I met Nyamok at the GoodFood Restaurant yesterday. The one at the intersection of Kimathi Street and Kenyatta Avenue. The one that overlooks the Hilliebillie Hotel, where it costs more to buy lunch there than to buy my weekly portion of groceries. When I say I met him, I mean I stumbled into him in the most unlikely of places. His appearance had changed so much that were it not for the scar I remember on his left cheek, I would have apologized and moved on to the washrooms. But there he was, with a scar on his left cheek and a look of dawning realization in a restaurant in the middle of throbbing Nairobi. The plates that he had been taking back to the kitchen lay scattered on the floor, some broken, some not. Bones and grains of rice strewn around. But none of that mattered because then, as if by magic, I was not in the restaurant anymore. I was in many-years-back, when I first met him.
***
Nyamok and I arrived at Best Boys High School at the same time, albeit from opposite directions. My uncle, my mother and I had walked from Marikka, the closest bus station to the school if you were taking the Thika Superhighway and he and who I assumed to be his parents were arriving from the other side of the road. We both arrived on foot and we both had shiny metal boxes that our mothers helped us carry. I had insisted on a new metal box instead of the old one I used in primary school because Best Boys High School was a big deal. Everyone in the country knew it and it only admitted smart students who had garnered more than 400marks in the big primary examination that seals fates.
When we arrived at the gate, ready to write our contact information onto a weathered book and be allowed into the premises by the watchman, a sleek Mercedes drove up and the watchman’s attention was claimed by the shininess of the vehicle as he signaled with an outstretched palm for us to wait while he registered this new visitor. Not that we minded. Who didn’t know that this was the way of things? Cars and money and property and connections made you first in line even in places like Best Boys High School. We waited patiently while the driver, a gigantic man with a booming laugh of those who have made it conversed with the watchman as if they had grown up together. As if they were best friends who had not caught up in a while. As if they were sitting in a restaurant awaiting their food instead of by the school’s gates where the sun was mercilessly torching the rest of us. While the watchman and the driver were unhurriedly catching up, the rear window rolled down and a boy about our age, with a clean shaved head and glasses perched delicately on his nose, looked at us. He surveyed us, our shiny boxes, and our dusty feet with bored curiosity. Then he rolled his window up, but not before we had seen the huge suitcases behind him in the seat and suddenly, I felt as if my new box, filled with carefully chosen items for my first term, was not enough. When the watchman and the driver finished discussing how hot the weather was and how the kids were doing and how the nearing elections would change the political climate, the driver handed the watchman a few notes, as if a reward for keeping up with the conversation. The watchman saluted the driver, effusing all sorts of venerations and waving goodbye to the car until it had disappeared round the bend, and then he recalled we were still standing outside
“New students?”, he asked
“Yes,” my mother and Nyamok’s mother both replied, at which point Nyamok and I looked at each other. Really looked at each other. We were about the same height. Both clean-shaven, wearing clothes that were clearly new and bought for this occasion because of how uncomfortable we fidgeted in them. I didn’t smile and neither did he. It wasn’t any surprise that he was registered as number 967 and I as 968. We were assigned the same dormitory, Njenga House. Our mothers, excited that their sons were already friends on the first day, quickly exchanged phone numbers and even asked us to look out for each other and stay close to each other and all we said was “Okay”. When Nyamok arrived in the new, shiny, tiled dormitory, the house captain informed us that we were in the same room, even though none of us had explicitly said that we wanted to room together. We were three incoming students in the eight-student room, and the remaining third student who was soon to be accompanied by his many, many, unending bags abound with sweets and candy and crisps and juices and sugar and chocolate, was the same person who had rolled down the window and looked at us, from his throne in the back seat of the Mercedes Benz.
James, our Mercedes roommate, Nyamok and I became really close from the beginning. I was the storyteller, James was the snacks provider, and Nyamok; well, he was the naughty one. Nyamok was the one who discovered that the watchmen changed shifts every eight hours and when we could sneak in and out to the ramshackle of a restaurant that was a stone’s throw away from the fenced school compound. Of course, at the eatery, it was James who paid. Once, when we got caught, it was me who convinced the watchman that we’d been to see our Swahili teacher, and I even showed him my Swahili exercise book, which I had forgotten to take out of my bag when we sneaked out and he reluctantly let us back in, even though he promised to follow up with Mr. Kimeshi the next day which we all knew he wouldn’t do.
