A Malindi Mama

I was being followed.

I knelt, pretended to tie my shoe, and saw her out of the corner of my eye.

I had gone down a side road, an unpaved track that led to Shiek's. At least, that's the name I thought the waiter had given me. I was perusing a menu posted outside an Italian restaurant, when he tried luring me inside. I had binged on Italian food the day before: insalata mista, bruschetta, mushroom risotto, chicken masala, a beef calzone, and gelato. I was hankering for some local fare, so I asked him where I could get some nyama choma.

"Eh?"

"Nyama choma," I said. "Where can I get some?"

"You want nyama choma?" he said, smiling.

"Yes."

He pointed down a side road. "You go down there," he said. "Turn left, and Shiek's is just there."

"Shiek's?"

"Yes."

I turned left onto Ganda Road, and that's when I first saw her about thirty yards behind me.

I had a bad feeling about Malindi the minute I stepped off the bus. I was ambushed by touts and beach boys, all clamoring for my attention. I'd had plenty of experience with touts before, but these young men were shrill, desperate. I pushed past them and escaped down Kenyatta Road to look for a place to stay.

I splurged and paid for a bungalow at Seaview Resorts. My room was spacious and breezy, with a fan and a defunct television set. I took my first hot-water shower in days and washed my mouldering clothes in the bathtub. I was on the back patio, hanging my damp clothes on the furniture and railing to dry, when I heard a woman titter and say something in what sounded like Italian. I leaned over the railing and looked at the neighboring bungalow. There, on the back patio, an elderly, bikini-clad European woman was on a deck chair entwined with a young, muscular Kenyan man in a white Speedo.

I was shocked. Not because of their age difference. Nor because it was an interracial coupling. No, I was fairly certain this was prostitution. While I had heard that prostitution was notorious on the coast, I had never expected to encounter it so vividly.

Male prostitutes on the coast had it much easier than their female counterparts, so at the time I excused the elderly woman's actions. More power to her, right? In hindsight, though, she was only helping to justify the more nefarious practice of female prostitution. Most women, or girls, entered the trade in their teens. Some entered before they were even twelve years old. And terrible things sometimes happened to them. Most girls made five times more in a day than the average Kenyan, so not surprisingly family members often encouraged their daughters to enter into the practice.

The girl following me to Shiek's looked young. Definitely in her teens. She wore a red halter top and dark blue jeans, and her hair was done up in European fashion, short, straight and bobbed. I wondered if the waiter at the Italian restaurant had sent her after me, perhaps thinking I had been talking in code.

I saw a sign ahead for a kinyozi (barber). In my gluttony the day before, I had failed to find a barbershop, so I was still sporting the monkish haircut under my hat. As I turned down the side road, I spotted the girl once again out of the corner of my eye. Perhaps she would give up the chase while I got a haircut.

The kinyozi was closed, but next door was a beauty salon, so I stepped inside. A portly woman with a bountiful smile full of big white teeth said, "Karibu!"

"Asante," I said, and I asked her when the kinyozi would open.

"You want a haircut?" she said.

"Yes."

"You sit down here," she said, pointing to a chair. "I give you a haircut."

"Do you have a razor?"

"Razor?"

I lifted my hat off my head.

"Aiiiii," she exclaimed. "Does it hurt?"

"Not anymore."

She commanded me to sit down. I did. She fastened a sheet around my neck. Then she dug through a drawer to produce an electric razor. Within five minutes, she had my head shaved. She held up a mirror before me. I ran a hand along my stubbled head.

"Looks good."

I then realized we had not settled on a price beforehand. Big mistake. She could name any price she wanted. And she did.

"Two thousand," she said, when I asked.

"Shillings?!"

"Yes."

That was the mzungu rate, but I was no mzungu anymore. I told her I had paid only two hundred shillings for a haircut in Kericho.

"This is Malindi," she said, smiling broadly.

I told her I wouldn't pay that much.

"You pay me one thousand," she said.

"Five hundred."

"Sawa."

"Sawa."

I had haggled well, but I walked out of the salon feeling cheated nonetheless. Sure enough, waiting at the corner, seated on a curbstone, was the girl who had been following me. I crossed to the far side of the street and quickly regained Ganda Road. I did not look back.

