Death by instalments: The Aida Muturia story

Life as I knew it had started spiralling. A self-destructive path, flirting with suicide. Only this one was happening by instalments. I could feel every ounce of life and every single thing I held on to being taken away from me. 

When mum was breathing her last, I had cordoned myself off from the world and secretly checked into a semi-upmarket hotel in the city. I felt like a pressure cooker whose nozzle was thrusting to pop. 

The deteriorating state of affairs between Saraswati and me had hit fever pitch. I was no longer in touch with Maloy. I had suddenly stopped visiting and sending mum food and spending the days with her. I had taken leave from work for this purpose, but even then, I remember abusing the employment code of conduct by taking unofficial leave days without following protocols. 

Saraswati’s pressure for me to vacate had escalated, thanks to my Dunning-Kruger stunt to dangle the pregnancy carrot as a last ditch attempt to not get kicked out. I saw my whole lifestyle slide down, domino style. I couldn’t imagine life without the luxuries that had become granted in my everyday life.

“How was I going to start again on my own?” 

My job was on the line as a result of disciplinary breaches, and even so, my salary could not afford me the comforts I was accustomed to. I did not have a car, nor could I drive. I was used to being chauffeured around in cabs when I was not with Maloy or Saraswati. I couldn’t have cared less about the bills. The idea of public transportation became a raw reality.

I panicked.

“How would I go from cabs to commuting?”, let alone what my nationwide audience would think seeing me mingling amongst them!

“And what about my heels!”

I graced the country’s TV screens every night, offering the quintessential celebrity image and the lifestyle that came with it. The sheer thought made me cringe. I also had lived with Saraswati in the upscale neighbourhood called Upper Hill. It was the in-vogue of the brand new and hot residential places to live in the city.

Moving from Upper Hill only meant my miserable salary would afford me residential status in the downbeat outskirts of the city. Everything had been done for me, from fancy meals to lavish living. Going out to plush joints and clubs and never contemplating bills was second nature. 

Saraswati saw through my blatant lies. In fact, he was disgusted. The contempt written on his face was enough to scorch the earth to nothing. He couldn’t believe how low a human being could stoop to try to save herself. Of course the pregnancy wasn’t his. It wasn’t even a discussion. 

In a last-ditch attempt to change his mind, I played the last desperate card I had left; I disappeared into this hotel without speaking to anyone of my whereabouts. 

I abandoned mum in hospital. 

I was a ball of anxiety.

I wasn’t thinking straight. 

I binged on alcohol and chain-smoked 24 hours a day, holed up in this room. 

I blacked out when I was too drunk to stay up, and even then, the sleep wouldn’t last more than three hours. I was too stressed out to sleep, my body was exhausted, but my mind wouldn’t shut down. 

At some point I became delirious and somehow called Saraswati, disclosing my location. My last-ditch trick was a pure miss. Nobody had looked for me. Nobody seemed worried. I was screaming to be rescued. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted, drained and my body felt like it was shutting down. I just wanted to get out of this room. 

Saraswati was swift to respond. It didn’t take him 15 minutes to arrive, so I thought something had worked. Ready to reconcile, at last!

“How long have I been away?” I thought I asked.

“What?”

“Never mind!”

“Ten days, or thereabouts.” 

He wasn’t pleasant, nor was he nasty, when he came. He didn’t show any particular emotion, but my perception was hazy from a hangover and a throbbing headache, so how could I tell what he was thinking? He politely gestured that I follow him to the car.  

I obeyed. 

The way the sun hit my face I wanted to crawl under the car seat, yet I could tell we were headed in the direction of the hospital. 

Why aren’t you just taking me home? I asked myself. I could honestly use a nice, long beauty bath, freshen up this smelly body and catch up on some good sleep as I imagined how I would then wake up to his re-evaluated position upon my long absence and reaffirm his undying love, as always, thoughtfully and stylishly in a quiet, posh restaurant reserved for only this. 

