The day that Kenyans will realise that the NIS and the DCI work with the interests of the colonialists, it will be a step closer to revolution.
Unplug.
A week later, I saw her again.
Same road.
Same blue umbrella.
I stopped.
“I thought you stopped coming this way.”
She looked genuinely confused.
“I've never seen you before.”
I laughed awkwardly.
“You told me about your husband.”
Her face changed.
“What did I say?”
“That he died two years ago.”
She stared at me for a few seconds.
Then she quietly said:
“My husband is alive.”
I looked at the umbrella.
She noticed.
“That belonged to his father.”
Then she walked away.
I stood there watching her disappear into the crowd.
That evening, I told my mother about the strange conversation.
She became unusually quiet.
“Describe the woman.”
I did.
Then I described the blue umbrella.
My mother asked me what street I had seen her on.
When I told her, she sat down.
“That was your father's old route to work.”
I smiled.
“So?”
She looked at me.
“Your father had a blue umbrella.”
I already knew that.
What I didn't know was that my father had died twenty-two years ago.
And the woman I had been speaking to was my mother.
She had dementia.
She had forgotten me.
But somehow, she had remembered the road.
Every morning, I passed the same woman walking to work with a blue umbrella.
It wasn't raining.
Not once in the three weeks I'd seen her.
One morning, curiosity got the better of me.
“Why do you always carry an umbrella?”
She smiled.
“My husband used to carry it.”
I looked at the umbrella.
“Used to?”
She nodded.
“He died two years ago.”
I didn't know what to say, so I wished her a good morning and kept walking.
The next day, she wasn't there.
Neither was the umbrella.