Lucky Girl: A Novel

Part One

Chapter One

Every morning throughout my childhood, at five forty-five a.m., Mother knocked on my bedroom door. I climbed off my bed, knelt, and kissed the floor. Serviam. I will serve.

Still kneeling, I made the sign of the cross—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—then started on the rosary, repeating the sequence of the Apostles’ Creed: one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, one Glory Be—altogether five times.

I kept my morning showers short. Mother said many other Kenyans had no water to drink and most bathed with ice-cold water. While I scrubbed my feet with the pumice, I prayed for the Holy Father’s monthly intentions—one month for the church’s deacons to be good servants, another month for the refugees, the next month for world peace, for the sick and suffering—all year round.

Mother wanted me to do those things.

Everyone in our neighborhood knew Mother for her devotion to the Catholic faith. But she was not one of those Catholics who only had doings with other Catholics; Mother was like the old-day missionaries. She visited people in need, like the Abdullahs, the Somali family with seven children who rented a cottage at the back of a wealthy family’s mansion down the street. Mother brought them baskets of hot buns covered with a white napkin.

Those poor children are always so hungry; no sooner am I at their front door than all the bread is flying out of the basket, she sympathized. The landlord’s children have more than they can eat, but he won’t give Mr. Abdullah even a cup of beans to feed his children.

She smiled with the Shahs, a Hindu surgeon and his plump wife who dressed in exquisite saris. When the Shah daughters brought payasam to share with us over Diwali, Mother received it graciously. When Mrs. Shah asked if the five-day lighting of fireworks was a nuisance, Mother said, Nuisance? What nuisance? Anything for your gods!

Mother kept me indoors. There is too much evil out there, she said. I longed for a sibling, someone to play with. I read books, practiced piano. I sat by the window of the study where I could watch the children from the neighborhood. Sometimes, they played a game of rounders, dozens of kids swarming around the players’ circle as if they were bees around a broken hive. Sometimes they raced on their bicycles, flying over pebbles and potholes. I saw that they stayed outside until the shadows of the jacaranda trees in our neighborhood disappeared.

I loved the escape of nursery school, all the hours I spent under the shade of the purple flowers of the grand jacaranda trees on the playground. I loved Princess, our housemaid, who raised me since I could remember. She hugged me often, and told me she loved me. She was always at the school gate waiting to scoop me up with arms wide open. She wore a head wrap and kanga and hummed as we strolled beneath the canopy of jacaranda trees that lined our street, and all the gardeners in the neighborhood followed her with their eyes as she walked by. Trailing three steps behind in my checked uniform, I wished I did not have to go home, that I lived at school, where I could play endlessly and without fear.

I didn’t understand it, but I feared Mother. My father died on my fifth birthday. My vague memory of that was a stain I couldn’t bleach out. Mother’s stiffness with me made my fear even harder to understand. My aunts told me that before my father’s death, Mother took me everywhere with her, like a trophy, singing to me while she planted her roses in the back garden, doting on me. After his death, she turned distant. She took on the life of a stern businesswoman.

My father owned a successful biscuit mill that he had grown from a storefront bakery to a household brand sold in supermarkets. After his death, Mother ran the business. She worked furiously, perhaps out of grief or the fear of failure. She sat on the board with men who had answered to my father, and she commanded their respect ruthlessly. By the time I was ten, she’d quadrupled the business’s value, sold it, and invested in real estate and hundreds of acres of land for commercial farming used for coffee and roses. She was a millionaire many times over and for every extra shilling she made, her determination to mold me into a good, humble Christian girl increased. She had to be stern.

Every lesson she taught me growing up tied back to modesty. Though we had domestic workers, as did most middle- and upper-class Kenyans, Mother insisted I contribute to the household. Cooking, tending to her vegetable patch, and polishing the bumpers of her bright yellow Peugeot until I saw my brown eyes reflected back.

