Questing for shelter in NBO

We are living in an apart-hotel type of arrangement, with a monthly lease but where there is room service and daily turn downs etc. The glamour and novelty of this arrangement is slowly wearing off, and is proportionately related to the increase in efforts towards securing longer term digs in the city.

In our present compound, I am by now of course on first name terms with all the maids and nannies, with whom I exchange surprisingly juicy gossip over loads of laundry, and while playing with S. and the several other children living here. Most recently, our talk has been of a child who fell from his bed and had to have several stitches, and what the parents must be like etc. Another nanny complained about how she had been told off because she forgot to pack her employer's phone charger in his lunch bag (I remain suitably impressed with this detail!)

I am a well-tolerated anomaly among the maids, in that I am male and foreign, but there is also a low-grade sense of pity towards me (unemployed but well-intentioned half-wit, unable to contribute in a meaningful sense to his family). It is in no way unkind, in fact they are very sweet with S. because of it, so I do resent or resist it. On some level, it is very relaxing.

Battle-hardened as I am from the NYC real estate trenches, the Nairobi housing search is not for the faint of heart (or those in their third trimester of prego!). Firstly, the economy in general and the real property market in particular are in a genuine boom here - of the 'bring your cheque book to the open house' variety! Secondly, and more complicated, are the increasingly crass socio-economic and even racial fault lines along which the rental market seems to operate.

Again, using my Indian frame of reference, I am constantly surprised by the number of Europeans who own land and means of production here. The largest land-owner in Kenya is the grandson of a British colonialist (Lord something-or-other). This grandson has been charged with 2 murders of black Kenyans (settled out of court both times), most recently in 2006! Of the 2 houses we've liked most, one was owned by an Austrian, the other an Italian (more on this latter house below). This is simply unthinkable in India, where foreign ownership of real property is highly regulated. I suppose it is none of my business, but I am beginning to empathize a little with Angry Bob Mugabe! Also, I must read about the Kenyan independence movement - I would be grateful for any reccos.

The top of our rental short-list list is a baby 'Out of Africa' kind of house, sitting on an acre behind a coffee plantation in a nabe called Runda. Owned by an Italian guy, brokered by another Italian guy, rent payable quarterly in USD in cash. Dodgy enough? Wait, there's more... The broker, sensing perhaps my rawness, described how the market here viewed people as simply Whites, Blacks and Indians. There seems no room here for nuance or complication. I am an Indian in this paradigm. Indians, he further shared, are 'like the Jews in the US' in that we are 'good business (sic.)' (read "cheap") and tend to circulate our dollars in the community (e.g. an Indian shopkeeper will only work with Indian lawyers, accountants etc.) Also, in the 'security' discussion, he explained that a dog or two is better than any electrical fence, because "Kenyans are afraid of dogs". With my toes tightly curled, I gestured the waiter with what nonchalance I could muster for another drink. How much more of this could I swallow even if we did really like the house? Considerably more, I suppose, because as of this writing we have an offer in at asking.

Having left America, and despite having been a young Muslim man there in the age of its war on common sense, I felt a pang of longing for the deep sense of decency and fairness I had experienced among my socio-economic tribesmen in Brooklyn (beyond that narrow circle, there be dragons, of course).

We find out re: the Italian house mid next week (owner and broker need to confer with partner in Italy - sigh). If positive, I will post photos of the walk-through...

How to be stoic (or not, as the case may be)

Brooklyn's dreaming gargoyles should be a distant dream now, but this was obviously not to be .

Our new Brooklyn tenants were to arrive this weekend, to a seamless handover to be handled by our amazing property manager Kirsten. Instead, on literally the eve of their arrival, there was a flood in the basement (unprecedented in all the time we lived there) which now seems to require mould/de-humidification measures. In addition, a few days before we were to leave, Bibi (our now ex-cat) had contracted fleas - which creatures left the ankles of my mother, S. and myself a raw and bloody mess. We thought we had dealt with this scourge by treating Bibi and deploying several chemical 'bombs' (I put that in quotes so that any overeager member of the intelligence community reading this knows that I am referring exclusively to the boring, Home Depot variety). All this to say, we were wrong, and that our tenants share the attractive ankle trait exhibited by the Hussain family. In short, and in addition to the attendant mortification, they have vacated the premises until the exterminator does the needful. CRINGE CRINGE. The only constant in this equation has been Kirsten, ever patient and pragmatic.

