Thread by @CSakwah

Story Thread

This babe, my ex now, used to prepare the most delicious homemade meals that I have ever taken. She was a hotelier. After dating her for a few months, I started noting offbeat characters that were toxic. I ignored them because I did not want to go back to eating

my poorly prepared meals. She used to do my laundry as well. Her house chore skills were impeccable. I tolerated the toxic trails because she cooked good meals, did laundry, and kept the house in order. While at it, I almost plunged myself into depression. She was a Dholuo.

She used to receive late night calls from some Luo guy with whom they would chitchat in Dholuo. She always insisted that the guy was her colleague, a harmless colleague. During those long and daunting calls, I used to hover around social media to kill time or play chess online.

I did not understand what they used to talk about because I don't have a grasp of the Dholuo language. One day, while she was on the call with the guy, I received a call of my own. She tried to mouth me to end the call immediately.

When I did not read into her gestures and mouthings, (asking me to end the call), she ended hers instead.
Pissed off, she asked 'I asked you to end the call?' I asked why, why should end my call when we could all share the space. She claimed that the guy was her boss

at one of the fancier Rusinga Island hotels. They were talking about their job. She explained that there were some clients in Nairobi whom she was supposed to organize their travel logistics to Rusinga Island. And her boss was instructing her how she was to do that.

I asked why I couldn't talk? ‘This space is enough for two phonecalls.’ I argued.
'It is disrespectful talking to my boss with background noise. Let me finish my call then you can whomever you were talking to.’ I texted my friend that I would call him the following day.

Right away, she called her boss and apologized for disrupting their phone call; at 10 PM.
I felt disrespected to my spine. I wanted to count my losses but then, the following day, Jaber came back home in the evening with a bucket of kitchen ingredients, fresh fish,

and the Kitchen nitty-gritty that we watch on cooking Youtube channels. She prepared a meal fit to be served in those high-end hotels. After the meal, she said, 'by the way, that guy, the one who calls me from time to time, is the reason why I got this job.

I just have to receive his calls because I don’t want to disrespect or hurt his ego. Sometimes he steers our conversations away from our job into personal things. But I have to tolerate his personal chats out of the fear of being sacked from my job. He is married with two kids.

He showed interest in me but I declined his advances straight away. I don't date married men, and I can only drop my pants for the person that I love. That is you.'
Even before I reacted to her words, which I presumed she said out of guilt, she asked me, 'by the way,

how was the food today?' I don't know if it was the Luhya in me or the poor cook in me, but whatever it was, my weakness for her started and ended with her luscious meals.
Bombasting my stomach friends, kina Ascaris lumbricoides, with steamy meals, were her ways of apologizing.

Subconsciously, I ended up complimenting her 5-star-hotel-esque-dish and allowed the phone call conversation to slip without a discussion.
Days slipped by, meals became testier. One day, around a month later, we went out with friends till late into the night.

We ubered back home when all of our phones were off. We plugged our phones into power and went ahead to shag before sleeping. The following day, mid-morning, I woke up to the voices of her whimpers. She had a sullen and lugubrious face.I asked her what was up? Why was she crying?

She said that Alan, the man, had called her a whore after unsuccessfully trying to find her through the phone the previous night. ‘He called me a whore and insinuated that the reason why my phone was off was that I was prostituting with my Nairobi men!’

Alan worked at their Rusinga hotel while she worked from their office in Nairobi.
Men, I wondered why a man who was supposed to be a harmless colleague would be so entitled to her availability and time to the extends of getting pissed off when he couldn’t reach her phone,

late into the night. I wanted to ask her that, but shootie was crying uncontrollably I had to calm her down first. Together, she and I ended up brandishing all manner of sissy names towards Alan in his absentia. I mean, which kind of a man insults a lady through a text message?

‘Ignore him, such an effeminate nincompoop,’ I insulted Alan while calming down my babe.
‘Imagine someone who is not even your boyfriend, not even your husband, someone whom you don’t owe anything, calling you a whore. Inauma, babe!’
‘Ignore him, babe. I, as your boyfriend,

knows you. I know you can’t cheat on me. You are not a whore and it is the opinion of your boyfriend that matters, and not someone else’s.’ I simped with much emotional conviction that eventually calmed her down.

When Jaber was done crying after I had helped her fix her tattered self-esteem, she prepared yet another meal that left my brain in a confusing turmoil. At that time,I knew everything was offbeat.Even if she loved me, as she adamantly purported, that man also existed in her life.

I don’t know if she felt indebted to the man for offering her the job, or if she was coying on repaying the debt, or if the man was financing her. After the meal, she retaliated her earlier assertions that I was the only man that she loved

and she couldn’t get wet for a man she didn’t love. ‘Mimi kaa sikupendi siezi get wet,’ you must have heard this torturous adage from Jezabel’s descendants. The whole lot of them.

Even if you meet a lady at Sabina Joy, she will still tell you that she can’t sleep with someone whom she doesn’t have feelings for. She used to throw phrases of the ilk on my face. I believed her.