Mother had Musau, her beloved gardener, build a small poultry farm for eighty chickens in our backyard. She also brought in rabbits. Then the chores started. Saturdays at dawn, even before my prayers—Kayai, wake up! The chickens won’t feed themselves.

Kayai, little egg. That’s what she always called me. Her only child, who she overprotected, doted on obsessively so I wouldn’t fall and break, yet for all her care, she struggled to show her emotions. I longed for birthday parties but Mother said they were a waste. Instead, she would buy me a single present, always something practical and useful. I longed for a hug, a kiss. I got none.

Saturdays inside the coop were spent sweeping, changing light bulbs over nests, and picking up eggs. Sometimes, she did these things with me. As we cleaned the barn side by side, I’d yearn for stories of my father, my papai. I wanted to hear about Mother’s childhood: why my four aunts and my kokoi, my grandmother, had come to live with us, why, even though Mother was so smart, she hadn’t been to university. Most of all, I wanted to know the biggest secret: how my papai died. No one ever told me.

Instead of telling me stories, Mother worked in the chicken coop with the same steady focus she always had. She swept steadily, soaked in a strange silence that barricaded her from me.

Kokoi and my aunts, Mother’s younger sisters, and Princess, made my world whole. They filled the house with chaos, dancing, laughter, and gossip when Mother wasn’t home. I loved my kokoi more than anyone. Although she was only in her fifties, a tough life had taken its toll on her body and Kokoi was frail. She looked a decade older than her years. At fifteen, she had been circumcised and married off and soon after, given birth to Mother. Mother was named Nalutesha, born on a rainy day, and Kokoi gave her the pet name Nalu. After that, Kokoi lost five pregnancies and had one stillborn in the span of a decade.

During those years, my grandfather beat her often, though never inside the house, as a Maasai home is a sanctuary of procreation and prosperity, a place where children are conceived, born, and nurtured. Barrenness in women was a sign of disorder. To cleanse the disorder, he beat her more viciously over the years. Kokoi was scolded by her mother-in-law too, and her father-in-law wouldn’t allow her to serve him a meal.

If a woman cannot produce children, what then are they there for? my grandfather’s family asked her.

When her husband took a second wife, Kokoi was glad. He could finally have all the children he deserved. He stopped beating her and beamed with pride while talking about his new wife’s pregnancy. Perhaps it was Kokoi’s relief at seeing her husband finally happy, or the end of the beatings, but suddenly she fell pregnant. This time, she delivered a healthy baby girl she named Naserian, brings peace, or peaceful one. Then she fell pregnant again and had another healthy daughter, and then a third. Naserian, Laioni, and Rarin all came crashing in, one after another, like sheep that had been let out of their barn for morning pasture.

My grandfather, growing restless around two wives with a horde of children, had started to have a dalliance with a woman he met while working in the city as a cook for a British family. Eventually, he abandoned Kokoi and her co-wife.

As the eldest, Mother had to quit her education to find work. Mother dropped out of her economics degree at only twenty and registered for a six-month secretarial course. Within a year, she had learned shorthand, dictation, and typing. She said that she could type faster than her mind could think, and she started to become afraid of her fingers, wondering if they had a life of their own. Two years later, as she was working overtime to put food on the table, my grandfather returned home, saying he wanted to atone and bring his family together. Kokoi found herself pregnant again with a fifth daughter. My grandfather, absolutely sure this surprise baby would be a boy, was so gutted that he left Kokoi for good. That was how my youngest aunt, Tanei—beautiful, flamboyant—showed up like an unexpected thunderstorm nearly a decade after Kokoi’s middle three daughters.

Mother was livid. She had already become the family’s matriarch, responsible for more than she could bear at only twenty-three, and now there was a new baby in tow. When Kokoi told the girls they shouldn’t carry hate for their father because he would always be their father, Mother was clear that he was never to be welcomed home again.

Forgiveness can be granted, but a snake is a snake even after it sheds its skin, she said.

