PART ONE

MARIA

Sleep, like the devil, beckoned me but I fought to keep it at bay. Amped up on caffeine, I anticipated when the final tick of the wall clock would signal my release from mundane chores. It was 3:30. I had about half an hour left till my evening break.

It had been a long day filled with fake smiles plastered together in shallow swathes. Fatigued, I slipped into the laundry room hoping that a thirty-minute nap would be enough to revitalize me. Sadly, there was no couch to lie on in the room, just a chair stacked against a wall. I folded the same towel for the third time.

"Maria! Are you here?"

Dr Kenneth Awatoya popped into the laundry room. He was in his early thirties, slim, tall in a well-cut suit. He had a choirboy look expect for his glasses, which added a bit of intrigue. His rough black hair and beard had a military look about it. He wasn't what I'd call the most handsome man I had met, but beauty is subjective. I assigned degrees of beauty to those around me according to preconceived parameters extending beyond physical appearance. He was a beautiful man, inside and out.

"I'm here, Daktari. Have you been looking for me?"

He walked in with a smile and shut the door behind him. Ken owned the AMI clinic where I worked as the manager of housekeeping. He was a non-smoker, never tried drugs, and exercised daily. Nurse Naomi, a good friend, often said I suffered from the white knight syndrome and hence my attraction to him, but I disagreed. It was much more than that.

"I thought you left. I heard you were looking for me. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his pants, he snickered. "Liar."

"I'm exhausted. I can easily pull off being a walking zombie, dead on the inside but subconsciously awake. I feel as though energy is being constantly drained out of me, as though I'm leaking electricity."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong. It's been a crazy week. I wanted to confirm if you were still letting me leave work early."

"Do you need money?"

I never gave much thought to the notion of respect before I met Ken. Like how respect is more than passing pleasantries or nice words. That it takes an effort to look at the other and take in who they are and show them you regard them as a fellow human being. How it is listening without judgment, getting to know them with as few assumptions as possible. Since I began working for him, he changed my perspective of the world. He offered me a hand when no one else dared to and the last thing I wanted was to take advantage of him more than I already had.

"No. I don't need money."

Ken adjusted the rim of his glasses. "Then what?"

"Nothing."

"Maria."

My already rapidly beating heart picked up its cadence. His expression darkened as he squatted down to my level and rubbed his thumb across my cheek. His dark eyes drilling into mine. I couldn't help but think - I'd never seen such dark eyes with so much light in them.

"You know where to find me if you need to talk to someone, okay?"

I hated that all he felt for me was just pity. He grinned and for a few moments, the sight of a smile stretching across his face, changing his hard but utterly handsome profile caught me completely off guard.

"Of course," I said. "You're the first one I'll go to."

***

I stood at the edge of the Hilton hotel facing Mama Ngina street at 5 pm. The evening light struggled through the murky cloud, but even in its weakness, it was enough to blind. A large horde of people was headed home. Its impenetrable mass of humanity, worn faces who were always hopeful about another tomorrow.

Like always everyone was in a rush. The traffic wound its way down the road like a great angry snake, tires hissing over the road. This was what I lived for. The longer all these sophisticated people were miserable in traffic, the higher my chance of making money was.

My rent was due in three days. I was already behind three months which meant if I would be evicted if I didn't pay. Although my landlady was displeased, I had managed to bargain for more time. Working at AMI had its perks, but it wasn't enough. The pay barely covered my expenses no matter how negligible. If I was not late to pay my rent, I was late to pay for my college tuition. My life was like a seesaw. Every time, something had to give.

Before the job at AMI, I hawked fruits in town to pay for my expenses. I would buy them for a cheap price from a local farmer near my home and sell them at a mark-up in town. For months, it kept food in my belly, clothes on my back and a roof over my head. I was ashamed to be back, but I didn't hide it this time. I didn't bundle up into a mess. I didn't disguise it in cloth. I walked with my head held high, knowing the twisted necks and judging faces that would follow would not help. I was lucky that I had an option and the willpower to dust myself off and start again, many didn't.

