I made friends with Kilonzo, or maybe it was the other way around.

“Haashok we are brathas,…” he said, reassuring me with an engaging smile, flashing his blindingly crooked teeth from time-to-time, “…hI will definitely find haa house”. He was a devout rascal of sorts, always whispering a prayer before meals, but quietly pocketing the after-meal baksheesh left for the waiter.

The house search is brutal. Kilonzo calls up estate agents, and then the landlords, and then turns them against each other;
soon after, demands a cut from both of them;
finally, tells me that I need to pay a fee to both the estate agent and to him.
But in no time, he turns up a house I can’t refuse.
It’s a beautiful house not far from the president’s statehouse, and my bedroom window opens onto a majestic silver-oak. There’s a small garden with trees, all of which are neatly labeled with sign boards (“jacaranda”,“wild fig ” ).

Kilonzo turned up two weeks later to collect his “consulting” commission.
He was still dressed in the same jacket and pajama pants which always looked a bit worn but were well kept. I thanked him for his help, and he immediately invited me home for a meal “…bratha to bratha…”
We left amid the sound of wailing sirens, which marked either the arrival of the president at his residence, or a riot by the nearby university students.

Kilonzo lives in Githurai.
Ronald the South African videographer had gone there last week. Went to shoot a documentary on urban youth gangs; returned missing his video camera equipment, a couple of teeth, and almost a little finger.
“If you go there in a Toyota, you’ll come back in an ambulance” he had told me over a soothing beer.

Problem is, I am here now, and I am in a Toyota.
I drive through the press of humanity, and the boiling traffic, dodging the gashed and battered mini-buses. One arm gripping the steering wheel and the other the buffalo-bone charm around my neck (a gift from Haroun the one-legged taxi driver from Mombasa: “it will protect you from jinis and bad luck…it worked for me!”).

Shimmering in the afternoon sun lay a ghetto-like neighborhood with slummy multi-storied tenements sprouting dendrons of television antennas and illegal power cables. I made note of a sign that said: “muganga kutoka mombasa – dawa za ukimwi!” – ‘witchdoctor from mombasa – medicine for AIDS!’
Every other shop sold paint or hardware or corn cobs. There was a lingering smell of live bait and burning rubber. In the midday heat, a woman fried tilapia fish in dark colloidal mafuta. I saw eleven goats gathered under the meager shade offered by a lone acacia tree.

We drove further in.
Kilonzo lived in a mini skyscraper which had grown up in the middle of a small maize & sukuma (spinach) plantation. It was a comical looking building like a tower of matchboxes stacked up on the narrow end. The whole structure was painted yellow and blue and served as a giant advertising sign for ‘Trust’ condoms. “Maisha iko sawa na Trust” – life is fine with trust. We climbed the steep staircase, so narrow, on the turnings I had to step sideways.
The apartment was tiny, and the single window in the bed-sitter, overlooked a traffic roundabout landscaped with barbed wire and entangled plastic bags. I liked the strangeness of entering his house, and sitting on the rough wooden chair; it felt safe and insulated from the dust and the skirmishes of the outside world going on down below.

The food was served immediately, steaming hot, prepared on a charcoal stove in a corner of the room by Kilonzo’s seemingly underage wife. She was training to become a nurse, and hoped eventually to work in England – where there was a shortage of trained nurses. We ate in silence, out of the plastic plates, enormous helpings of fresh wholegrain ugali and goat stew. His wife was cheerful but spoke little, preferring instead to let Kilonzo speak for her.
One of the many radio stations of Nairobi ran a weekly call-in show -- women called in on the weekend and presented themselves, and the DJ tried setting them up with other male callers. Speaking to Kilonzo’s wife, I was reminded of one of the callers, a woman who had described herself as “demure and submissive”. It didn’t necessarily mean she was weak, but simply compliant to the precepts of the day.

Evening came upon us. The walls seemed smaller now, the shadows crept visibly among the cracks and the peeling paint. And in the slanted rays of twilight the bars on the window looked dark and oppressing. I longed for the noise and comfort of the street below.
I bewildered out into an extravagant sunset, the sky turning from crimson to copper through the haze of swirling dust devils. And drove home, leaving the flickering oil lamps and naked light bulbs by the wayside to cast fading sunsets of their own.