A few blocks down was Chic's Bar and Restaurant, an open-air establishment with wooden picnic tables in rows beneath makuti shelters. I was the only one there. The place seemed abandoned, until I heard the clattering of pots in the kitchen.

I sat at a table and waited. Sure enough, the girl appeared at the entrance. She spotted me at the corner table and walked toward me. She sat shyly at the far end, across from me, and mumbled something I did not understand.

"Pardon?"

"Do you have a mama?"

Immediately, I thought of my mother in Illinois. "Yes," I said, without sarcasm. And then I realized what she had meant. My first reaction was one of anger. I was furious that she would think I would engage a prostitute. My face must have betrayed my feelings, for she suddenly looked despondent.

I thought I should say something, but I did not want to protract the situation. So I sat there silently. She sat there silently. And sat. And sat.

Eventually, I retrieved my journal from my backpack. My head bent over its pages, in some strange form of symmetry, I began writing about my current situation: I am sitting in Chic's Restaurant. A young woman I believe to be a prostitute is sitting at my table right now. She asked me if I have a "Mama," to which I said yes, but she hasn't said anything since.

I looked up from the page. She sat there looking desolate. She was definitely young, perhaps sixteen, and from this proximity I could tell she was wearing a wig. Her lips were painted a burlesque red and her face was powdered to conceal the pockmarks on her cheek. I wondered if she would be in trouble for failing to get any business from me, and I imagined the waiter at the Italian restaurant beating her in a back alley. Strangely, I imagined her wig flying off her head as the waiter struck her.

I thought about giving her some money, but that would only encourage her situation. Then, immediately, I thought I was being high minded, a privileged Westerner. And that made me angry again, to have been put in this situation involuntarily.

All this time, no one from the restaurant had acknowledged my existence, and I wondered if the young woman's presence was causing a delay. I stood. My head hit a supporting beam of the makuti shelter. I gasped, winced, fell back in my seat, and held my head in my hands.

My forehead throbbed dully. The girl had covered her mouth with her hands, but her eyes betrayed the smile beneath. I thought of yanking the hat off my head, to show her my bandaged wound, but I would only be making more of a fool of myself.

Finally, a woman emerged from the kitchen, carrying a menu. She set it on the table before me and looked uneasily at the girl across from me. They spoke in Swahili, none of which I understood, but I could tell the girl was being interrogated. Their conversation gradually became heated, with the server occasionally pointing at me. Finally, she waved the girl away.

"Enda!" she said, and she watched her until the girl was out of view. 

The woman turned to me indolently and waited wordlessly for me to order. I wanted to tell her I was not the least bit interested in prostitutes, but hers was a stare I would come to know well in Kenya. This was a woman who had had many dealings with foreigners, and not many of them were pleasant ones. I was just another mzungu, in her eyes.

Since the place was completely empty, it suddenly occurred to me that the restaurant might be closed.

"Are you open?"

"Yes."

"Do you have nyama choma?"

"Yes."

"I will have nyama choma with sukuma and ugali, tafadhali."

"To drink?" she said, sliding the menu off my table.

"Tusker."

"Sawa."

I gorged myself on nyama choma and ate the whole platter of roasted goat, along with the sukuma and ugali. My stomach distended, picking gristle from between my teeth with a toothpick, I realized I had handled the situation with the girl very poorly. But I don't know what I could have done differently. I could have been sympathetic to her plight, engaged her in some conversation, but I like to think I acted the way most people would. Several years previous, when a young man accidentally stepped in front of my vehicle, forcing me to slam on the brakes, my first reaction was, "You stupid son of a bitch!" He had not meant to step in front of me, that was apparent from his apologetic expression, but my first reaction was anger. How dare you almost burden me with your death?

If I had not already paid for a second night at Seaview Resorts, I would have left Malindi immediately. Instead, I resolved to leave for Nairobi early the next morning. Nairobi was no paradise, but at least it did not pretend to be, and its utter honesty about itself suddenly attracted me. It was time to return to more arid climes.

(To be continued)