Nyachula

The lakeside beaut 2

I stared at the screen.

It was me. Two years ago. Standing at a pharmacy counter at MP Shah, wearing that ugly green jacket I had thrown away last December. My face had less stress lines back then, and more hope, and definitely more hairline.

“How,” I started, but my throat closed.

“Eat first,” Nyachula said gently, sliding the phone back into her bag as the mama placed a plate in front of me that could have fed a small Kibera household.

The ugali was hot. The tilapia stared at me with one accusing eye like it knew about my financial decisions. I broke off a piece with my fingers, dipped it in the sukuma, and ate. And bro. I almost cried again. But this time for different reasons. Whoever cooked this had clearly fed Luo men for decades. There was love in that pot. The kind that knew men carry things they will never speak about, and food is sometimes the only language that reaches them.

Nyachula watched me eat for a moment, then started talking.

“Two years ago,” she said, “my small sister Akinyi was hit by a boda boda on Ngong Road. The boda guy ran. Of course. They always do. She was eleven. We took her to MP Shah because my mother panicked and forgot we did not have MP Shah money. By the time we realized, she was already in the ward.”

I stopped chewing.

“She needed certain medicine that the hospital pharmacy did not stock. They sent us to that pharmacy outside, the one near the gate. Eight thousand four hundred shillings. We had exactly three thousand two hundred. I remember because I was counting it three times like the numbers would change if I prayed hard enough.”

She laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that has tears at the bottom of it.

“I was standing at that counter crying. Not loudly. Just that quiet woman cry where the face does not move but the eyes refuse to behave. The chemist guy was telling me to step aside because there was a queue. And then this man behind me, in a green jacket, just said, ‘Add it to mine.’ Like that. No big speech. No Bible verses. He paid for everything. Then he gave me an extra two thousand for, quote, whatever else. He did not even let me say thank you. He just walked out.”

I put down the ugali.

“Akinyi,” I whispered.

“Akinyi lived,” Nyachula said. “She is in Form Two now. She wants to be a pilot, which is ridiculous because she is afraid of escalators, but who am I to crush dreams.”

I laughed. And then I genuinely could not remember.

“Nyachula,” I said slowly. “Aki I am sorry. I do not remember this. At all.”

“I know,” she said. “I figured. You did not remember because for you it was Tuesday. For us it was the day God showed up in a green jacket.”

Wueh. Wueh wueh wueh.

I had to put my fork down because my hands were shaking. Two years ago. That would have been around the time I got my first proper bonus at the tax advisory firm. Sixty thousand. I had felt like Elon Musk for a whole weekend. I remember buying my mother a phone, treating my then fiancée to Mama Oliech, and apparently, somewhere in there, paying for a stranger’s sister to live. I had completely deleted it from my brain like a WhatsApp message you regret at 2 AM.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

She smiled, and I noticed for the first time that she had a small gap in her front teeth. Cute. Dangerous. Continue.

“My uncle works as a security supervisor at MP Shah. He pulled the CCTV footage. We had your face. But Nairobi is Nairobi. So we sat with that photo for a year. Then six months ago, one of my friends saw a guy on a LinkedIn post at some Westlands event and said, eh, is that not your green jacket man? It was you. I sent you a message request.”

I frowned. “I never got it.”

“Edwin,” she said. “You had your DMs set to friends only. You ignored us regular folks like a politician after elections.”

I laughed so hard the tilapia nearly fell off the table.

“So today,” she continued, “I was passing through town to drop something for my aunt here. I sat on that bench to answer a call. And I looked up and there you were. Same face. Different jacket. Same eyes.”

“Eyes that were two seconds from doing something stupid,” I said quietly.

“Eyes that were two seconds from doing something stupid,” she agreed.

We sat there for a moment, just looking at each other. The mama hummed somewhere in the background. Otile Brown was still bleeding through the wall from the barbershop. Outside, Nairobi was being Nairobi, hooting and hustling and chewing people up. But in this small blue doored room above an alley, time had decided to take a small break.

“Nyachula,” I said. “I do not know what to say.”

“Then do not say,” she said. “Eat. Then we are going to KNH. My cousin works in HR there and they are looking for someone in their finance department who knows tax. The pay is not great but the medical cover will save your mother. We can sort the Bondo clinic from there.”

I stared at her. “You planned this?”

“I have been planning this for two years,” she said, completely calm, like she was telling me the weather. “I just did not know what day God would put you in front of me. So I kept the plan ready. My mother says a woman without a plan is just a woman waiting to be disappointed.”

I think that is the moment I fell in love. Not romantic love, not yet. The other kind first. The kind where you realize you have just met a human being who is so completely themselves that you want to take notes. Romantic could come later. For now, I just wanted to keep listening.

She slid a piece of paper across the table. A name. A number. A time.

“Tomorrow. Eight AM. Do not be late. And cut that beard, you look like a Form Three boy who is trying.”

I touched my chin instinctively. “Aki my beard.”

“Edwin.”

“Yes?”

“Eat your fish.”

I ate my fish.

And as the afternoon sun slipped through the small window and landed on her brass earrings, making the tiny fish glint like they were swimming, I realized something Nairobi had been trying to teach me for three years and I had been too busy to learn.

You do not always get to choose the day your life changes.

But sometimes, if you are very lucky, you get to choose the bench you sit on.

The End. For now.

P.S. Akinyi still wants to be a pilot. We are working on the escalator issue.