, which was a French lesson that began with a short quiz. Wandering into class late because I had to find it, Wasma’a invited me to sit next to her. I had never taken French before but Wasma’a had been studying French at Hillcrest Preparatory School. She brought me up to speed, and before the instruction part of the lesson began, our French teacher marvelled at how I had gotten a mark higher than 0/10, all things considered.
Wazzy and I became inseparable, nicknaming ourselves Waz and Wanj.
I sat next to Wasma’a in our common classes and we grew a bond based on unbridled joy. We could be tracked down by our laughter both in and out of class, constantly pranking with our classmates. In one biology class, we were dissecting hearts and the boys crept up behind us and placed their specimens on our heads. It was disgusting and hilarious at the same time.
On the sports pitch, we belted out the words of our favourite songs, hockey sticks and rounders bats being accessories to our dance. We’d sing bits of The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian – “Ay, oh, uh-ey, oh, ay, oh, uh-ey, oh, Walk like an Egyptian”, a nod to Wazzy’s heritage. At breaks, we hung around the kiosk begging the shopkeeper for free or discounted crisps, for which purpose we composed a song whose sole lyrics were: “Please, Bwaanaaaa”.
Some days, I asked for permission to go to Wasma’a’s house after school. We spent a couple or so hours cutting out posters of our favourite pop stars, or my boyfriend who was a good friend of Wasma’a’s brother would come over and hang with us. On the bus ride to and from school, we sat next to each other merry making as the bus weaved its way from Langata Road to Sarit Centre. If we were to be picked up late, we might get started on our homework or chat with students in other classes. I had never had a friendship like this before. It was fun and happy and loyal and tender and consistent.
Hillcrest introduced much fun into my life.
My classmates came from all over the world – the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, Sudan, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, Ghana, the United States and the United Kingdom, and everyone brought a flavour of their culture with them. Outside of Hillcrest, I was also getting to know students from other schools and was developing more of a school-life balance. But change was constant, and Wasma’a and her family left Nairobi for Canada two years later, after her father had a heart attack and died. Most students with international backgrounds, whose parents were either diplomats or worked for multinationals, also left to do their ‘A’ Levels or International Baccalaureate (IB) abroad.
2
By June 2023, it had been seven years since I last swam in the pool at my family’s hotel, Windsor Golf Hotel & Country Club, which I live close to. The hotel was my father’s crown jewel, a golf hotel and country club launched in 1991 as he turned sixty. In the years before the hotel was built, my father would take me for drives through the original coffee farm and forest in his Isuzu Trooper. Sharing his vision as if the buy-in of little me mattered, my father would matter-of-factly ask, “Miss, I want to build a hotel here. What do you think?” This was a serious question requiring an answer. My opinion mattered.
“Who will stay here?” I’d ask.
“Pilots and cabin crew from Swissair and other airlines,” he would say.
“I think it’s a good idea, Dad.”
“You do? Why?”
“Because we can build tourism if the pilots and cabin crew stay here, then the people on the plane can also come and stay here. I think you should go for it.”
We had versions of this conversation on multiple occasions.
Other times, we would drive through the farm with my brother, check on the coffee, look at the quality of the coffee berries, the mulching machine, the dryers, the storage bins, chat with the manager, and then go to our last and favourite stop, the dam.
“Did you see that?” he’d ask.
“What? What is it?”
Pointing to avert our attention, he would say, “Look there!” and then throw a pebble and make the water ripple, and say, “I definitely saw a crocodile! Didn’t you see it?” We would shriek and laugh and ramble on about what we should do about the crocodile and who we should call to remove it.
After several years of planning and keeping the faith amidst economic downturns, my father built the hotel. As the first sub-Saharan hotel with an 18-hole golf course, it was an idea ahead of its time and it took dedication and patience to turn it into one of Nairobi’s top resorts for conferencing and leisure.
Being a man drawn to aesthetics, my father’s exquisite taste permeated the hotel. He participated in every aspect of the hotel’s design, selecting the best Kenyan architect and international golf course designer. His inspirations were Victorian architecture and the St. Andrews course in Scotland, and he went as far as getting involved in tile selection, picking equipment for the kitchens, and naming the different sections of the hotel – the Conservatory, the Oak Room, the Windsor Room, the library and down below, the Library Bar.
He chose the grass for the course; oversaw the landscaping and design of the gardens, ensuring the indigenous forest was preserved; intervened on the positioning of tees and water bodies on the fairway; the selection of roofing tiles and the regal clock and steeple on the roof; and the design of the pool. The pool had a particular form, long enough to swim laps and suitable for play too.
As I got older, my relationship with my father evolved to become more like that of a brother and his twin sister than that of a father and daughter, and he often introduced me as his sister. In Kikuyu nomenclature, I am named after his sister who didn’t survive childbirth. I am also named after his father’s mother, the matriarch of the clan, which bore major significance as a result of the strong traditional imprints my patrilineal side of the family retained through and after the colonial misadventure. I was a source of joy for my father.
