One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina Read Free Book Online Page B

and is called Greensteds. Life there sounds very much like an Enid Blyton novel. Ekya Shah, who was briefly my best friend, went there, but hasn’t spoken to me since he left. He hiccups his consonants now, like a proper Brit.
    Wambui takes us to visit Railway quarters one day. The good thing about Wambui is that she takes us to places our parents or school would not approve of. She has friends there, who live in a row of one-­room houses with green doors. Clothes flap on the line directly above them, and other clothes are being washed at a tap by young girls and wives.
    The buildings are very old, some of the oldest in the country outside the coast, as old as the railway, the origin and spine of what we now call Kenya. Built by the British in 1901, it opened up East Africa for proper conquest. Today, the railway is collapsing. In the 1970s, some tycoons close to Kenyatta wanted to make money from trucking, to break the grip the Luo had over railway jobs. They let the railway collapse. Fungi spread on the open pipes, and green tears stream down peeling walls. A toy safari-­rally car leans against a wall streaked with the charcoal scribbles of children.
    It is made from wire shaped into the frame of a car and held together with thin strips cut from the inner tube of a tire. The car is complete with a long steering wheel for a child to grip and run in any direction, making hooting and growling sounds. Railway children make the best wire cars—­crouched and grimacing, with steering that makes the wheels turn; with paper mudguards, number plates, and springy aerials thrust from the back of the car. When the railway was being built, in the first few years of the twentieth century, the British fought a war with the Nandi, who were stealing copper wire.
    In between some of the ceilings, under the old corrugated iron roof, young men keep carrier pigeons, and their feathers are clustered in the roof drains. Jimmy comes here a lot. He likes carrier pigeons, and dogs, and has friends here.
    One woman is sprawled on the grass, elbow crossed over her eyes, sleeping, her whole body receiving the sun. The smell of fish, dry fish, cooking fish, and boiling, bitter green vegetables is everywhere. It smells like a foreign country—­a hot and languid place. Dried fish from Lake Victoria. Many railway employees come from all over East Africa. The railway was once the East African Railways, but Idi Amin became the Ugandan president, and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere is a communist, so the East African community collapsed. To re-create Kampala and Kisumu heat in these highlands, these women keep food boiling on stoves, and sit inside steaming courtyards and small rooms.
    Two women’s heads are held at the knee by their hairdressers, legs wide open. There is a pile of discarded pea pods,
sukuma-­wiki
stems, and potato peels next to the tap, covered with a large web of slime. Brackish, soapy water glides into an open drain where ducklings swim. Ducks with mossy, muddy bellies wander about. One of the women, in a blue and white
kikomi
outfit, starts to talk to Wambui in Dholuo.
    “Who is Engine?” asks Wambui.
    “Ai? You speak Luo?” Ciru asks Wambui.
    “I used to speak it well, but I forgot much of it.”
    Ciru and I look at each other. When Wambui speaks Luo, her body language changes. Her face becomes more animated, does more moving than her arms; her mouth pouts, her arms rest akimbo. Wambui is awkward in English, crude and ungrammatical in Kiswahili.
    “He! Engine ni mwingine,” says the woman in Kiswahili. Engine is something else.
    “Kwani?” Wambui asks.
    “I have never seen someone like that one. Chu chu chuuu all the time. He—­huyo, he has no brakes when he is with a woman.”
    A child runs past roaring like a rally car as he steers his wire Datsun 160J. We laugh.
    “He is an engineer—­his mother was a Goan, from India. His father was a rich Maasai. He has women all over the railway line.”
    All the women start laughing.