Mundia, Noni and I were the first to arrive at the camp. We were received with the customary hot towel and complementary juice before the concierge showed us to our tents, or rooms as it were. Each one was nestled within its own little garden, surrounded by a thick, green lawn which was sectioned off into several plant beds using decorative lava rocks. Each section featured various herbs, flowering shrubs and ornamental succulents: aloes, agaves, snake plants, cacti — though those may have been naturally occurring — and many more that I could not identify. Nazir probably could. I had seen some of them in his nursery although he mostly grew grasses, palms and foliage plants.
The walkways were paved with mazeras and at each turn there stood a lantern with room numbers and signage to the spa or the dining area or the lake shore. The weather was pleasantly warm on the drive over, although not for me. My armpits were covered in gauze so the heat and sweat was only aggravating. My first priority was to cool off in the shower while Mundia got online to check on bids for his merchandise, or so he said. It didn’t matter, I couldn’t have cared less.
Working on holiday was always contentious for us. Outside of any activities we had scheduled, he would be in the business centre acting like a regional manager for a multinational corporation. A man with important decisions and urgent calls to make. If there was no business centre, he’d hassle the staff to set up a special sitting area near an ethernet wall port just for him, or else walk around, open laptop in hand, in search of a good Wi-Fi spot. It was a fantasy life he liked to play out, like a boy clomping around in his father’s clothes playing office pretend. Except he took himself seriously, and was the only one who was unaware that he looked like a clown.
Sometimes the staff would ask me if my husband had managed to make his important call under the guise of being hospitable, but they were being derisive, I knew. I was embarrassed for him, but doubly embarrassed for myself. How I never once broke and rubbished this act of his is truly a feat of self-restraint. In any case, I eventually realised that these displays were in part, also a way to avoid my bids for connection and the frostiness that followed after he rebuffed me.
He preferred these group get-togethers because friends made for a good buffer between us. As soon as Waita, Nora and their son Jordan, arrived, the boys immediately took off in search of beer while Nora went to Noni’s to introduce the younger boys. Once I had redressed my boils and thrown on a kaftan dress, I went to explore the grounds. There was a swimming pool that I would, regrettably, not be using, stables, a spa and a small jetty with two boats moored to it. The lakeshore was only a short walk from the grounds and well within view of the camp’s elevated dining room.
Lake Elementaita, of course, was the most prominent feature of the landscape, surrounded by a forest of acacia trees that were packed with birds’ nests to the point of drooping. It was not flamingo season, so there was no flamboyance of them, but I could already identify a colony of great white pelicans on my binoculars. On the shore was a pair of black-winged stilts foraging in the shallow water. Further out, I spotted a crested grebe pecking at her plumage with two chicks hitching a ride on her back. Closeby, the shrill calls of grey-hooded gulls rose above the chorus of warblers, robin-chats and greenbuls as they took to flight, after a grazing waterbuck disturbed the flock.
This never gets old, I thought to myself, feeling a prickle of excitement. I took a few pictures and thought to share them with Nazir, but he was on night shift that week and it was far too early to wake him. I contented myself with solitary birdwatching, taking note of the species I could not identify to research on later.
Things had slowed down between us, somewhat. My inaction was making his fear — that he was only a transient escape for me — a reality and I had started to feel guilty. Rotten, actually. Not that he applied any pressure on me to leave; that would’ve been humiliating for him. But he nudged me to do what was best for me and I liked him all the more for it.
Nora and Noni joined me for a stroll along the shore while the boys rode horses, another thing I would not be doing. In the terrace outside the dining area, a chef started the grill and set the first batch of innards on it. Mundia and Waita hang around him, beers in hand, no doubt engaging in some kind of caveman contest. My way, better. No, my way, best. Or some variation of that, anyway.
Meanwhile, Noni palmed off a drink on me despite my protests, insisting that there was barely any alcohol in it.
“It’s mostly orange juice and sugar syrup,” she said. It wasn’t but I yielded to a sip. Far be it from me to be a wet blanket.
“What’s in this? It’s making my face all hot!”
“Okay, there’s some triple sec in there. And a splash of white rum.”
“So it’s a cocktail?”
She giggled triumphantly. I spent the rest of the day fending off drinks and invasive questions, and feigning a stomach bug so that I wouldn’t have to talk about the boils. Then, I worried that I had jinxed myself with the lie so much that I actually developed a stomach ache.
Leilei, Kami and their two daughters arrived late in the afternoon, while Jill joined us just after nightfall. By then, I was already flagging but I managed to hang on until about ten o’clock. The children were in the lit garden playing tag. Everyone else had a few drinks in them at this point. Nora and Mundia were dancing, Kami was locked in a loud debate with Waita about steroids in protein supplements, and I was spectating a very competitive poker game that was down to Jill and Leilei. When no one was looking, I slipped away and went to lay down in my room.
While I was sleeping, the kitchen and bar closed. The women put the children to sleep in their respective tents and the party moved to Jill’s room. There would be no danger of waking the little ones there, but it was close enough to the other rooms that everyone could pop in and check on their kids every now and then.
At around midnight, I woke up to a Rwandan choir song playing on what I thought was the camp’s stereo. Oh-oh, I thought, they’ve let Leilei take over deejaying. I was going to rescue them with one of my many car playlists but when I picked up my phone there was a message from Nazir.
For context, he had begun reading Sufi poetry and literature a week before — yes, I had driven the man to poetry — and whenever he came across passages he thought I might appreciate, he read them to me in voice notes. Sometimes he peppered them with his thoughts and other times he asked questions. I was not as well-read as he was, but there was usually a podcast online that could catch me up in an hour or so. Then we would share our theories and try to flesh them out. That was our equivalent of braiding sweetgrass.
Groggily, I put on my wireless earbuds and listened to the message.
Listen to this:
To love, you must first know yourself as love. Nature itself is a living example of how to love just by being. Take for instance, dung beetles. They eat and nest in dung and by doing so return organic matter to the soil. That’s how they love in their ecosystem.
Earthworms, just by burrowing in the soil, help with aeration, drainage and root growth of plants. Bees, butterflies and birds pollinate while searching for nectar. You have trees purifying the air just by breathing, providing food and habitats for insects, birds, wildlife, microorganisms like lichens and even other plant life like mushrooms, mosses and vines, just by being trees. Even rocks do their part for other lifeforms just by sitting there and being rocks.
And that’s only on land. There’s a whole other section on sea life and fresh water bodies, but it goes on to say:
Most species never take without giving; it’s almost physically impossible to do so. The divine nature of love is revealed in them just for being as they were created to be. That is to say that one cannot love by extinguishing oneself because then it wouldn’t be love, it would be martyrdom. Self-abandonment in the name of love is paradoxical, misguided and unnatural. If love — for oneself and for the other — were truly present, then self-negation would not be. The two cannot co-exist.
That’s from The Path of A Sufi Seeker. Does that make sense to you?
I thought about it for a moment and then replayed the message. I hadn’t heard it all that well over the noise of the party… which was now oddly quiet… I paused the message, took out my earphones and listened. Were they dispersing already? These things usually kept going till at least three in the morning. When I didn’t hear footsteps, I concluded that they were probably just looking for a new playlist and unpaused the message.
Too late, I realised, with shock and horror, that I was actually broadcasting my voice notes over the Bluetooth speaker in Jill’s room.
