The train to Suswa leaves Ngong at 929AM and gets to Suswa at 1055 AM which is to say it gets there at a canter, which is to say it gets there and we don’t know what to do or what to do with ourselves. We is H— and I.
We are here to lament the bygone era of leisurely travel. In the train, some uppity young Turks were playing ‘Mashaolin,’ an Arbantone song, and a bland simulacrum of the SinoKenyan relations. Poetic. At the Ngong Station entrance they asked us to scan our tickets to enter, and at the Suswa exit to scan the tickets to leave, which pissed off some catty heads. An old man was muttering to himself, saying fuck this, fuck that. Someone shouted, “New Singapore!” and we all laughed.
In the train, I peeked at the outside world and there was a vista of nothing. All that existed was a wide open space, a prairie, bordered by more prairie. I was bored, so much to look at, but nothing to see. Depression, it occurred to me, was the absence of boredom, the waste product of choice. I declared boredom was the reason people do what they do: why they join TikTok, why they book trains to Suswa, why they become someone’s someone else. Boredom.
Opposite me, sat a woman in a tumbo-cut and a skin of Denim jorts, a girl on the verge, confident in not caring. She was sipping something, her puffy eyes hidden behind thick sunglasses, the flaps of her stomach folding into Swiss rolls. She looked like someone who you should take home and do beautiful things to. In theory, that was. Tangentially. She was up for whatever.
I’ve loved trains since young, why no one can tell. Like some phantom longing to set some undefined thing straight. I imagine myself, a character in the Orient Express or the Lunatic Express, where I would die from Malaria, or exhaustion from the Mhindi underboss or eaten up by the Tsavo Man Eater lions, which—don’t look this up—preferred eating men only. The clue is in the name.
A woman with a Ghana Must Go bag galloped in, her mouth twirled in a pinprick of disillusionment, or disappointment, maybe both, a tow of three, five kids behind her, faces snarling with different levels of menace. Train was full like this; every bloke with legs was there.
The train jerked and we crawled forward. The LED screen above us announced things: how fast we were going (110km/h), the temperature (24°C), the time 10-something-AM and where we are. Suswa births itself in a jolt, an African savannah that made Dr Livingstone famous, and Toto millionaires. Dusty and green, talk about duality. How the town survives (with no mall!) is a mystery, like parasites feeding on the corpse of British decline.
We take pictures of everything, buy a souvenir or two, to always remember where we were when. Boda guys swarm over us like houseflies, selling us what they have been told to sell us: a trip to Mai Mahiu (1500 wawili, 1200 mmoja), or to Meat Village or to Mara Village, one of the three places they recommend to any overeager Instagram travellers. But then again, are we not Instagram travellers? Ah fuck it. We pay 200 bob and are streamed to Mara Village, whose selling point was a swimming pool that smelled of chlorine and something else that was meant to be killed by chlorine.
Tobiko, our boda guy walks us to this ‘hidden gem’ to eat meat—what else?
“We iko na mwanamke,” he says, an edge of steel to his words, his mouth in the general direction of me, “ama unataka jangili?”
Jangili? We say.
Jangili, he says.
Jangili is an unclaimed woman. Or man, if that’s your sort of thing. He tells us about his father’s seven wives; he himself is onto his second wife, but what he really loves are his cows, “Kama Mia moja hivi.” 100 cows. He is going to buy more, by the way. Already, those cows meant more to him than any woman did, or could.
He shows us how to cut meat, while that other one eye swam luxuriantly, weighing us as one would weigh a kettle of fish. He wants to know who we are. He wants to know who we are to each other. And I tell him, “Needing to know is what got us banished from the Garden of Eden.”
But just in case, Jangili ni ngapi?