I happened to have packed the book of Seneca's letters into a suitcase, and was reading them poolside as news of these developments reached us. Sadly, I have been unable to apply much of those teachings. Some of this is attributable to my own make-up (neurotic, restless and generally flappable), but some also to the fact that Seneca is in need of a good, hard editing. Also, his life and writings are inherently at odds with one another - spouting humility while amassing wealth, being a career courtesan while banging on about being indifferent to fate. What can a ravenously ambitious slave-owner teach me about handling adversity with dignity? What can Seneca know about the ferocity of fleas?

What next, will they discover an unpublished treatise by the Buddha on how to live a harmonious family life?

No, Seneca has a few nice sound bytes, but Anno put it much better than Seneca ever could, once she and I had discussed and decided the course of corrective action we were going to take re: the Brooklyn house:

"Look, let's just go to the elephant orphanage - the feeding is at 11am, and S. will love it."

Now that is stoicism in action.

NBO - First impressions

Having never set foot in Kenya (or anywhere on the continent south of Morocco and Egypt), I had pegged my personal frame of reference to India just to give myself some sort of orientation. I knew from the get-go that this would be inaccurate, and possibly even misleading.

Having now spent all of 4 days in Nairobi, there are obvious differences with India:

• The climate is absolutely perfect for our species. My brother-in-law Matt had it right when he said that it wasn't an accident that the Rift Valley was our collective birthplace. The near- constant 20C weather makes even a traffic jam seem relatively innocuous.
• The density of population is far less than a comparable Indian city. Again, this makes everything less chaotic, and allows for a much more civil public discourse. People's manners are by-and-large quite formal. The only over-familiar interaction I've had so far was with an Australian man placing his hand on my shoulder (not unfriendly, but still unwelcome) at a lunch bar in a posh hotel - I was apparently blocking his path to the passion fruit key lime pie. Similarly, there is no need for images of holy figures in the corners of public buildings (which can be found in India, to prevent the use of such corners as spitoons).
• The sense of a new city built on a wild landscape remains. In most Indian cities (even towns), the buildings and the neighbourhoods have been in existence for hundreds if not thousands of years, and so the human settlements tend to dominate the eye. In Nairobi, which is only about 100 years old, and despite our best efforts, the default remains the forest, and the velvet cake-red soil on which abound flowers and plants that seem almost like they're showing off. Alongside the highway way out of the airport, right in the financial district, I saw tens of huge white birds, standing erect and motionless on tree-tops in the sodium-light lit darkness.

Ministry of Humility

In the humility department, the name of this blog is now officially misleading - inasmuch as Bibi never made the trip with us. Instead, our next-door neighbours Suki and Barnabus agreed to accept her into their home (amazing neighbours btw!). The logistics of feline importation began to get a little crazy (cat passport, separate flights, consular approval?) and so we thought this would be a more proportionate response. Besides, as my father says, cats are more attached to places than people.

I thought about changing the name of this blog, but decided against it so that I could forever live in the shadow of my arrogance, and because oui4 lacks (in my mind anyway) the same ring.

Breaking orbit with Planet Brooklyn

It's probably fair to say that 30% of a move like this gets done in the last week, regardless of the work done before.

So the last week has been pretty intense.

On move day, the moving company Sea & Air (which had sent a representative out to evaluate the cubic footage of our belongings, and on that basis advised that we go with a 20ft container) reported that there was an overflow of about 350 cubic feet. This would of course be shipped, but a modest and undisclosed surcharge above anything listed in our agreement! Impotent grrrrr!! I had suspected something vague when the owner of the company sounded like Borat, but told myself not to be such a snob. Ah well, sometimes gut feelings, even unkind ones, are to be followed.

The day after move day, Anno noticed that a piece of jewellery was missing. It was my great-grandmother's ring, and had been in a closed jewellery case, in a closed suitcase, in a closed cupboard in our master bedroom. Pretty enterprising. Sea & Air was piss-poor in the empathetic listening (to say nothing of 'actually doing something about it') department. Deep sigh. I called the 71st precint (laughable), but we decided to just focus on getting on the plane without having any more hiccoughs.

And so, with my parents, Nazmin and L. waving from our soon the be ex-stoop, our neighbour Foster drove us to JFK (thanks Foster!). Anno and I were utterly frazzled from the exit, and I'm pleased to report that no vital documentation was misplaced in the various states of disrobing required of modern travel.

Once on the plane, with a fist full of bubbly, I let myself calm down a little. It seemed like we had spent a summer of increasingly granular to-do lists, and that things had finally come to where I could do nothing further.

With S. fast asleep in the seat next to mine, her hair plastered to her forehead, I turned to see Anno (who was sitting a few rows behind due to seating map glitch) resting both her hands on her belly staring vacuously at the screen in front of her.

I caught her eye and raised my glass, as the glassy ocean raced on below us.