Now, decades later, Mother treated my aunts—responsible Naserian, cheerful Laioni, bookish and serious-minded Rarin, and wild Tanei—more like her daughters than her sisters, partly because she had helped raise them and partly because imperiousness was part of her nature. She tolerated no nonsense as long as they lived under her roof, even with Aunt Naserian and Aunt Laioni, who were in their late twenties. They had both studied business and accounting at the university, and they helped Mother with her businesses, both at the farms and in the factories.

They never brought home any boyfriends, even though I often heard Kokoi tell Mother the girls were past marrying age. Aunt Rarin, the fourth born, was Laioni’s Irish twin, only eleven months younger. She studied law in Nairobi. It seemed when she wasn’t in her books, she was in her head, dreaming of bigger things for herself. She declared that she would get a clerkship at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwanda Genocide after she passed the bar, to which we all rolled our eyes, and she did. She said she’d win a scholarship to continue with her master’s degree in international criminal law and that she would study in Scotland, and she did. I loved my aunt Rarin. I wanted to live a big life too.

Tanei was only six years older than me. Mother’s greatest frustration was her youngest sister’s rebellious behavior, developed by the time she was in high school. Often, as Mother scolded Tanei, she appealed to Kokoi to intervene. No, Kokoi said. She’s your daughter now. Who am I to say ‘Close your legs’ or ‘Do this or that’ when we eat your food and take shelter from the rain under your roof? Let everyone know that if it weren’t for my firstborn daughter, my Nalu, this family would be nothing, nomads, beggars.

Kokoi meant to appease Mother, submitting herself to demonstrate loyalty. After all, Kokoi lived by Mother’s generosity. And so it was this family of vibrant women who gave my early childhood color and joy. But with Mother, other than the hours we spent cleaning the chicken coop together, her warmth remained caged far away.

···

When I turned seven, I began attending a prestigious all-girls convent school across the city. Mother decreed the school bus unsafe, and instead, she hired a driver. I called him Mzee, Swahili for a distinguished old man. He had skin like onyx and wore Islamic prayer beads around his wrist every day.

We didn’t speak much, mostly because I had never spent any time with any man and didn’t know what to say except for an exchange of pleasantries. Our drive home was far more interesting. Even as a child, I was always intrigued by the disparate sections of the city. Going from the quiet, leafy suburb where my school had sat for sixty years since the Irish nuns built it from the ground up, to crisscrossing through the chaos of a township where the tin roofs lay so skewed it was a wonder they didn’t slide off in heavy rain, to then finally entering my family’s neighborhood where residential homes were resort-style mansions guarded by twenty-four-hour security companies. That was Nairobi—a captivating tilted society of haves and have-nots, where many lived on less than a dollar a day and walked miles to and from work in the broiling African sun, while others only shopped overseas for their clothes and shipped in European furniture.

At five p.m. on the dot every day, Mother phoned home to make sure I’d made it back safely.

In those primary school years, I started to really feel my father’s absence. At my new school, fathers seemed suddenly to appear everywhere, at swim meets, tennis matches, and field hockey games, yelling out their daughters’ names in deep, rumbling voices.

I thought I was ready to know the big secret of how my father died. Kokoi wouldn’t tell me and neither would my aunts. They skirted around it like blowflies over a dead carcass. The older I got, the more my frustration grew. Kokoi told me, With time, my beauty, with time. Some things heard by a young ear change the soul forever. The only thing you need to know about your papai is how much he loved you. He craned his neck like an angry ostrich over any imbecile who said, ‘Don’t worry, next time it will be a boy!’

My aunts told me stories about my father that Mother never shared. They said when Mother went into labor on the warm January night of my birth and was rushed to the hospital, my father couldn’t be reached. Mother complained through the night to all the nurses about his absence, though her bouts of anger were interrupted by bouts of worry and weeping.

She fretted that something horrible had happened to him; she was inconsolable, but as soon as she wiped away the tears and blew her nose, she would stiffen up again and threaten to strangle him the second she laid eyes on him, said Aunt Rarin.