We read Great Expectations and watched the serialised rendition that was broadcast on television together. For me, this was precious and affirming. I was sheltered and remained so regardless of the miles between us.
In 1992, in my first two weeks of college in America, I was coming from the pool in the company of my new classmates. We had to take a swim test, a mandatory requirement to graduate from Bryn Mawr College. That’s when I noticed a man who worked on campus had started stalking me. One mid-morning, the man followed me into my dormitory building and pinned me against a wall, and before he could put his lips on mine, I ducked under his arm and bolted down the stairs into my room, which was in the basement. With the guidance of my roommate and our neighbour and dorm resident assistant, I established that this was harassment and I had rights. I had just turned eighteen and had never been educated about my rights; as a human being, Kenyan, or woman.
Being a Seven Sisters college, Bryn Mawr was all about women’s empowerment, and with much encouragement from my dorm mates, I reported the incident to campus security. Before I knew what was happening, I was identifying the man in a line-up. I was informed that I was going to be subpoenaed to testify against him in a courthouse. I had only been in the States for three weeks at most. I was trying to settle down and this was enervating for me.
My father who was in Nairobi and had not been to my college campus called me and told me to focus on my studies. The next thing I knew, I was not going to testify in court and an order was issued restraining the man from being within a certain proximity to me. This was the kind of protection I could rely on my father for. No matter how complex the situation, he always came through.
The event with the man dampened my spirits and at Care Week, when families of freshmen sent care packages or came to visit, the weight of depression hit me. I had no words for what I was feeling, and witnessing the very American outpourings of love, I felt a deep vacuum inside of me. I was in this wonderful environment but was feeling alone. I called home to share my feelings and was misunderstood. A few weeks into the first semester, I received a letter from my father.
“Dear Wanja,
How are you? Here we are fine. Bunge has started.
I want you to know that I love you very much…”
I lost the letter in storage, but the message remained etched on my heart.
Twenty years later, the night my father died on 21 February 2012, I found myself hurled into what felt like the deep ocean, alone. The day after we buried his body, the nuclear family had a series of meetings about his estate, belongings, and security at our village home in Kangema. In one meeting, I recall my mother emphasising that no one was to be left out. In another meeting, the family elders also made a point of stating that as I was not married, Kangema was my home and in Kikuyu, “Wanja nī ūmwe witū”. I was one of theirs.
To me, it seemed as though these were messages my mother had given the elders to convey because their voices carried the weight of elderly wisdom. Was my belonging not obvious? I wondered. It did not occur to me that this messaging could be reinforcement to protect me. After all, I was not the only unmarried child of my parents. At that point in time, all three of my brothers weren’t married, with two being divorced and two being without children. In this context, mentioning that I was unmarried felt benign, and I chalked it down to consideration as I was the last born and had lived away for much of my adult life. Only after my mother’s death six months after my father’s did it occur to me that she could have been anticipating something. Or was it my father’s spirit that the elders could hear in their “Wanja nī ūmwe witū” proclamation?
In August 2012, three days prior to my mother’s death, I moved back to Nairobi from London, where I had lived since the end of 2009. I was moving back because the unexpected passing of my father after a stroke meant my mother was now alone at home, and she had also been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
***
Before I moved to London in 2009, my mother had undergone surgery for a subdural haematoma in Nairobi. She seemed to recover well, but there was a recurrence, with another blood clot forming in her skull putting pressure on her brain, and so she had to have surgery again. Her energy and stamina were sharply affected and she was suddenly confined to being at home. For a woman who would walk from one end of Nairobi to the other more than once a day as she tended to her businesses, this was a difficult shift. She was stoic about it and her recovery was phenomenal.
Then in early 2010, my parents travelled to London in order for my father to have cataract surgery. He was not fond of hospitals and had never sought treatment abroad before, so he decided to get a checkup for his nerves and any other condition that might be diagnosed because of his diabetes. This involved visiting various specialists, none of whom recommend any additional treatments. After his cataract surgery, it seemed that this would be the last of my parents’ emerging medical issues.
However, the relative calm of the rest of 2010 was deceptive.
In response to a persistent night cough, my mother’s doctor found a hint of a lesion on a lung on an X-ray and suggested she come to London for further investigation in early 2011. In London, after a whirlwind of tests, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer and following consultations with a lung specialist, an oncologist, a radiologist, and a thoracic surgeon, immediate treatment was recommended.
My father and I accompanied my mother to every one of the consultations, which were very intense and for which the oncologist advised us to read as much as we could in order to ask as many questions as we needed to. Even so, we had few questions and chose to defer to the better judgement of the team of doctors. And when the oncologist determined that the course of treatment would be chemotherapy followed by radiation, he asked, referring to my mother, “Who will take care of her?” I said I would, and that my mother would be staying with me. Then he turned to me and asked, “And who will take care of you?” The thought had not even crossed my mind or anybody else’s.