The mood in the car was sombre. He didn’t speak a word, but I didn’t have anything to say either. I walked into the lobby and through corridors of the hospital and up the elevators onto the tenth floor like a zombie. 

She lay there, with machines all around her. There was this big tube in particular, almost the diameter of a garden hose, filling up her mouth. Her lungs puffed up and collapsed unnaturally, like a balloon being inflated and deflated on purpose. I didn’t process this immediately, though there were some unusual number of people, even those I normally wouldn’t see come to visit, all around and everywhere, having whispered conversations.

From a distance, mum seemed alive. Asleep. She wasn’t in the ward where I’d left her though, those many days ago. This unit seemed strewn with a great deal of machinery. No one spoke to me, nor offered a chat, so I walked singly towards mum.

“Hmmm... funny.” I thought it was my hangover.

She was no more. No wonder Saraswati had come to fetch me in a huff. 

“She was actually calling for you.” I turned. It was my younger sister Karuna, as if she’d been teleported suddenly to my fast ejecting illusion. 

I remembered the second or third day after mum’s admission to hospital, Saraswati visiting her. She really liked Saraswati, from the minute she’d met him on our first visit upcountry during my brother Kim’s funeral. Mum knew I wasn’t in love with him, but she took to him. She would rant on and on about how he was the best man for me and I’d always ask her if she saw what I saw and she’d tell me I was too shallow.

Saraswati had come home from the hospital visit wearing a rather sinister grin, raving how mum had playfully insinuated to him that he could have Karuna “if Aida isn’t interested”.

Apparently, he had started entertaining that idea more than he cared to admit, but it wasn’t surprising at all to me. I’d seen the special treatment he used to give her, including, but not limited to, wads of cash, so-called pocket money, since she’d started living with us a few months before the smelly stuff hit my fan. 

His ogles and signals weren’t that hard to decode when she was around. I guess mum’s suggestion unleashed his dragon, as if to confirm what he’d already ‘heard’ from God. 

In consequent visits, mum lost her inhibitions as she gushed and rollicked off the topic of selling Karuna to Saraswati. I think she’d secretly harboured this intention for a long time.

I stared at her body, not realising that she wasn’t actually breathing. She was on a life support machine. As she succumbed to years of chronic depression that I had not recognised at the time, I realised I had been inviting death much the same way.

In the rare moments I was home over the years, on a break from the city, I would literally talk her down and downplay her perennial unhappiness, beseeching her to stop crying at every possible trigger and “get a grip on yourself.”

“How can you be so miserable, mum?” I would ask her.  “Is life really that bad?”

I was numb as they rolled her casket down to the ground. I wept uncontrollably. There was such finality to that moment. I had missed her final hours as I was wrapped up in myself and my self-serving indulgences. This haunted me for years, and the weight of it dragged me down into a rabbit hole that became plummetless.  

I was still pregnant when we buried her. Nobody else knew. What I didn’t know at the time was the tremendous toll this was to have on my life going forward, not to mention that it would expose the recklessness with which I had conducted my life prior, and expose it for what it was: a big drama. A drama that was an entanglement of two men, a pregnancy, a profound death, and a job I had sabotaged myself out of after reaching the peak of mental stress, now turned depression that I didn’t acknowledge as depression. 

I just thought I was sad, so I isolated myself from the world. All I’d do was sit in a dark room with curtains drawn, all day and night, drinking and commiserating with my demons. 

I did not realise when I was hungry, and when I did, my intestines would feel like they were feeding off of each other, as if burning from acid. A small bite of bread and, as if by reflex, my ritualistic binge. 

I didn’t shower. I didn’t meet anyone. My seldom but deeply unnerving endeavours to reach out to friends and former colleagues were met with a coldness which I didn’t comprehend. 

Apparently, I had been the talk of the town and everyone knew I had gone crazy, so nobody wanted to associate with me. I couldn’t understand why my own friends had disowned me. 