My aunts said that I was born at five a.m., small but pink and loud. A day later, I still had no father. On the second day, he arrived disheveled and dirty. His Volkswagen Beetle had crashed into a ditch on a remote country road, forcing him to walk miles and hitchhike to find help with towing. Mother was overjoyed. She told everyone that she had prayed to God and bargained with him: If He let her husband come back alive she would bite her tongue forever, no matter what Father said or did. No one could have predicted that on my fifth birthday, God would renege on His end of the bargain, and she would lose my father for good.

By the time I was ten, I begged everyone who would listen to tell me the truth about what happened to my father, but my tantrums brought no results.

Soila, you are driving me crazy, Aunt Naserian complained. I hounded them while they folded meat into triangles of pastry, while they beat the rugs with brooms outside on the veranda. I circled them relentlessly, like a flock of hadadas. Naserian was the second oldest after Mother, and the other aunts followed her lead. If she broke rules, they did too. If she wavered, they did too. On this she remained silent, so the others did too.

At only sixteen, Aunt Tanei broke all of Mother’s rules as if they didn’t apply to her. If anyone would tell me something I wasn’t supposed to know, it was her. But even she stood firm. Soila, please! I’d rather die.

I searched for answers in the framed photographs of my father that littered our living room, staring back at me. I studied his eyes, his smile. They were as impersonal to me as the pictures in Mother’s Drum magazines. I couldn’t remember the moments captured in the photographs: my father holding me on his lap on a wooden stool in a photo studio or standing next to me in flared pants while I posed on a red tricycle. I squinted at his face in the photos. If Mother won’t tell me, maybe he will. After all, Kokoi always said the dead tell stories.

I had only a vague memory of the period around when he died, like a broken vase I couldn’t quite glue together. There was going to be a party for my birthday. I had a pink cotton dress ready to wear and Mother was fussing around me and bubbling with excitement. The next clear memory was Mother screaming and me being kept away from the closed door of her bedroom when I called for her.

At school, when my friends asked why I didn’t have a father, I made up stories that became more colorful over the years. One day, my classmates and I were eating lunch, and the topic of my father’s mysterious death came up yet again. He drove his car into the back of a truck and his body was flat as a pancake when they dug him out, I replied.

No, he didn’t.

I had never liked Salome, the girl who blurted this out accusingly.

That’s a lie, Salome continued. You’ve always got a new story.

The other girls were silent and wouldn’t meet my eyes. They all knew something I didn’t. The warmth of embarrassed tears stung my eyes.

Yes, he did, I argued, packing up my thermos with my beef stew half-eaten. And why would you say that he didn’t? What do you even know about my family?

I know that he died inside your house, she said, taking a bite of her bologna sandwich. Everyone knows.

Stop it! Jumping to my feet, I tilted forward to smack her in the face but the screeches of the other girls woke me from my anger. Could it be true what she said?

I couldn’t bear the humiliation. I ran off clutching my lunch bag, blinded by tears. By the time I made it to the brick arches of the school chapel, I could barely catch my breath, choked by sobs. None of the other girls had stood up to Salome. None of them came after me, cared to comfort me.

What in the heavens is the matter? Sister Pauline hurried over to me.

Nothing, I said, hiding my face with the sleeve of my school cardigan. All of the Irish nuns terrified me. They moved invisibly, only to appear just when we were at our worst behavior. Sister Pauline scared me most. She was head of school and head of the other nuns, who bowed their heads when they crossed her path. Nothing, I’m fine.

You’re not fine, she said. Let’s go to the office and have a glass of juice, shall we?

Mother always said, Soila—if I ever hear that you have been called to Sister Pauline’s office for bad behavior you will sleep with the chickens in the coop. And I believed her. Yet here I was, in Sister Pauline’s office, sitting on a hard chair, staring at the wooden crucifix hanging on the wall in front of me while she poured a glass of fresh orange juice and set it on the table. Now tell me, my child, what is the matter?