As I would eventually learn, the oncologist’s question was both pertinent and prescient in more ways than I could fathom. My parents left for Nairobi to prepare my mother for her return, and in a matter of weeks, she was back in London. The atmosphere was devoid of joy.
I had recently been invited to join the board of trustees of a non-profit addressing social issues through the arts. Through this organisation, I befriended two women, one of whom was an actor with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the other a patron of the Royal National Theatre. We had just attended a press night of a theatrical production, and it so happened that Hamlet was being performed at this time and was receiving stellar reviews.
My father had been quoting Hamlet for the last couple of years. Randomly at the dining table or if he walked into the TV room, he would begin, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” So to shift the energy, I thought watching Hamlet might be a good treat for my parents on their return trip to London before the chemotherapy began. I asked my friend to reserve us the best seats available, which she did. I had to get the dates right and called my father to say I had a surprise for them. He tried to coax me into saying what it was and I said I couldn’t. “I need to tell your mother because she will want to know,” he said. I wouldn’t budge and wrapped up our banter with, “Nice try, Dad!”
We laughed.
Under the circumstances, I knew this would cheer my father up and felt my mother too would appreciate it, given that the last time we’d attended a theatre show to watch Rent on Broadway in New York after my graduation, she was the only one of us who had understood it. Once in London, and following my reveal, my father was brimming with excitement and my mother was looking forward to the outing. I had also gotten a ticket for my father’s bodyguard, really a brother to me, and we had excellent seats. The fanfare of people arriving on time to take their seats, the pre-show people-watching, and then the production itself lifted our spirits.
As soon as my mother’s chemotherapy began, the tolls of caretaking fell upon me in layers. I came to understand the need to prioritise support and self-care as a primary caregiver. At the time, I lived in a two-bedroom flat in Notting Hill and naturally – much as we had rented a flat near the hospital for my parents, for them to be together – my mother moved in with me after the first round of chemotherapy. My father, who had come for the initial round of my mother’s treatment, stayed in the rented flat after we were done with the day’s activities.
For my flat, we hired two Filipino nursing students who attended to my mother, ensuring that while I was at work, she had good company, ate healthy food, had her vitals checked, and could go for a stroll; chat, pray or go to church with them, given that they too were Catholic. To keep a semblance of normalcy, I joined the Virgin Active gym at the bottom of Portobello Road because it had a pool and I could walk there. Some evenings, I went there to swim laps. It made me feel better, but the weight of everything sapped any pleasure.
My mother’s treatment and recovery lasted about seven months, during which time my apartment became an abode for her visitors. My father came to see her in London as often as he could, at least once a month, and he stayed in a hotel; my small flat couldn’t accommodate both my parents. During these London visits, after a long day of medical tests or a chemotherapy session, needing creature comforts, my father might say: “I want to read the Financial Times. Can you get me a copy?” or “I feel like a pork pie. Can you get some?”
One day, my father said he wanted chapatis. I was going to order parathas from this Indian restaurant he and I liked to go to, but he said he didn’t want to order from there. Couldn’t I make them? I had no idea how to make chapatis.
To my pleasant surprise, my father said he would teach me.
In my small kitchen, my father positioned me next to him at the counter, his bodyguard on the other side. On account of a spinal tap gone wrong several years prior, my father used a walking cane, so his bodyguard joined the cooking lesson, to hold the cane and gather essentials that were within his reach, say a bowl of warm water or a tea cloth. My work was to mix the flour, water, and oil, roll the dough, glaze, and re-roll the dough, repeating all these steps, such that the chapatis would be layered when cooked.
Once we had enough balls of dough to roll, and because I did not have a rolling pin in my kitchen, we used the hand of a cooking spoon as a roller.
It was a welcome respite and one of the most wonderful things I ever did with him.
After her chemotherapy, the oncologist gave my mother the go-ahead to return to Nairobi after several rounds of radiotherapy. The prognosis looked good; her tumour had shrunk after chemotherapy and we anticipated that radiotherapy would zap it. We celebrated her remarkable progress, which the doctors said was very impressive given her age. The oncologist carried out another set of tests. To our dismay, the tumour was growing again. With her immunity so low, there was nothing to be done. More chemotherapy would be harmful. Winter was approaching, and my mother was too eager to return home, so she left.
***
I was emotionally and mentally exhausted and needed a rest, so I decided to use my Christmas break to travel to India to an ashram I had researched for several months. It offered a perfect daily regimen to revive mind, body, soul and spirit. I obtained my visa, but before I booked my flight, my father called me and said he wanted to spend a white Christmas with me in London. I protested. I had plans. He persisted, saying he wanted to listen to an orchestral symphony with me. Nothing was available. All the philharmonic performances were fully booked, but my father insisted on coming. He said he also wanted to rest.
