Jam Session

There was a restaurant in Bungoma whose name I have forgotten. The mind finds ways to protect itself.

It sat behind a hardware shop, green door, and had speakers that had clearly been fed better than the customers. On weekdays, it sold chapo and ndengu to men who ate in silence. Then Sunday afternoon would arrive, the selector would walk in carrying a laptop with Virtual Dj like a newborn, and the whole building changed religion.

This was the era of hot grabba. You could smell it from the road that sweet criminal smoke leaking out of the windows like even it wanted to dance. Boys in slim jeans and tall socks. Girls who had done their hair on Saturday specifically for this, not for the Lord. Everyone loyal to one thing only the rewind and the whine.

Now. My mother is a church elder. This detail matters the way a lion detail matters in a story about jogging.

My method was clean, and I was proud of it. Sit through the sermon wearing the face of a boy considering being a Father. Wait for announcements, which at our church were not announcements but a whole television season: harambee for the choir uniforms, harambee for the pastor’s roof, anyone with a wheelbarrow to please see Brother Wekesa after service. Somewhere around episode four, I would rise with the expression of a person going to the toilet, and simply never return.

Tie in the pocket before the gate. Shirt untucked before the road. Bible left with a friend, because a Bible does not survive a jam session. It comes back smelling of things that cannot be explained to your Mother.

Inside, the selector was a prophet with a fader. He would drop Busy Signal and men who owed people money would forget, briefly, that they were in serious debt. Then Konshens. Whine and Kotch. And I tell you, I have never seen a congregation more committed. People who could not stand through one hymn without leaning on a pillar were now going down slowly, coming back up slower, doing it with devotion.

That was the exact posture I was in when the music stopped.

Not a fade. A full stop. The selector had seen something I had not seen.

I straightened the way a man straightens when he hears his full name, all three of them. And there she was. My mother. Sunday Kitenge, handbag held in the crook of her arm like an instrument of state, standing in the doorway of a dancehall den at four in the afternoon, having come, apparently, to buy fish from the shop next door.

Somebody near the door said “Mulembe” to her. Out of pure fear.

She did not shout. That is the part people misunderstand about elders. She looked at me. Then she looked at the speaker. Then she looked back at me and did small mathematics with her eyes.

The girl I had been dancing with reversed out of my life so smoothly she should be studied at university.

Then my mother said, “So hapa ni Choo.”

The walk home was one kilometre and eleven years long.

At the gate she did not report me to my father, which I mistook for mercy. On Wednesday she stood up in fellowship and asked the church to pray for young people being pulled by the world, aiming the words at me with the accuracy of a surveyor.

I repented. I stayed home two entire Sundays.