Salome says my father died in our house, I said, blowing my nose with a tissue from the box on her desk.

Well, how would Salome know? Does she live in your home?

No, Sister Pauline, I answered, still sniffling.

Well then, why do you let her make you so cross? You can’t always worry about what other people say about you.

Yes, Sister Pauline.

Do you not know how your father died? she asked, after a slight pause.

In a car accident, I said.

Who told you that?

No one. I just know it, I said.

Well, well, my child, she said. Perhaps it is time you asked your mum about this matter?

She won’t tell me. But I know it’s what happened.

I think you’re done with school for the day, Sister Pauline said. I’ll call your mother now to collect you, and in the meantime, go get your things from the classroom.

Mother didn’t come to school. Instead, just like always, it was Mzee.

What’s happened to you? Mzee asked, as I stuffed my backpack into the back seat of Mother’s Peugeot. Are you ill?

No. Where’s my mother? The headmistress called her to pick me up, not you, I said sullenly.

Mzee answered with a shrug and turned the volume up louder on his favorite Swahili music station. I closed my eyes and allowed the sound of the East African drumbeat to fog my misery.

The phone rang in the hallway at precisely five p.m., like it had for years.

Are you home? It was the same cool tone that she used when buying vegetables at the market.

Yes, I’m home.

Start on your homework, then. I’ll be home in an hour.

At six p.m. I heard Mother’s footsteps move slowly up the stairs to my room. I imagined her bursting in with a sharp rebuke for getting myself in trouble at school. But then she entered, perfectly composed, upright, serene.

So—you want to know how your father died? she said, without greeting me first. I curled up on the bed, thirsty and puffy-eyed from crying. She sat beside me. Sit up. I don’t think you’re old enough, but God knows if I don’t tell you the world will.

I scooted away from her and leaned against my wooden headboard, putting distance between me and her mercurial temper, still expecting her to tell me off. Instead, Mother finally untied the blindfold from my eyes.

In the early morning hours of my fifth birthday, my father went into the bathroom, saying he wanted to get ready for work. Mother said it was unusually early for him to go in to the office on a Saturday, but he said he wanted to tie things up early at the mill before coming home for my birthday party in the afternoon. Mother fell back to sleep. It wasn’t until she woke up again several hours later that she found the door locked and water streaming out.

We had to use an axe to break the door, she said, her voice flat. He used his shaving razor.

His razor, for what?

Mother rubbed her palms together and breathed a deep sigh. I searched her face, still uncomprehending.

Soila, what I’m saying is that your papai killed himself. He used his razor and cut his wrists and allowed himself to bleed out and drown in the bathtub. Do you understand it now?

I felt waves of shame crush my body. I didn’t know my father at all, but imagining him drowning in the bathtub in bloodied water and Mother screaming over him, shaking him, begging him to wake up was numbing. That was the moment that I, in my newfound grief, began to understand why Mother was Mother.

Her grief, which had always frustrated and confused me, was bigger than I had ever known. I knew from my aunts’ stories that Mother had been different before my father’s death, but this was more than I imagined. My father hadn’t just died. He had killed himself. And he had left Mother behind to torture herself with all the questions about why he had done it, for all these years.

Maybe Kokoi had been right when she said my ears were still too young and it was better left untold. Mother sensed that I didn’t want to hear any more. Without saying another word, she laid her hand gently on my cheek for just a moment.

I’m so sorry, Kayai, she said. Then, as if she hadn’t just shattered my childhood, she stood up and left the room as serenely as she had walked in.

···

That night, dinner was served at seven p.m. just like it was every other night. But instead of obediently going to the table, I remained in my room until Aunt Tanei came to get me. She leaned on the doorframe with one hand on her hip.

Soila, how long must we wait for you?

I don’t want to eat, I said. I turned over and faced the wall.

Excuse me, your highness, Tanei said. I know you had a bad day but sulking about it won’t make it better. Besides, your yeyo is giving me a hard time about my marks and I need your mopey face to deflect her from the nagging.