And so my father travelled to London, and we would spend the days together before he would retire early to his hotel. It was quiet and peaceful.
I was having a year-end dinner with my girlfriends the day before Christmas Eve when I saw eighteen missed calls from my father’s bodyguard. When I called back, my father’s bodyguard said I had to rush to the hotel they were staying in. I arrived at the same time as the ambulance. My father looked different; his shirt untucked and yet, he was speaking as himself, saying he was fine and there was nothing to worry about. It was only once we had gotten to hospital that the triage nurse said he had had a stroke and that his blood sugar was very high.
Later, doctors confirmed my father had had several mini-strokes over a number of months. I presume the strain surrounding my mother’s illness had affected him deeply. His London stroke was unexpected and because of complications with his diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, his condition gradually worsened over the ensuing weeks. My heart was breaking inside.
I switched places with a sibling for a week and travelled to Kenya for recess.
When I returned to London, it was the same intensity. The gloom of winter did not help. An onset of sepsis from injections and repeated cannula insertions and removals made my father weaker. Every day was a hospital day.
While in hospital, my father said he wanted to remain in the stroke ward with other patients and did not wish to have a private room. It didn’t matter that he was a cabinet minister. We got to know the nurses, who took a liking to him and gave him special treatments. One Somali nurse brought shaving foam and a razor and would give him a shave and comb his hair on alternate days. It was at this juncture that my father told me about my namesake, my great-grandmother, whom he had never spoken about. He talked about his childhood to me for the first time, as if he felt it was time he needed to share some things.
When my father was discharged from hospital, my mother came to London and spent the two weeks recommended before air travel with him at the hotel. He got up every morning, dressed up and was present. He was quieter than usual and spent longer moments in deep thought. His right hand was affected by the stroke, and as advised by his physiotherapist, he dedicated time to practise writing. It was a slow process, and while he was scribing, sitting at the desk with the lamp on, my father didn’t want to be interrupted. He selected the poem Daffodils by William Wordsworth for this exercise.
On Valentine’s Day in 2012, I treated my parents to supper and we made an affair of it, not fully realising the significance of that meal. A few days later, my parents left for Nairobi on a night flight. At the airport, placing his hands on my shoulders, my father spoke his last words to me before they were escorted to the plane by the Kenyan High Commissioner to the Court of St. James.
“Thank you Wanja. Thank you,” he said. ‘‘After all, what are daughters for?”
***
Hours after my parents arrived in Nairobi, my father was admitted into the Aga Khan Hospital. His lungs had filled with fluid. I flew back to Nairobi just in time to hold his hand and feel him squeeze mine on the day he died.
Now at our Ridgeways home on her own, my mother made plans and travelled alone to London for a medical review. With my father’s recent passing and my being alone in London, the oncologist suggested she undergo her next round of chemotherapy in Nairobi, where the larger family resided. A hospice nurse was hired to move into Ridgeways. I travelled back to Kenya to stay with my mother whenever she was hospitalised or at times when I could sense she needed me. In the midst of all the travel, I decided to move back home to take care of her.
***
With barely any time to make sense of my father’s death and before I could fully unpack my bags – I had decided to move back to Kenya permanently – my mother died in the early morning of 22 August 2012, exactly six months to my father’s passing, barely a week after my arrival from London. It was devastating. Absorbing all of this before even finding my way in Nairobi left me rudderless.
However, the rudest shock out of my move back to Kenya was the realisation that I had zero support. With my parents gone, there was no shoulder to cry on.
It reminded me of a family vacation in Diani during my Msongari days.
We had gone on a snorkelling excursion, and because I swam competitively, I thought I could swim beyond the reef. I was making progress swimming in the ocean, when suddenly, I had the sharpest sting on my foot. I had unknowingly kicked a sea urchin and it had released its spines into my foot. I howled. My father quickly swam up to me and got me out of the water, into the boat, and back to shore to treat my foot.
I had to heal and learn how to swim in Nairobi’s dark waters.
I had lived abroad intermittently since 1992, enrolling into Columbia Business School in New York at the age of twenty-five then staying on to start a business.
After five years, my business had found success in the mid-Atlantic region, yet it did not scale sufficiently to justify its continuation. My father consoled me. “Miss, I think what happened is that this was an idea ahead of its time,’’ he said. ‘‘You were ahead of its time.” When I went to Ridgeways to start cataloguing my parents’ belongings, I found in my father’s drawer cut-outs of my features in the New York Times, the Montclair Times, Food and Wine magazine’s 30 under 30, and other publications from that time in my life. He had kept the articles, in which I had talked about his various influences on me.
But outside of these memories, I was surprised at how this time of clear loss went by without much acknowledgement of the need to mourn, to embrace, to cry, to heal. It was as if there was an urgent need to move on, with a chaotic fervour around my parents’ estates sweeping through. I was thrown into the deep end after the biggest heave-ho into life. It had never occurred to me that living abroad had exposed me to different norms that could cause headwinds.1
Alone, I navigated my way with my inner voice, which I had come to rely on for discernment. I always left a situation or person just at the right time. My circle narrowed considerably.
