Lucky Girl: A Novel

Chapter One

Every morning throughout my childhood, at five forty-­five a.m., Mother knocked on my bedroom door. I climbed off my bed, knelt, and kissed the floor. "Serviam. I will serve."

Still kneeling, I made the sign of the cross-­Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-­then started on the rosary, repeating the sequence of the Apostles' Creed: one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, one Glory Be-­altogether five times.

I kept my morning showers short. Mother said many other Ken­yans had no water to drink and most bathed with ice-­cold water. While I scrubbed my feet with the pumice, I prayed for the Holy Father's monthly intentions-­one month for the church's deacons to be good servants, another month for the refugees, the next month for world peace, for the sick and suffering-­all year round.

Mother wanted me to do those things.

Everyone in our neighborhood knew Mother for her devotion to the Catholic faith. But she was not one of those Catholics who only had doings with other Catholics; Mother was like the old-­day missionaries. She visited people in need, like the Abdullahs, the Somali family with seven children who rented a cottage at the back of a wealthy family's mansion down the street. Mother brought them baskets of hot buns covered with a white napkin.

"Those poor children are always so hungry; no sooner am I at their front door than all the bread is flying out of the basket," she sympathized. "The landlord's children have more than they can eat, but he won't give Mr. Abdullah even a cup of beans to feed his children."

She smiled with the Shahs, a Hindu surgeon and his plump wife who dressed in exquisite saris. When the Shah daughters brought payasam to share with us over Diwali, Mother received it graciously. When Mrs. Shah asked if the five-­day lighting of fireworks was a nuisance, Mother said, "Nuisance? What nuisance? Anything for your gods!"

Mother kept me indoors. "There is too much evil out there," she said. I longed for a sibling, someone to play with. I read books, practiced piano. I sat by the window of the study where I could watch the children from the neighborhood. Sometimes, they played a game of rounders, dozens of kids swarming around the players' circle as if they were bees around a broken hive. Sometimes they raced on their bicycles, flying over pebbles and potholes. I saw that they stayed outside until the shadows of the jacaranda trees in our neighborhood disappeared.

I loved the escape of nursery school, all the hours I spent under the shade of the purple flowers of the grand jacaranda trees on the playground. I loved Princess, our housemaid, who raised me since I could remember. She hugged me often, and told me she loved me. She was always at the school gate waiting to scoop me up with arms wide open. She wore a head wrap and kanga and hummed as we strolled beneath the canopy of jacaranda trees that lined our street, and all the gardeners in the neighborhood followed her with their eyes as she walked by. Trailing three steps behind in my checked uniform, I wished I did not have to go home, that I lived at school, where I could play endlessly and without fear.

I didn't understand it, but I feared Mother. My father died on my fifth birthday. My vague memory of that was a stain I couldn't bleach out. Mother's stiffness with me made my fear even harder to understand. My aunts told me that before my father's death, Mother took me everywhere with her, like a trophy, singing to me while she planted her roses in the back garden, doting on me. After his death, she turned distant. She took on the life of a stern businesswoman.

My father owned a successful biscuit mill that he had grown from a storefront bakery to a household brand sold in supermarkets. After his death, Mother ran the business. She worked furiously, perhaps out of grief or the fear of failure. She sat on the board with men who had answered to my father, and she commanded their respect ruthlessly. By the time I was ten, she'd quadrupled the business's value, sold it, and invested in real estate and hundreds of acres of land for commercial farming used for coffee and roses. She was a millionaire many times over and for every extra shilling she made, her determination to mold me into a good, humble Christian girl increased. She had to be stern.

Every lesson she taught me growing up tied back to modesty. Though we had domestic workers, as did most middle- and upper-­class Kenyans, Mother insisted I contribute to the household. Cooking, tending to her vegetable patch, and polishing the bumpers of her bright yellow Peugeot until I saw my brown eyes reflected back.

Mother had Musau, her beloved gardener, build a small poultry farm for eighty chicke...