A Missing Finger

A story about the elusive nature of perfection by Kenyan Abenea Ndago

“Look.”

“Yes?” I asked.

She continued, “My leave ends five days from today.”

“Ah, are you sure?”

“See, you forgot again!” She turned. “I’d be surprised if the whole estate didn’t know about your warthog forgetfulness just as it does Neighbour Otwori’s penchant for gossip.”

She was right. The curious aroma of a maternal hospital still lingered about her.

I confessed, “I’m sorry.”

Then it dawned on me that the subdued posho mill of time had ground three months of leave into ash. I wondered what we would do now that the baby needed a helper in our absence.

I turned and asked, just to fight off my parental guilt:

“That’s next week?”

“Precisely,” she confirmed. “And Auntie hasn’t found us a house help.”

She was adjusting the baby onto her breasts.

“I will call Mama in the village,” I suggested. “Mama knows many village girls who would be willing to come to the city and help us.”

Baby Nyathi choked on the milk she had been harvesting from the fertile farm on her mother’s breast. She coughed.

Her mother pleaded, “You better do, then.”

The next several days I was bothering Mama over the phone till she could not rest. We wanted a house help sooner than immediately. Mama burst out at me saying I was biting and gnawing at her old life the way I had bitten her breasts when I was a little baby. Mama said tongue-in-cheek that she now hated me. But she loved Mama Nyathi: my wife had given her a beautiful granddaughter whom Mama planned to travel from the village to come see with her two old eyes, with live chicken and millet flour in an old basket for porridge.

The first to arrive was the remarkably big-headed Uma. She came thin, small, and very dark. Her hair was scalp-short. Uma said she loved babies and would have done as best she could to make Baby Nyathi comfortable whenever I and its mother were out of the house working. We were overjoyed.

The best consolation for us was not even that Uma had run away from her husband who had been pounding her like in-the-mortar millet grains in faraway Alendu, and that she would hence be patient with us, for fear of the humbling stigma pasted on women who had deserted their marriages in Kano. Our well of happiness was that Mama knew Uma’s parents back in the village. So Uma would think twice before doing mischief with Baby Nyathi — she could not stand on our baby’s chest the way we had watched a Ugandan house help do on TV as the small baby cried and vomited all the milk it had drunk.

Baby Nyathi loved Uma to the point of making my wife jealous.

“Come here to me, my beautiful daughter,” her mother would say after bathing Nyathi at night and we were resting the food we had eaten. “This Uma whom you love so much doesn’t even know how to give birth to a baby — leave alone one of my daughter’s level of beauty.”

The house help would interject, laughing, “Of course I do.”

“Where, where? Who has seen?”

“Mama Nyathi. Don’t forget that I have three live children staying with my mother in the village.”

“That’s possible, but have I seen any of them?”

And both would pierce each other with arrow-words that way, till late in the night when Uma’s big black head was dancing back-front, left-right, because its owner wanted to sleep.

But Uma was untidy. Her work was dirty too. Laundry was imperfect — it seemed as if ghosts creased the clothes she had ironed. My pairs of trousers acquired three woolly lines where there should have been a sharp straight one. Cooking was a tragedy. Mama Nyathi would rise early and do the floor before she could leave for work.

After only weeks we told Uma how she had become soft-skinned. She fought the clever view, saying only a woman in her own house could have the peaceful spiritual contentment necessary for a soft skin. We knew why Uma rejected the compliment — it would have implied she had been suffering wherever she had been before, be it at her matrimonial house in Alendu, or in her father’s homestead back in the village.

Before we could both say rat is running away from snake Uma was keeping long hair and shampooing it. She hummed sacred songs. Said she knew Jesus who saved her.

The first time the house help sought permission to attend a church vigil on the other side of the estate Uma returned happy the following morning. She began looking wasted and drowsy.

Neighbour Otwori crossed the church compound at dawn and said he had seen the church door secured with two padlocks. No one was observing any vigils. The second time he did, Otwori said he had barely looked when he heard the sound of a long kiss whistling near a broken wall. Uma’s lips were pulling away from the marathon mouth of a man whose rugged beard was begging God to please double the number of hours contained in one night. Uma hid her face and ran away thinking Otwori had not seen her.