Few, mainly friends abroad, frequently called to check on me. When I could, I travelled to Europe or North America to meet them during the summers. I also travelled to Lamu or Diani and at last to the ashram in Kerala, to rest and replenish my soul. A common motivation to go to these destinations was that they all had swimmable water bodies; the Indian Ocean in Kenya’s coastal destinations of Diani and Lamu and in the case of Kerala, a dam. Swimming in the Neyyar Dam was different because in India and in the particular village the ashram I went to is located, it is considered disrespectful to wear a swimsuit.
My ashram cohort and I made sure we entered the dam beneath the trees along the banks, taking off our T-shirts only once we were in the water, leaving our clothes on the aerial roots. This was memorable because swimming in a lake or a dam gives me the feeling of being one with everything around me. Once I can float and glide in the water, usually with breaststroke, head above water, what’s left is for me to connect with all the elements and life around me: the soft sand or mushy ground below, the water, sky, trees, birds, sun, and wind.
In Diani, I would wait for suitable tides before immersing myself in the water for at least an hour at a time. In Lamu, I would swim across the channel from Manda to Shela, or through the mangroves. In every location, the water’s embrace was soothing. This allowed me to gently connect with my emotional world and locate the energy I needed to heal. Many times, this energy came from the sun. I would go for long walks on the sand dunes to cleanse my aura. The reality was that I had to do this inner work on my own. Perhaps, like my first encounter with the deep end of the pool, most people were preoccupied treading waters and struggling to survive in their own lives and no one was coming to save the day. I also discovered that amongst family friends, qualities such as loyalty or compassion were generally deemed quixotic.
3
The Pool My Father Built
Six weeks before I turned forty-nine in August 2023, I started having a deep urge to swim. Lying awake in the wee hours of the morning, the thought kept coming to me. “Go for a swim!” Sitting at my desk, the feeling would come. “Go for a swim!” One morning, as my cousin and I walked through Karura Forest with kaleidoscopes of yellow and orange butterflies crisscrossing our path, I shared my urgent need to swim and my decision to still not go to my father’s hotel to swim or for anything else, six and a half years since my cut-off.
Our Ridgeways family home had since been rented out, and so I couldn’t swim there. I had gone to a nearby mall hotel to check out their pool and didn’t like it. I couldn’t do laps, and not only was it too small, but it also wasn’t heated. I was planning to check out yet another hotel’s pool, though I was not feeling very optimistic from the photos on their website. I had started procrastinating.
But I needed to swim.
That evening, on a family enterprise-related webinar on disruption, I asked a question during the Q&A. “How do you disrupt yourself when this gives rise to incompatible values between you and others, and your self-differentiation is deemed problematic?” In response, the speaker said, “You do it with love, so that the others understand that it’s not about them, but about you being who you need to be for your highest self.”
The next morning, during meditation, I made a decision to disrupt myself by going back to the hotel, to the pool my father built, to be who I needed to be for myself; his daughter. Estrangement from my siblings after the fallout over my parents’ estates wouldn’t take this away from me.
The following day, I got into my car and drove to the hotel at noon.
I parked where I always have, which is also where my father used to park, at the front of the hotel where the ‘Reserved’ sign sits. The concierge looked like he wanted to ask me to park elsewhere, but something held him back. I said hello, locked my car and walked through the Conservatory to the pool area, where I set my bag down at the north end of the pool-side, in readiness to have lunch then swim. It had been six and a half years since I had done this, at this pool.
I wore my black and white kimono, white yoga pants from the ashram in India, not leggings, more like culottes, and my swimsuit underneath. I had no desire to step into the changing room, which I never really liked from back in the day. I had lunch and savoured every bite of the pork ribs, potato wedges and spinach I’d ordered. It reminded me of meals with my father, never rushed, peppered with minimal conversation. It was like the ashram experience, where we ate in silence to present ourselves to the blessing of our shared meal.
As soon as I was ready, I walked to the steps in the shallow end of the pool and step by step, slowly eased myself into the water. The pool was heated using a thermostat that kept the temperature at 26° centigrade. It was warm and lowering my body into the water was easy. I felt the way I used to walk into the chapel at Msongari or going to mass and experiencing a connection with the Divine. I stayed there a while, the sun caressing my face, head above water and the rest of my body submerged. It had been so long. It was blissful. Numinous.
In the shallow end, there was a trio of small boys, about seven or eight years old, playing together. There were a couple of adults there too. I didn’t pay much attention to them. When I got out of the water to set down my eyeglasses, which I had forgotten to take off, their handball landed at my feet. I picked it up and threw it back to them. As I walked back into the pool, the ball landed in front of me, again. Looking up, I saw three wee faces waiting for me to throw it back to them, again. “You want me to throw it?” I asked. “Yes! Throw it! Throw it quickly! Just throw it!” they chimed in unison. I did. They clawed the water racing for the ball and then, splash! It landed in front of my face again.