For the months that I had dated her, she had accustomed me to a marriage-esque lifestyle that I couldn’t fathom walking away from. I couldn’t imagine going back to my bad meals, to my poorly cleaned or not-cleaned-at-all laundry, to my unkempt bachelor house,

and to the unsolicited sex served on her well endowed Luo body. Jaber used to cook for me like a chef and shag me like a whore in the bedroom. In the end, I became a captive of her exemplary culinary and coitus skills.

Additionally, I couldn’t imagine the shame that would come with my friends and a few social media followers learning that my relationship had suffered the ‘mtaachana tu’ fate, especially after I had constantly flaunted her beauty on my Whatsapp status.

I was wallowing with depression, or stress maybe. I was stuck in a relationship with an emotionally manipulative partner, a partner who played a victim every time she was supposed to plead guilty or apologize.
My tipping point, the moment when ending the relationship

was inevitable came a week later. My babe was back to her good moods after Allan called and apologized; this, she shamelessly reported to me.‘He called me and apologized. I scolded him and warned him to stop acting overprotective and clingy towards me because I was not his wife.'

It was on a Thursday when Allan called again. She was cooking while talking on the phone. In the background, Prince Idah’s song, Nyar Migori, was serenading their phonecall. She was from Migori. To concentrate on her cooking, she had the call on loudspeaker.

The thing about Luos is that even if you don’t understand Dholuo, you can partially get what they are talking about. They tend to marinate their Luo sentences with an English word at end of the sentence. Something like

Jaberi jhsgh jagsus khsgagy whole weekend.
Hagtshgsb kjuyta ngssh nhgjsg Sunday evening
Khgsfygs jhgags kkgujsg airticket.
Hsgts jhuhga jiysbfn agtsfh gateaway
Aahtsgh jagsygh shftag Rusinga Island. I was particularly suspicious of this phonecall.

It stank of infidelity to the high heavens. I ended up doing something so senseless and desperate that I loathed myself for doing it. I secretly recorded her phone call through my phone recorder.
The following morning, on Friday, she stuffed her katravel bag with clothes

and other beauty paraphernalia and bombarded me with an ‘I am traveling to Kisumu till Sunday. The boss called me yesternight and asked me to rush to Kisumu to take care of some hotel logistics.’
Just like that, she canceled a weekend plan that we had made. Plans ang’oa?

I sipped on the breakfast that she had prepared, took a bite on the state of the art samosas, and miserably said, ‘travel safely!’
That day, I paid one of my Luo friends called Otis an impromptu visit.

I explained to Otis that I suspected my Jaber of having an affair with her human resource manager. I had shamelessly recorded her phonecall and wanted him to translate it for me. Otis started listening to the phonecall, each moment laughing.

Occasionally, I would ask him to share with me the funny bit of the call. ‘Share the jokes, Otis!’ But Otis was adamant that he was only going to translate the call at the end.
At the end of the recording, Otis pulled me to his couch and sat me down.

His face had suddenly turned from gay to somber.
‘Otis, start with the jokes, share the jokes!’
‘Jasiala, there was no joke in that phonecall!’
‘But you were laughing, Otis! Why?’
‘I was laughing at you, Omera. You are the joke here, Bw. Sakwah.’
‘Otis, I don’t understand!’

‘Precisely because you are a fool. Jaber has made a fool out of you.’ Otis was visibly mad and I did not understand why. He did not explain anything to me. He scrolled down my phone and handed it back to me and said. ‘I have deleted the recording and I won’t translate it to you.’

‘Why, bro?’ I nagged. I became agitated because Otis had deleted the recording.
‘Semeji, achana na hii sister yangu atamaliza wewe. Wasichana wajaluo ata amesinda sisi wenyewe. She is not traveling to Dala on a work errand.

Instead, she is going to have a weekend getaway with her boss on Rusinga Island.Ujinga kaa hii BBI iko maliza!’ He clicked his tongue out of agitation and added a few Luo words that I didn’t understand.
It was a painful realization to take. I loved Jaber, so much.

I treat relationships with someone from a different tribe with much skepticism, especially towards the ones who insist on using their mother-tongue while talking to their tribe's men.
Since the break-up, I started learning how to cook.

I don’t want to be stuck in another toxic relationship in the future, because I am scared of cooking my own meals. Because I did not learn how to prepare simple meals when growing up. Because I thought the kitchen was a woman’s place, as society taught me.

My son, if God blesses me with one, will learn how to cook and do laundry and other basic or essential house chores from a tender age.
The moral lesson: however bad a relationship is, don’t leave it empty-handed. At least I left that relationship with the content for this story.

I have written two fictional novels, Premium Tears and The Campus Exile; crime romance novels set in Kenya. If you fancy reading Kenyan fiction from a budding author, please grab a copy.
I deliver the books within Nairobi and send them as a parcel outside Nairobi.

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