It’s a hard thing to see the man you’ve looked up to your whole life scared. It’s even harder to watch him withered and weary. His eyes have lost that vigour, that spark of youth that once lit them up with the sparkle of life, his once sharp and witty conversations now reduced to a stream of sentimental drivel. It’s his voice when he speaks, but not really him, because this time when he talks to you, his words are slugged and his voice is sloshy and that exuberance you remember that gave his laughter a kind of bounce is not there anymore. When you meet his eyes, they are dry and vacant and his visage is a picture of ennui. His hug is a rack of frozen bones and when you hold him within your arms, you feel his heart faintly beating, dup! dup! dup! like the steps of heavy-booted feet far, far away.
One fine evening, on a Friday in 2024, you sign off from work, pack a small bag, and hitch the next bus leaving Nairobi for Kamreri, the tiny village where your placenta was buried—because your father demands that you come. When you two are alone, he tells you a joke because he loves to tell jokes. You know the best thing you can hope for in life? he poses rhetorically, forcing a smile in between. Dying with all your teeth. He bares his white teeth at you and lets out a guffaw. You laugh along if only out of politeness. You’ve always found his jokes funny because he is a funny man and he is your father. And when your father makes a joke, you’ve got to laugh—it’s the law. But this time when he tells you this joke, you don’t laugh, not only because you’ve heard it a hundred times before, but also because he is 62, has diabetes and for the first time, his mortality dawns on you. And you don’t want to consider the death of your father, not even in jest.
THE ALMIGHTY FATHER
When you’re a little boy, you never see your father as anything but invincible. Your father is supposed to be the strongest man who ever lived. He is omniscient, the bravest, the smartest. The only one who can defeat the monsters lurking in the shadows and the savage villains in fairy tales told to children. Certainly, Ogwa Snr Ajoji wuod Onyango KaNyochieng is—was—nothing else in my eyes. My father is a big man, full-blown and hearty, with clever hands adept at making little things and big things—an indefatigable spirit who sometimes, ok most times, doesn’t know when to stop. When he walks into a room, you never know what he’ll say, think, or do—it could be anything. He’s a man gifted with devilish banter and such charming wit; my siblings often joke he could talk his way out of hell.
My father has never seemed ill-dressed even when he is. He has a way of making everything look suave and desirable. An omena (sardine) soup tastes like cow’s piss until you watch my father eat it. A perfume could smell like an embalmed body but when worn by my father, it could as well be a Dolce & Gabbana Homme Intenso. It’s his mind, however, that is perhaps his greatest asset. The way he thinks, the way he sees the world, his ideas, his perception of life have always been peculiar. It was a fact I did not particularly appreciate as a little boy because, as John Steinbeck writes in the novel East of Eden, little boys don’t want their fathers to be different from other men.
My old man has an acute understanding of design, a gift that, unfortunately, none of us—his five kids—inherited. He just knows how things work, how they should be and where they should be, a skill that before his retirement steered him to the echelons of construction. He can spot a crooked wall from a mile away and know when even a single stone is misaligned by a whisk of hair. Once, when I was about twelve and I accompanied him to one of the building sites he was overseeing, he told me the walls spoke to him, that the concrete whispered to him, told him if they were wrongly mixed or too dry or too wet or just not ‘feeling right.’ With his eyes closed, I remember him running his finger along a wall and knowing exactly where the rather imperceptible crook was. And I’m not making any of this up.
For a man so smart, you think he would be better at keeping himself alive and healthier for longer, by, I don’t know, eating less junk. But my father relishes in the sweet and sumptuous and not even a syzygy of stars and a voice from the heavens proclaiming ‘EAT HEALTHY, YOU’RE GENETICALLY PREDISPOSED TO DIABETES’ could ever stop him from reaching across the table for another saucy chicken drumstick Min Jii, my mother, had deliberately placed a kilometre away from him. He just can’t help himself. Ogwa Snr loves life and all the good things that come with it.
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