I was enjoying the game and whilst I thought it fun, I was there to swim. I swam to the deep end and out of reach from the next throw. As I was turning to go, one of the boys called out to the other. I stopped when I heard his name. I had taken my glasses off, but looking in the direction of the little boy, I instantly saw a resemblance to a family trait of protruding ears. He was the nephew I had never met.
With no ball being thrown, the boy had proceeded to the edge of the pool and hoisted half his body over, and was now preoccupied with the pool deck channel drain. It reminded me of myself as a child, knowing that in that moment he must have discovered a whole world; maybe a bee or beetle caught in the paddle drain or just the fascinating flow of water through the drain. My heart was tender and curious for a moment. Then I snapped out of it, turned around, pushed off and swam. By the time I got to the deep end, I knew I wasn’t going to engage, and because he had no idea who I was, there would be no harm caused. Any interaction would have had repercussions, especially for me.
The next day I decided to create a ritual and cycle to the hotel instead of driving there. My plan was to leave my house at 6:30 a.m. to be in the pool by 6:45 a.m., swim for an hour then cycle back. This would be great exercise and also a beautiful way to begin the day because I live in a bird sanctuary in the vicinity of the hotel and the dawn chorus is exhilarating. To be ready for the next day’s undertaking, I checked my bike’s tyre pressure, which was low, so I pumped the tyres. I packed a backpack with flippers, goggles, a swim cap, a hydrating face mask, body lotion, and lip balm. I set aside the clothes I was going to wear over my swimsuit, and I put on my phone alarm for 6:00 a.m.
I didn’t dither when the alarm went off.
I got up, laid my white and blue cotton shawl over my head and around my shoulders and went into my prayer room. I lit two tea light candles and smudged with palo santo to cleanse my aura and the room. I took off my glasses, closed my eyes and struck my singing bowl for the first “AUM”, then the second, then the third, and meditated and made my requests in prayer. When I was done, having given thanks, I blew out the candles. I was ready for the day.
Putting on my swimsuit and clothes was quick and easy. Jack and Moxie, my two dogs, were my immediate concern because they love nothing more than going on bike rides and I knew they would follow me all the way. So I tricked them, by making them think I was staying back with them, and then quickly jumped out and left them locked in the house. They didn’t know what was going on until they heard the gate open, but by this time I was out and on my way.
***
I live in a gated community in a house that was intended to be a gift to me from my father in accordance with his wishes. The development was a family project built on a portion of our coffee estate. All the houses are similar, yet have their own landscaping plan. My house is distinct. At a time of creative release, I commissioned a stained glass rendition of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, also known as the statue of Nike, the goddess of Victory. It’s a work of art that appears like a protective angel right at the front of my house.
The neighbourhood staff were coming in and there were a lot of warm good mornings and hi madams exchanged between us. As I got to the first gate, I rang the bicycle bell to alert the guard, who was a bit surprised to see me, probably on account of the hour. Past the gate and onto the ridge, it was such a nice crisp morning and I was easy on the bike, riding for about a kilometre until the right turn onto the hotel road. I cruised down the hill, then it was time to pedal up.
At that point, there was a troop of monkeys making their way from one end of the road to the other, jumping from branch to branch in the trees above. As a child, I had found monkeys relatable in their mischievousness but after a scare with them at the coast, I had developed a phobia. That morning, I had a kindred and joyous feeling of being up and on the move with the monkeys. I felt a sense of adventure and aliveness and I had no fear. I started the ascent and barely halfway up, I couldn’t push the pedals. I had to stop.
I rode back down, changed the gears and tried again. I didn’t make it to the top. I got off and pushed the bike to the spike barriers, gasping. The guards at the gate were definitely not expecting me on the bicycle. Even though I was wearing a helmet, one of them recognized me and said “Good morning madam,” to which I panted back a barely audible and breathless “moh-ning.” I got back on the bike and now on a flat surface, cycled past the guard hoisting the manual boom barrier, turned right into the car park, and came to a halt just before the golfer’s caddy/check-in desk. I left my bike there, went straight to my pool bed spot, peeled off my helmet and clothes, and put on my cap.
Goggles in hand, I walked right into the pool and didn’t even dip my toe in to check the temperature. It was heavenly. I felt like I melted into the water and with it, the palm trees around the pool. Looking up at the clear sky above, a pair of black and white hornbills glided by. It was ethereal. I fitted my goggles on and pushed off the side and swam breaststroke. First lap, second lap, third lap, fourth lap, fifth lap. I could feel myself turning inward, listening to my breathing, which I noted was excellent; strong lungs, legs, and arms. I was moving at a good pace and had the air for it. By about the tenth lap, I was thinking my breathing was just like the breathwork sessions I had done.