This whole situation was new to me and all I could do was curl up and isolate. I did not also realise that this went on for months, more than six months, to be precise.  

I remember being kicked out of my house several times, the humble abode on the outskirts of town that I’d reluctantly moved into after succumbing to the pressure to move out of Saraswati’s house and months after we had laid mum to rest. 

I was manhandled by the landlord, kicked out, house locked and I forced to spend nights sleeping at the security zone of the establishment.  

One kind soul who happened to be Sarawati’s best friend, Damaru, came to my rescue eventually. He paid my rent and helped me move into a new place, with him, and somehow we ended up in a relationship, which to be honest, I must have zombie walked through. 

All I remember was his parents and sisters always cautioning and reprimanding him more than I could care to hear, about me. It’s still a blur to this day. 

From a highly successful and privileged life, I was engulfed by a darkness thereafter and for years, that didn’t find expression. With every root of every unprocessed emotion sinking deeper, the narrative about my mum further camouflaged my pain, creating layers of history upon one story.  

“I killed her!”

“If I had been there, she wouldn’t have died!”

“She probably died cursing me!”

I drew the curtains on life. I felt as if I’d died while still alive. Under the weight of it all, the life inside my womb, also succumbed. 

Numbness set in after the funeral. I didn’t cry at all. I didn’t know if it’s that I didn’t have tears or I was in shock. This was not America. We didn’t cajole and psychotherapy here. Verbalising and crying were seen as weak. This was Africa. You sucked it up and you dealt with it! Messages of condolence and comfort were very Jesus-ish, very Bible-ish. So barren! So lifeless! 

‘She fought the good fight, she finished the race, she kept the faith.’

‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.’

Every strand of my being tried to hold on to her but the more I tried the more it became elusive.

Small pockets of memories, even simple ones, were disappearing. I didn’t understand that instead of processing, I was blocking. It became my coping mechanism and that extended to the way I dealt with people, situations and challenges. I carried an external façade of feistiness but in solitude, I was a fierce loner who spent most of her time indoors, drinking, smoking, insentiently glued to the screen.

I felt lonely, depleted, and trapped. It was as if everywhere I turned, I attracted a bad omen. A few months in, a work colleague of mine, Sebuleni, a lady who I hardly interacted with who happened to live a few blocks from me, started throwing teasing remarks here and there, at every random chance she got. 

“You’re such a hermit!” she’d say, “You should get out of the house sometimes!”

She was the crowd-puller kind. Anywhere she was, people got drawn to her. She tried to have me join her and her group of friends who arbitrarily hung out in local pubs most evenings. I had taken on a routine of going home straight from work and stayed indoors all weekend, every weekend.  

I did get back to work. Elsewhere. I had emotionally disconnected from everything and everyone so that it naturally felt as if there was nothing else left for me to do. It had started ever so subtly that I did not realise the monster I had been feeding. I would shut down for weeks — shut out the world, unresponsive to the activities and people around me and with little desire to socialise, engage, or indulge human connection. 

Everything felt hostile, impeding. I don’t recall much of where even my family was during these dark days, and if they reached out, I scarcely recall. My juice for life had dried up, as had my memories. 

Tomorrow in the Daily Nation: I remember, for the first time in my life, contemplating suicide. Not just as a fleeting thought. I Googled obsessively about the quickest way to die. The dying kicks before I’d finally left the home that we’d shared with Saraswati, I had turned into some sort of dark, attention seeking, extortionist vixen. In my desperation not be kicked out, I’d started locking myself in the bathroom for hours on end, seated in the empty bathtub, drinking cheap booze and arbitrarily slashing my wrists. At first I’d thought I wanted to kill myself but even the anaesthetic effect of the alcohol wasn’t enough to propel me to cut deep into the veins. I’d settled for the thrill of the pain of injuring myself continuously, again and again, with a kitchen knife. I would never allow it to heal. But nobody paid attention. Not even empathy. Nobody raised the alarm or sought help. Nothing.