Taking down the basket of a heavy load of mangoes and bananas on my head, I leaned over a sleek Range Rover with a smile. The driver was a petite, fair-skinned woman in a long ombre weave that fell to her back and a deep red lipstick. Furiously typing into her iPhone, she glanced at me with scorn. She slowly took in the faded jeans, worn thin at the knees with tell-tale dark stains and my ill-fitting shirt with a raised eyebrow and shooed me off like an annoying fly on her window.

I smiled, despite the hopelessness covering me like a wet blanket, and dragged my feet to the next car. Before I could muster a perfectly convincing smile at the driver and offer to sell him my merchandize, he closed the window.

It was easy in moments of derision to think the worst of Nairobi. The streets that were once sleek new tarmac, now greyed by the bleaching of the sun, the bumper to bumper traffic, the matatu drivers weaving in and out of the city like they were on a heist with the police fast on their tracks and the army of obnoxious motorbike guys in sticky leather jackets in the heat choking the life out of the roads. I was at that level of cynicism. Tired. Tested. Contented.

When I was young, my father referred to Nairobi as the melting point of pseudo-classes. In the grand scheme of things, we all faced the same demons. The same problems equally neutralized everyone – the rich and the poor. Traffic, politics, and the failing economy. With the knowledge of a Macmillan dictionary, he had the answers to every question under the sun. He was like a small factory producing packages of wisdom. But sometimes even the smartest of people could not mould the world to their will. That lesson stuck.

A loud honk startled me out of the road into the sidewalk. I looked back at an angry man with his head out of the window, hurling insults. I had been in the way of his five-second window when the traffic lights gave as a go-ahead. This was everyday road rage in Nairobi.

'Toka kwa njia mama.' It was the only thing I heard before he lunged ahead.

Mama? Did he just call me an old woman?

Disheartened, I continued walking.

Did I look old?

The cars came to a halt giving me the chance to stare at my reflection. I was only twenty-six. Beauty measured by the senses is subjective. Hence the quote beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. When someone says one is beautiful, they are typically referring to the superficial sensation of beauty afforded by the interplay of looks and mannerism. I didn't fit in the category. The cornrows that graced my hair looked cheap and tacky, I had no designer label and zero prospects were knocking down my door. Creepy Gordon didn't count. I knew I wasn't beautiful, but why did the reminder burn my chest? Readjusting the purse hanging on my waist, I continued moving. Worry wasn't going to pay my rent.

Time passed slowly. Each second seemed to last an eternity as I received rejection after rejection from privileged assholes who had no idea what fraught meant.

Another car honked loudly. The pedestrians around gazed at me as if my mere existence were a nuisance to them. I had done nothing wrong so why was I getting these looks? The driver lowered the window and signalled to me over. I ran.

A young girl about ten-years-old sat at the front passenger seat. She wore a pink checked skirt, a white shirt, a grey sweater, and knee-length white socks. A look not very many people could pull off. Purple glasses sat heavily on the bridge of her nose like an old librarian with all the tea to spill.

"How much?"

My customary tight mouth exploded into a radiant smile that produced the dimples on the side of my cheeks, swallowing my eyes whole and revealing the hidden teeth behind my lips. At that moment, I was the moon and the star. "A hundred bob for five mangoes and one fifty for the bunch of bananas."

The girl's father, behind the wheel, seriously counting the money in his wallet said, "I need twenty mangoes and five bunches of mangoes."

"Sir?"

"We're a large family," he chuckled lightly. "The wife sent a list."

I began laughing, once again not all certain what I was laughing at. In that moment of joy, I barely had an inkling of what happened around me. Carefully, I packed all the fruits in my basket into a decent shopping bag, handed it over through the window and took the two crisp notes he handed.

"Thank you, sir!"

Bouncing slightly on the sidewalk, I sniffed the new notes. Happiness for me was a relative term. I took it for the rich, a luxury I didn't have the pleasure of enjoying. But at that moment, happiness flowed through me, warming my skin like the rays of the sun. Two more days like this and I had enough to pay the landlady as I figured out the rest. Suddenly, Nairobi didn't seem too bleak.

The moment between balance lost and the impact is one I will never erase from my memory. I will relieve that precious second before my feet slipped from the sidewalk as I happily jumped onto the road. My body snapped in two and the car that came at me tore right through my skin. The pain almost brought me to the point of blacking out, maybe it would have been easier if it had. As it was, I lay on the cold tarmac, aware of every pain that struck each nerve on my body.