🌿🌿 Bitter Herbs

And nothing is exactly what he had been for the first 17 years of his life. Born to an industrial worker father and a seamstress mother in Nakuru, Kenya, making it big in the land of the brave was little more than a psychedelic vision. It was far from the plan, despite his early interest in food. Hinga would sneak into the kitchen to observe his grandmother, Shosh, gracefully preparing meals for their family. His parents were often too busy eking out a living to mind the nitty-gritty of attending to unexpected offspring. Hinga considered himself more Shosh’s child than his parents’, pitiful as the image was.

Shosh sliced and seasoned and sautéed and sieved with such swagger that he often thought the men of the family fools for despising the background effort behind their beloved dishes. He wasn’t supposed to, but he insisted on learning this enchanting art as soon as she let him. Ugali was a natural starting point as it made the most of the budding strength of a pre-pubescent boy. Then Hinga’s grandma guided him into the technique of cooking chapati, whose complexity she had thought would decisively destroy whatever passion he had for food. She had another thing coming.

With the most demanding tasks out of the way and his interest cemented, Hinga transitioned to matoke, rice, and stews. He was in high school now and closer to Shosh than either could’ve envisioned. Her life story was fraught with mystery and intrigue, making Hinga’s success at reading her mental diary something out of a film. The woman everyone regarded as slow and wrinkled was once the talk of the town, hot property with high demands for potential suitors. She was as free as a Serengeti wildebeest, migrating this way and that depending on where her whims led her. Then she met Hinga’s grandpa, Guks, whose one golden incisor shone so bright from across the bar that starless night that Shosh couldn’t help but flutter toward him.

They married when she was 15 and he 20, an apparently usual occurrence in colonial Kenya, as long as you had the papers to prove you both were legal. So Shosh dialed up her charm to add three years to her government age, and the lineage that led to Hinga was guaranteed. Theirs inspired many a fairytale, but Hinga’s mum, Shosh’s only daughter, missed the ride to Disneyland. By the time Hinga was leaving for America, he had endured a revolving door of step-dads and even more step-siblings. This tumultuous upbringing was pocked by new men every so often eager to sheriff their home.

He was happy to play chameleon until a particularly unpleasant one started beating him and his brother and his mum. The younger sibling, Hinga was expected to stay silent as his world caved catastrophically around him. Expectations had a strange way of floating in and out of his awareness at will. Once, when the bully unleashed his alcoholic anger on his mum, Hinga retrieved Shosh’s .45 and emptied it into his head. A calming silence he hadn’t heard in years engulfed him. Or maybe that was the deafening aftermath of the gun’s blasts. His mother was worried about what light the family would be painted in. He was a minor acting in self-defense who got off with community service.