• The troubles in his police job seem trivial when Sgt Makini travels back home
I’ve left Jiji Ndogo Police Post. For good? I wish. I’m on a week-long administrative leave for abuse of authority. So, I decide to pay my mother a visit.
I grew up in Kite, a small village in Laikipia. Only thing of note there was that every night when drunk, Mashamba, the largest land owner, was escorted home by a leopard. Or so he claimed. No one ever saw the animal, but no one dared contradict a man the size of a house. Oh, and the Nigerian pastor who started a church and instructed everyone to shave their heads bald. First time I saw my mother’s scalp.
“No wonder matiti yangu ilikuwa inauma,” mom says when I arrive. “Five years hujakuja nyumbani.”
“Mom! I thought that only works when one’s kids are suckling.”
She spits on her thumb and rubs something off my cheek.
“You’ll always be my small boy.”
“Where’s Kanini?”
“Didn’t I tell you in the letters? Your sister got married.”
“I’ve never received any letter from you.”
“She’s with Mashamba now.”
“What the?! You don’t mean…”
“The same one. And no, she hasn’t seen the leopard either.”
Mother refuses to discuss letters further and instructs me to visit Kanini before food is ready. I cross the valley to Mashamba’s. Kids litter the compound, you’d think he runs a kindergarten.
“Actually, that’s how it started,” Kanini tells me. “One moment I’m teaching his young offspring, the next I’m giving birth to three of them. Now I have four.”
“Four kids in five years? Christ Almighty! Is this a tot factory or something?”
“What can I say? The man has quite the libido.”
“He’s a hundred freaking years old!”
“Close. Seventy-seven, but none of his five wives is complaining.”
Quadruplets about five years old scamper in, their faces as dusty as baby elephants after a dirt bath.
“Hi, uncle!” they chorus.
“Don’t worry,” Kanini says. “They call everyone uncle. And only that one’s mine.” She points to the ashiest one. “He’s Makini Jr. Takes after you, too.”
She’s right. I used to return home every evening resembling a small tan monkey.
“But why Mashamba?”
“Mom didn’t explain it in the letters?”
When Kanini escorts me home, I press mother about the mysterious letters. She points to a box on the table. Inside are clean white envelopes, neatly addressed to my various locations. For two years, my mother had written me a letter every month since I left for Kiganjo Police college against her wishes.
“But mom, you never mailed any of them.”
In one letter, she explains how Kanini got pregnant and was struggling with the baby before getting married to the old man.
“What about all the money I’ve been sending?”
Mother hands me her phone. She hasn’t withdrawn a cent of the money I’ve been remitting, is almost getting to the limit her account can hold.
“But, why mom?”
She points me to one more letter. It’s from my father to her, telling her how an extrajudicial killing he had been part of haunted him. That he loved us all but couldn’t go on living.
“This sounds like a suicide note,” I say.
“He used his service revolver,” mother says. “You were five, Kanini, just a baby. That’s why I didn’t want you to join the service.”
“You could have told me.”
“Some things are hard to talk about,” Kanini adds. “Same way she didn’t say in the letters that I was actually raped the day I got pregnant with Makini.”
That’s why I must find Kimondo.
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