Mother loved dinnertime. Every evening, Princess brought out dishes of meat, or collard greens, or beans boiled with maize, or chapati and lentils. Our dark wood dining table, laden with food, was too formal for our informal family, an extravagance with eight curved legs with solid brass tips. Mother used dinnertime, when all of us were gathered together, to expound on the importance of a Christian woman’s conduct in the outside world, and the joy of living in God’s grace and daily pursuit of his mercy. Tanei’s poor grades were another frequent subject of conversation at the dinner table.

Tonight, Mother didn’t turn to me until we had finished eating and were clearing away the dishes.

Kayai, leave the plates, she said, nodding at Princess and my aunts to finish up. Sit down, I want to talk to you. I sank back into my seat. You need to understand, Kayai, your father’s death devastated me. Then, your kokoi reminded me that I still had to get out of bed for you. What you know now about your father’s death doesn’t change anything. You have to move on with your life, with the people who are here today.

Had she moved on? I was afraid to ask. She still wore the look of a widow. When my father was alive, I was told, our home was full of life and laughter. After he died, the mood became somber and she refused to change anything in the house. What she could have modernized remained antiquated—the red velvet couches, heavily printed carpets, busy wallpapering, the yellow-tiled kitchen with green appliances and yellow Formica countertops. She still slept in the same bed she had shared with my father that his family had bought as a wedding gift. Our house wore the look of a vintage wedding gown. Mother froze the house in January 1981, the year my father died.

To me, it seemed as though she expected my father would return someday and perhaps not be able to find our house if it had changed too much. I had heard stories of restless souls haunting houses, searching and lost, unable to free themselves from purgatory. I prayed that my father’s spirit would know where to go to be free. I didn’t know it then, but as I grew older, I realized that what I wished for my father was what I most wanted for myself: I wanted to discover where to go to be free.

Chapter Two

I expected the revelation of my father’s suicide to shake the foundations of my life, but days passed as they always had, adding up to years. As I entered my teenage years, I began to chafe against the rigidity of our family’s traditions.

Most of all, I hated that Mother whipped herself. I was only six or seven when I first heard it happen. When I was that young, I slept in a smaller bedroom next to Mother’s. Mother often came in after I was already in bed to pray for my dreams.

She would read to me from the Bible, and sometimes when she was too tired, she asked me to read to her from one of my storybooks as she lay on my bed with heavy eyelids. I was always eager to show off my reading skills but soon my eyes would shut too. Once I woke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Through the wall, I heard the sound of the whip.

After each blow, a whimper, and I counted them—seven. The first time I heard it, I ran to Mother’s locked bedroom door and called for her, worried somebody was hurting her. The next morning when she woke me up for school, she wore a light cotton nightdress and I saw the marks, red and angry, on her upper back.

It wasn’t until I was thirteen that Mother explained it all. I was sashaying back into my bedroom after a particularly long hot shower to find Mother sitting on my bed. I ran for a towel and came back into the room, mortified that she had seen the growth of hair that was starting to sprout in between my legs.

Soila, what have I told you about taking long showers? Mother scolded. I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes and all I see is steam rising out and I don’t hear you scrubbing your body, just singing. Children in this country don’t even have water to drink.

Yes, Yeyo, I said, sitting on the bed next to her.

I take cold showers, she said. Did you know that?

Yes, Yeyo. I know I’m supposed to. I’m sorry.

Soila, we live in such a materialistic society that people can’t understand you’d actually make yourself a little uncomfortable to be more mindful of God.

Yes, Yeyo.

Many people diet just so they can be thinner. Yet they wouldn’t bear any suffering for God.

Is this why you sometimes whip yourself? I asked.

Yes. She answered directly. It’s my penance. It’s what I choose to do, to live fully in the spirit. The pope does it with joy, Mother Teresa does it, Saint Josemaría Escrivá did it.

I didn’t agree with Mother, but I knew how important her faith was