***
My first breathwork session was in 2016 when I trained as a systemic family constellator using Bert Hellinger’s method of resolving unspoken or hidden family dynamics. The facilitator focused on stuck emotion, and I just went along with his instructions. It didn’t take long for the emotions to come up; situated at the bottom of my solar plexus, the area between the navel and belly button.
My emotion was grief and it was old. It was more than the grief of my parents’ passing; it was the grief of a child and I wailed through the session, inconsolably, before coming to a deep calm. A huge emotional block had been processed and I knew it was from when I was a kid, but I didn’t know what it was. Was it the abuse by the watchman? Was it from being put down all the time? Was it from being bullied and beaten? It was thirty years after I last swam competitively. Face in water, exhale; face out of water, inhale; exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale.
I swam for an exact hour, got out, towel dried, moisturised, clothes on, back on the bike, and I was home in ten minutes. This began a daily ritual and meant I was shifting emotions without really thinking about it.
It all came to the surface following a visit from a close friend.
As he does on weekends, my friend came over with an almond milk latte and pain-au-chocolat for me and a coffee for himself. We sat outside on the verandah to chat, as we typically do for an hour and a half at a time, after which he will say he has to go. In the months prior, I had started getting irritated every time he said he was coming over. I complained that he came over and left and he was doing a drive-by and he should stay longer or he shouldn’t come at all. Cognitively, this didn’t make sense to me or to him, but emotionally, it was super-charged and it was mounting to a crescendo.
The Thursday prior, I had a call with my mentor in Hong Kong and he’d told me about a technique of connecting with the shadow self. In Jungian psychology, the shadow consists of the parts of self that we deny. We were talking about this in the context of values and virtues, and I was saying I think we are here to learn and master virtues, a higher expression of values on the scale of consciousness. It was while discussing the connection to morality and ethics that the subject of the shadow came up.
The issue was, you can’t repress the shadow and must embrace it, otherwise, you have a lopsided self-expression, possibly very judgmental in that you can’t see or tolerate the shadow-side of others on account of not being able to see your own. He shared with me a technique with which to do this, in which you communicate with the parts that show up through emotions. So if anger shows up, you locate it in your body (is it in the chest, head, throat?) and speak to it.
So, there I was, sitting with my friend on a beautiful sunny day, and he announced, “What time is it? I have to go to…” There was the feeling. Resentment. “Why can’t you stay longer?” I asked. “Because I have to shop for the house and I want to go home to rest after that,” he replied. I walked him to the car and waved as he reversed out. Then I came back to finish my cold coffee and the tears, brimming in my eyes, started to pour down.
I started to sob and cry as I had when I first did a breathwork session. I had a deep ache in my stomach and felt as if a heavy weight had been placed on my chest. I felt trapped in this feeling. I couldn’t lift it and inside of it, I experienced longing and loneliness. What was it? I knew from all my healing work that this was an opportunity to name it. So I allowed the feeling. As uncomfortable as it was, I knew that only by allowing it effectively would I be able to recognize it cognitively. I had to wait for it, wait for the right word that captured the feeling in its totality. There. Slowly. It revealed itself, like a heavy cloud unfurling to reveal the luminosity of a full moon. I was feeling abandoned.
It hit me that what I was reacting to was the experience of being left in all the ways one can be left; left behind, left out, left alone. It wasn’t that I wanted to be left alone, which I did from time to time. It was that I was left alone without consideration. The emotion was grief and it reminded me of being left alone when my father died. It was the grief that went with my deprivation and isolation. At that moment, I felt the hurt of being betrayed, and then blamed and punished.
I called my friend, who was driving into ABC Place in Westlands, looking for a parking spot. Hearing my voice and sobs, he stopped the car. I explained that I now saw what I was reacting to, not him leaving but the experience of being left and not by him, but by my family. Eventually, he spoke. “You should be so proud of yourself,’’ he said. ‘‘Look at how far you’ve come, look at what you’ve created by yourself. You are loved. I love you very much. You have a family with us.”
We must have spoken for thirty or so minutes.
I went to my study and pulled out a blank sheet of paper and pen. As I tried to think of where to begin, I remembered the call with my mentor in Hong Kong. I hadn’t yet looked at the resource materials he had shared with me on a technique called Focusing, but I instinctively knew what I had to do. I closed my eyes and scanned my body for emotions. My mind went to my solar plexus, connecting with the sensation I felt there in a dialogue.
Me: “How old are you?”
Answer: 12.
Me: “What are you?”
Answer: Grief.
Me: From what?
Answer: Cruelty.
It carried the double bind of being targeted and silenced. I was finally understanding what my father meant when he said to people, who in turn relayed what he’d told them to me, “Wanja is misunderstood.” Even so, and especially after my father died, there was no reprieve.