That’s exactly what Uma did. The last morning she returned from those vigils, she asked Mama Nyathi to let her take her bundle of belongings from under the bed.

“Bye,” Uma was telling us. To our baby she said “Good beautiful baby” and touched Nyathi’s cheeks. We both knew Uma was going to lengthen the nights by living in the man’s house. Not even Neighbour Otwori could stop that…

Baby Nyathi was now big. She had stopped identifying her mother by the smell of milk. Lisi came next. Strangely, our second house help had no thumb on her left hand — which, I thought, was curiously odd. Her four fingers were just as odd as the growth of a sixth finger on the human hand. I had always wondered why, when the two numbers — six and four — were perfectly even.

Lisi arrived gaunt in spite of her babyish face. That face belied her voice. It boomed way too thick for a girl’s. This made us fear that the house help could terrosise our baby.

We gave Lisi the benefit of the doubt. She was way cleaner than Uma. However her best talent, I think, was cleaning the kitchen with her tongue. The refrigerator was a lion eating grass. It was often as loudly hungry as Lisi’s stomach was eternally full and her jaws working. Mama Nyathi joked that death had warned Lisi it would take her the day it found Lisi’s stomach empty and her jaws silent.

In no time, our own house help was bigger than both of us. We even forgot about her missing left thumb. She was big, puffed up like a matriarch elephant. Her stomach was a hill in front of her. Lisi’s cheeks bulged. Her face contained a man’s forehead with hills and valleys.

“Seems my baby eats too many eggs these days,” my wife said one evening after we returned from work. “We can’t keep a crate of eggs in the fridge for two days.”

I giggled at the pointed statement.

“Nyathi love egg,” Lisi said.

“Are you sure, Lisi?”

“Eeh, eeh¹, Mama Nyathi,” the house help repeated. “Baby really love egg.”

“A crate in two days?”

“Baby eat — I donts say lie. Or you thinks it now me that eat egg?”

Our ears caught the rudeness in Lisi’s tone more than her bad grammar.

My wife looked at Baby Nyathi and said, “Oh my little baby, you have the stomach of a liech².”

Until we suddenly returned from work shortly before lunch the following midday and found the baby crying to death in her bedroom cot as her caretaker, clothed in glittering sweat at the dining table, attacked, munched, and python-swallowed a pan-sized pizza of fat yellow eggs trapped in meat and oil raided from the fridge. We told her “Bye” as calmly as Uma had told us those months…

Yuni came from the village with dark blotches on her body. Of all the three house helps, she was the cleanest, the best cook, and the best care-giver. She could not eat if the baby had not. If the baby was sick, Yuni was crying. She was ready to lie on the road and be run over by a tractor if the machine was going to kill Nyathi. So fond was she of our daughter that, when Nyathi was fairly big, she spent in Yuni’s bed without any coaxing.

Our last house help began to cough. She became small. The hair thinned pale-brown and fluffy. Her small, weak breast shook the house every time she coughed. Eyes reddened. Her lips dried. Nostrils clogged with eternal flu. Neighbour Otwori swore it was the disease.

We heard from the village that Yuni’s husband of the past decade had been harvested by the disease. We loved her — and she loved us and the baby. But we could not continue being with her. And so we tripled her salary and gave it to her in a lump sum.

When the three of us stood at the country bus station in Nairobi the next morning, I was carrying Nyathi in my arms.

“Bye,” Yuni told us.

We gave her our hands, “Travel well, Yuni.”

“And when will I see you?” she asked Mama Nyathi, still holding her hand.

My wife said, “I come home to Homa Bay the week after next, Yuni.”

Tears welled our house help’s eyes. Mama Nyathi calmed her down. Yuni turned, bid the baby farewell, and began mounting the steps.

Just then my eyes turned to the baby I carried. It looked sadly at her departing care-giver. Maybe Nyathi knew — as I always did — that Man rarely ever gets everything Man desires.

1. Eeh: yes

2. Liech: elephant

Abenea Ndago is Kenyan writer. An Associate Editor at africanwriter.com, he has a novel forthcoming in 2017. He is an essayist, short fiction writer, social critic, and he also teaches Literature at Kenyatta University.