Nairobi Noir by Peter Kimani

Author:Peter Kimani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

HAVE ANOTHER ROTI

by Rasna Warah

Parklands

Anamika was nervous as she drove into the 1960s art deco bungalow, on 6th Avenue in Parklands, that Dr. Shirin Manji had converted into an office. The entrance was through the type of verandah that Anamika, and probably the psychiatrist herself, played in as a child, with its terrazzo floor and quaint pillars that seemed to evoke a misplaced grandeur.

The office was sparse but cozy. There were no pictures of family on Dr. Manji’s desk. Anamika noticed that she did not wear a wedding band and suspected she was single.

Dr. Manji had the kind and concerned face of a doting aunt. Droopy brown eyes with a twinkle of mischief framed by wavy hair that had a tinge of whiteness emerging in a shapeless fringe that covered her forehead. She was slightly overweight but pleasant-looking. She had been recommended to Anamika for the sole reason that she was Asian. She didn’t look much older than her patient; if they had met under different circumstances they might have even been friends.

“Why are you here?” asked Dr. Manji as Anamika settled into the beige velvet sofa that smelled slightly of mildew.

“I don’t know,” Anamika shrugged. “I don’t want to be here, to be honest. I find talking to psychiatrists a waste of time and money. I am only doing this because my employer is paying for it.”

If Dr. Manji was taken aback by her client’s candor, she did not show it. The doctor at UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency where Anamika worked, had suggested that she might be having a nervous breakdown after colleagues found her crouched under a sink in the office bathroom. The kindly Canadian medic from Toronto who had left a thriving practice to help out the world’s refugees—but who ended up treating highly paid self-indulgent UN staffers—gave Anamika a couple of tranquilizers and names of psychiatrists and psychotherapists in Nairobi who he believed could help her.

Anamika had initially resisted the idea but eventually relented when her childhood friend Winnie suggested she give a woman psychiatrist named Dr. Manji a try. “Only an Asian woman can truly understand another,” she had advised. Anamika wasn’t sure. When two people are too much alike, they can’t help each other—because they know the sins of their tribe too well, and are adept at hiding them, not just from themselves, but from each other too.

Besides, she found the whole concept of talking to a complete stranger about intimate details of her life to be unnatural and unnecessary. Psychiatrists coax patients to remember things they have carefully stowed away and forgotten. Why exhume that which is already buried?

* * *

Excavating memories can be a delicate and risky maneuver. Quite often the temptation is to bury the memories in the hope that the pain they cause will go away. Anamika had managed to bury these memories for most of her adult life. Then, shortly after Raage’s death, the memories resurfaced like a tsunami, particularly when she was drinking, which was pretty much every day.

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