Oftentimes, a family is taken as a whole such that one person’s ontology – say the patriarch’s – is assumed to be how the whole family is. “The so and so family are like such and such”, or “Be like your Dad”, the latter being something frequently said to and expected of me, notwithstanding the fact that no two human beings are the same. Though often likened to him, I was well aware that I was my own person and my father knew as much, because we discussed it.
To the public, my father was a larger-than-life figure – a corporate titan with several board chairmanships and a consummate politician and public servant having served as MP for Kangema and cabinet minister in four portfolios – transport, finance, internal security and environment. To me, he was simply my father; loyal, dependable, compassionate, an overprotective parent.
I had shared my need for independence with my father because for some reason he and my mother had had a tendency to over-focus on me. It was a vicious cycle in which I would develop self-doubt, especially in situations where I didn’t need to question myself. After their deaths, in my sink-or-swim situation, I had to learn to believe in myself completely, with no second guesses.
***
My experiences in the pool had given me the blueprint for survival. It was in the water that I transmuted sorrow into a sport that challenged me, and taught me to be victorious and own my wins.
It was in the pool that I emerged into my higher self, listening to my inner voice for guidance, in spite of all resistance or evidence to the contrary. I had to trust myself as I ventured into the open ocean of life’s unexplored territories.
With my parent’s passing, I had found myself in a situation somewhat similar to my open water dive with sharks in Costa Rica. I had gone on a spring break holiday with my boyfriend while I was at business school in New York and he had selected this location because I wanted to swim with sharks.
I had been diving before.
After I started working with Barclays Bank in 1997, I decided to give scuba diving a go during a family vacation in Diani. I shared my plans with my father, who opposed the idea vehemently, and when I asked him for cash to pay for the dive – I was having issues with my bank account – he flatly refused. I found a way to access my latest salary and made the payment. The Padi instructor at Diving the Crab said all I needed was a test run in the pool, and since I was a good swimmer, it would be easy for me. So I went ahead and a day after two pool drills, we set off before sunrise in a glass-bottom boat.
The adventure of it all was right for me.
The early morning held a sense of magic unfolding and as we approached the reef, the sun was rising and the sea was calm. We motored across the water, beyond the first and then the second reef. Once anchored, we tested our equipment and as demonstrated, tipped over the edge of the boat, descending into the open water.
Down I went, my body moving through this cold, beautiful underworld. The coral reef was radiant with hues of purple and pink, gilded with sea anemones and algae and all sorts of tropical fishes flashing by as if to stun with their splendour. I was mesmerised; insulated with no talk and just my own inner experience of joy and wonder. I don’t recall how long we stayed there, but it was long enough to experience my body in a new way, capable of taking me to new depths. When the instructor motioned to ascend, the prism of light that came through the water gave me a knowing of the experience of ascending into the heaven of afterlife. Upon my return to the cottage, I shared this excitedly with my father. He looked at me partly in annoyance and then peppered me with questions of interest and curiosity and, as always, pride.
Because of my experience in Diani, I was mentally ready for Costa Rica and on the day of our dive, my boyfriend and I embarked on a fisherman’s steamboat, the sailor looking very much like an elderly Captain Haddock in The Crab with the Golden Claws, tobacco pipe and all. Again, our excursion began before sunrise and we set off for a spot called “Shark Alley”. Our first sighting was a whale and her calf, then we saw a huge manta ray gliding under the boat. It was surreal to me. The water was murky and the guide cautioned that we may not see anything on account of the poor visibility. It didn’t really matter to me because I had seen more than I expected to by this time.
We got to the spot and without much fanfare, checked our equipment and tipped off the edge, following our guide. My focus was on my breathing and I enjoyed the sound of it and the bubbles from the oxygen tank, and then there they were, seven white tips, suspended in the water.
The curvature of their mouths, the setting of their eyes, the length of their bodies, and the sheer beauty of these creatures were mesmerising. I felt as though I was in the presence of great danger and yet safe. We didn’t stay long. The sharks moved away, apparently not liking the sound effects of our breathing through the oxygen tanks. Mission accomplished. The guide motioned us to ascend. It was only when we turned around that I became aware of the little fish nibbling the air bubbles that had formed on my leg hairs that I realised where I was and what was in the water with me. Sharks!
What if they had a change of mind and attacked me? What if the next fish air nibble was a bite? My mind started to spin as we ascended, and I was only too eager to get to the surface and into the boat. Returning to the beach, I felt a deep satisfaction. I had swum with sharks at last. I also knew that was the last time I would go scuba diving. Navigating Nairobi after the death of my parents was like the dive to “Shark Alley”. There were ominous figures lying in wait and in full view. Had my father been alive, I would have comfortably swam past these sharks because I would have been with the biggest fish of all, in my world.
But I was never alone, and will never be.
1 Due to an ongoing court case and the sub-judice rule, the writer cannot elaborate further.