Nyamok was also book smart, or in other words, had an eidetic memory. While James and I would spend hours poring over notes and doing exercises after exercises in preparations for the end of year exams, Nyamok would quickly peruse through textbooks, smack them shut and start planning our next escapade.
“Prefect Nyandu is harassing us!” Nyamok began one night, and we pretended to ignore him. James went on memorizing the chemical equations and I resumed flicking through the Friday Pulse issue that came with The Standard every Friday because I was tired of revising for the Chemistry lab. “He gave me a twenty-minute drill for having my socks not tightly pulled up!” he said in exasperation. “Well, he is campaigning to be captain, and you shouldn’t have refused to do the twenty push-ups he gave you”, James chided taking his glasses off and yawning. It was clear he wanted to get back to studying for the lab exam but Nyamok was not having it, “Have you forgotten he made you skip lunch on Wednesday? When we have rice and beans and fried cabbage? And you,” he said addressing me, “who made you arrive late to class for the past one week because he had you sweeping the tiles outside his office over and over and over?”
“Well, we can’t do anything now. Every prefect is campaigning, and the director will believe them over us anytime,” I said resignedly.
“I have a plan that I have been thinking about for a while now?” Nyamok said, smiling mischievously.
“Last time we had a plan it almost ruined us!” James replied.
“You just listen to me first and if you like it, we do it. If you don’t, we don’t. Sawa?” Nyamok asked. James and I put down our books and turned to him, knowing well that acquiescing to his plans implied acquiescing to partake in them.
The next day, with shaking hands, we met in our room and pooled together portions of concentrated Hydrochloric acid that we’d stolen after our Chemistry-lab exams. We impatiently waited for everyone to go for dinner before we tiptoed up the stairs, turned right, walked down the corridor, and silently, with our feet barefoot to prevent taps on the beige tiles, we proceeded to Prefect Nyandu’s bed. Nyamok lifted the mattress and placed a polythene bag under it so that whatever was poured wouldn’t leak to the floor, then James drew back the checked blankets that covered the bed to expose a purple bedsheet and they all looked at me, to complete the ritual. I took the plastic bottle that had the HCl and slowly, I poured it on the mattress. I must have been doing it very slowly because James, who was normally the slow one, grabbed the bottle from me and with the urgency of people doing something they shouldn’t, splashed it on Nyandu’s mattress until it was emptied. Nyamok pulled the blanket back and made the bed as we found it and we left as stealthily as we had arrived.
That night, at exactly midnight, there was piercing scream that woke everyone in Njenga House. When we heard it, James, Kamau and I did not waste time trying to figure out where the sound had come from. We immediately bolted up the stairs, turned right, ran down the corridor and hurried to Prefect Nyandu’s room, where in the middle of the room surrounded by his roommates, he lay writhing and twisting and screaming on the floor. “It burns,” he said between sobs and James, the only one who could keep a straight head when things got out of hand, went to Prefect Nyandu and signaled us to help him. Nyamok and I joined him and together we supported screaming Nyandu to the bathrooms, where we leaned him in one of the shower cubicles and turned the tap on him. Seeing Nyandu like that, crying and wailing and weak, shook me. The realization that he could be broken. That the meanness he used on us could vanish so quickly and be replaced by utter helplessness.
The school never found out who poured acid on Nyandu’s bed and even those who were suspicious kept their mouths shut because Nyandu had not made himself exactly likeable. The director made Nyandu Captain and he, in turn, made James his office worker. Ever since that night, he considered James an ally against the force of enemies he’d made over time. Furthermore, James was always loaded with snacks and food that the dining hall didn’t offer. His parents visited him every month and each time they did, it was as if they had emptied the supermarket shelves of anything edible and ordered from every notable restaurant in town.
***
Our eyes were on each other, each trying to conjecture how we had ended up here, crouched over dishes in a restaurant floor. At that moment, time was inexistent. There was only me, Nyamok, and the air between us.