BITTER TRUTH

It had been quite a long time since the two met. He had visited with his expectations riding high. As he entered into his sleek black BMW 318i he could not help but curse again and again. He held his car door open for a while, one leg inside the car while his right leg still outside, he looked at the window on the third floor with a scorn on his face. He snapped back to his senses when he realised his 7000 shillings black Italian leather shoe was in a little poodle of dirty water. He cursed some more and almost banged his car door before realising this and smoothly shutting it as he sunk in his seat, adjusted the steering wheel, put on some music, checked himself in the rear-view mirror and smoothly eased his way onto the road and drove off. It had been a disappointing visit, but at the moment he had more pressing matters to attend to. He lightly nodded his head to Musa Juma’s music as thoughts of a car wash and cleaning his shoes or maybe even getting a new pair took over. He stopped at the junction joining the Thika Superhighway, looked at the man in the Toyota Vitz next to him and disgustedly shook his head as he joined the highway and sped off towards the city centre, the smooth modern road coupled with his perfectly maintained engine making it more of a glide.

Back at the third floor apartment, Jackie was left standing by the window cursing at Tom inwardly, with some sense of dislike for herself too. When he drove off she turned from the window and wiped tears from her eyes. It was a two bedroom apartment with sky blue walls. She was in the room that served as her sitting room. Two two-seater sofas with a small coffee table and two stools made up what was her furniture. There was a 14 inch television set, an LG DVD player and a Sayona sub-woofer system orderly placed on a T.V trolley. On the wall there was nothing more than a wall clock, a calendar and a large picture of a white palatial home with a well manicured lawn. On the picture it was encrypted, ‘A home is much more than the structure of stone.’ Covering the red cement floor was a checked black and white plastic carpet. The other room, the bedroom, had precisely that, a small 3.5 by 6ft bed. An addition was a wooden rack for hanging clothes. Typical of Mathare, the washroom facilities were shared among the residents of each floor. It was a pathetic life by Tom’s standards and that is why she actually disliked herself for she could not stop herself from feeling a little more love for him due to the fact that he had actually sacrificed his time and pride and visited her in these conditions. There was a knock on the door and she dried her tears, adjusted her kanga and went to answer it, “Mama Muthoni no, that is not the President’s son…” It was her nosy neighbour who was definitely there to inquire about the man in the ‘big’ car.

The two were the conclusive proof of Karl Marx’s analysis of the society. The best example of how in Kenya there is a clear divide in social class. Tom was a high-ender, the have, belonging to the rich, the bourgeoisie. Jackie was a complete contrast, born and brought up on the wrong side of the economic line, the have-not, a true epitome of Marx’s proletariats. Her life story was short and simple. She was born to struggling parents in Mathare, had her not so promising education disrupted in her second year of high school because after the death of her father, she had to join her mother in breadwinning for her five younger siblings. She had tried her hands at everything, from her mother’s vegetable business to tailoring apprenticeship, to a children day care attendant, to what seemingly was the better of them all, hairdressing. It was her hair salon exploits that exposed her and enabled her to atleast move out of her mother’s house into her own. However, the two houses were not more than five hundred meters away from each other. At 22 years of age, she had been through too much life hurdles to ever be surprised. She had not known love for anything or anyone but her family, she did not know how to handle what she was feeling at the moment.

Tom was a young promising lawyer, born to a banker mother and his father was a long serving Court of Appeal justice. The hardest of challenges he had faced in life might as well have been when he had to choose whether to go for a school trip to Egypt with his classmates or join his parents on vacation in London. He was 12 years old, the decision was based on the Pharaoh stories he had read earlier in his life. He attended prestigious private schools right from kindergarten to high school. The only time he had been in a public institution was during his law school days at the University of Nairobi, because his father, an alma mater, like other pioneer legal brains in the country with all due naivety thought the best legal minds only came from that institution. It would be unfair to link his achievements to his parents’ connections only for Tom was also very bright, he had always been a performer. One of his driving factors was that as much as he had no problem spending and enjoying the fruits of his parents’ success, he also did not want to be thought unable to fend for himself. As much as he seemed to always have his way due to the money and the influence from his parents, he was a smart smooth talker who could charm his way to where his hard work and papers could not.

These two had met in circumstances very unlikely. Who would have thought their two separate worlds could be brought together. They had grown to love each other much more than any of them actually expected, each breathing a breath of fresh air in the other’s life. The fact that this new found comfort and love that they shared was under threat was scary to them. None of them knew how to handle the threat and this lead to every attempt towards tackling the problem end up in arguments, just like it had earlier happened. Jackie felt undermined and construed Tom’s gestures as fuelled by sympathy for her background and current situation. On the other hand Tom felt like his genuine offers for assistance were misunderstood to mean that he was trying to buy his way out of every fix. These two were both victims of their backgrounds and societal placement, vices that now challenged what had managed to breach all odds and brought them together…love.

To be continued…