A warm midday in downtown Nairobi, this Thursday.
Much warmer than yesterday, Wednesday; though it gets colder as I complete this post close to three, with my coat out.
Which was in turn a surprising turn of "fortunes" for Nairobians (Iborians, as Philip Ochieng, the columnist, once called us) -- a real break from Tuesday.
Tuesday: one of the coldest days that I remember in this city (though not in Urbana-Champaign, or even in Nyeri town) -- and that my body "remembers" as I reflect upon all the yesterdays in Eastlands.
Eastlands always was a warmer place than downtown, which was warmer than places we did not frequent before the mid-Sixties but have come to know: Hurlinghan, Lavington Green, and other places like that. It still is.
So this work-week started badly, with a dreary Monday. That Sunday night, going into Monday, Talia, barely four years, died -- and God knows how many others.
Who would have thought, Monday, that Tuesday was going to be so much worse; when walking out of an office building was like jumping from the fridge into the freezer? Only Talia wouldn't know the difference. And yet that imagery does not begin to capture the chilly day's persistence -- and one's surprise at it.
But, for all that it was while it lasted (which must be what eternity must feel like) -- and knowing, as we now know, how Wednesday turned out -- who would have thought that Tuesday was going to be such a "one-day-trip"?
Cold days come and go in July, as we know; and as Julys, with their idiosyncrasies, come and go. July gives way to August, and it is not many an August that keeps up July's headline tempo. Still, chilly August days have been known to surprise us, going on and on. And August to September.
No one knows, then -- save the weatherman, and the weatherwoman, badly -- when the next cold front will be upon us. The rainmaker makes only the rain, when-ever he can; not the warm days you may wish for in the some-time depths of July.
Easier to remember the past than to see the future, then?
Oui!
I remember a cold, cold July weekend in 1973 -- which didn't stop the zurura-ring, or such fun as we could have. I remember, too, that the Saturday Mboya died, in 1969, it wasn't a very warm day in Nairobi.
A cold shiver shook the land down the full stretch of its very spine.
Easier to wish for the past, which we cannot truly remake, than the future, which we can do something about?
No!
Apana weja!
