To the Father on the Bicycle
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I wish you knew how wonderful it was seeing you every other morning through foggy glasses and cold-stung eyes, passing each other on our bicycles along Camino de la Laguna, each of us on our way to work.
Sometimes you had your son with you, swathed in the warmest clothes, your left hand wrapped around his little body, his head rested against your chest as he stood on the cross bar of your rusty green bicycle. The two of you were Madonna and Child, your binnies forming radiant halos. As you rode past, you’d raise your hand off the handle bar and nod, and I would always shout “Rasta!” through my mask because, as embarrassing as the memory is now, it is what felt natural to say to someone who looked like me and whose hair, dreadlocked and tied at the back, looked like mine. Our encounters warmed even the coldest mornings in Cajicá.
The first time I saw you, I was thinking about memory. I had just come from El Pastelito, the tienda at the park next to the church, where I usually got empanadas for breakfast. I was doing my Saturday morning errands having passed by the Dollar City next to the park to buy snacks, and at the cigarrería next to the police station for gin and cigarettes. I knew nobody in this small town, and being in the tienda made me feel less alone. The first person I began to talk to regularly was the old man who sold me the empanadas, warming them for me each time. Whenever he laughed, he would throw his head back, and watching him felt like the days we would visit my grandmother in Bahati, an estate in Nairobi, where we’d spend Sunday afternoons, my parents and I, cramped up between shelves of flour and sugar and sweets in my grandmother’s little shop. I wanted to ask him about the countless toys and trinkets that hang from the ceiling of his shop: dolls, fire trucks, maracas, crochet bags, coloured lanterns, baskets, pots, radios, vinyl records. However, feeling that my Spanish was not strong enough to sustain the conversation I imagined we’d have, I never did. Instead, I assumed they were souvenirs from all the places he had been.
This is what I was thinking about as I left the tienda and walked across the park, the glorious golden-domed church, Iglesia Inmaculada Concepción, with its magnificent red doors behind me, past the statue of Enrique Cavalier, and the water fountains painting crystals beside me. I thought of the memories I had collected. What would a monument to the experiences I had had and places I had been to look like?
When I got to Calle Principal, I stopped for the lights and that’s when you appeared. You were on your bicycle, carrying a bag of buñuelos, or pan blandito, or whatever, riding from somewhere towards somewhere. And then you were gone. As I crossed the street towards my house, I wondered if a person could be a monument to memory, like the toys in El Pastelito, something or someone to remind one of the places that had embraced them.
*
I arrived in Colombia from Kenya in March 2017. I had come as part of a government program that brought in English speakers to work with Colombian high school English teachers. After a week of orientation in a cold and miserable Bogotá, I went to Cali, a city 458 kilometres west of the capital, where I would spend the next nine months. The school I was posted at was in Los Chorros, a neighbourhood to the south west of the city. On the eve of my first day, my colleague, a wonderful caleña teacher called Alejandra, offered to pick me up from the place we were staying and drive me along the bus route. “It will make it easier for you when you report to school,” she said. She didn’t have to do this but she did. An unforgettable act of kindness. This would be my first tour of the city, a lesson in how to survive here.
When we got to Los Chorros, a hilly neighbourhood decked with cascading red brick structures, banana plants, and thick shrubs, she pointed at the bus stop off Calle 70 where I would get off the A71. As we drove towards the school, about a minute walk from the stop, she said, “And here is the school.” There was a note of triumph in her voice, and then it changed, becoming something serious. “You must never walk past the school. Never.”
Even though I was only there for a few months, there are many things I loved about the city: the nights out in dingy salsatecas like MalaMaña where I would turn into a sweaty mess dancing to Grupo Niche and Celia Cruz with faceless strangers; visits to La Unión De Vivienda Popular where I’d share meals from home with Kenyan priests—ugali, chapati, and pilau; random encounters that filled me with joy, like the time I was waiting for Father Mwangi to get something from a tienda and a man standing across the street saw me smoking a cigarette and shouted “Caramelo, tienes candela?”; teaching kids who looked like me, who had made a life in a neighbourhood deemed too dangerous to visit, who reminded me, everyday, of where I came from. Cali was Black, and I loved it.
But Cali also had its unpleasant parts, like the “nice” Colombian lady that once lived in Miami who struck up a conversation with me on the bus and, after asking me where I was from and what languages I spoke, said, “Here you have to speak English, otherwise people will think you are a bad person.” Or that time when, in the D1 supermarket in San Fernando, my Kenyan friend Wambui and I, having walked through the aisles picking the things we needed and then, having paid, got stopped at the door to show the contents of our bags. Cali was also the pain that came after my partner called me one day to say that what we had had for the last four years was over, this pain made worse by the immense beauty that surrounded me everyday: the lush green grass where we sat at the park in San Antonio hiding bottles of Pokerón from the police officers on patrol, looking at the city, a galaxy of lights beneath us, or the bougainvillea spilling over into the street in Bulevar del Río, or salsa music mixing with the air we breathed everywhere we went—made impossible by heartbreak.
*
“I thought of the memories I had collected. What would a monument to the experiences I had had and places I had been to look like?”
Nine months later, after the fellowship had ended, I moved to Cajicá. Cajicá was unlike Cali in many ways. Instead of salsa, vallenato filled the air. “All vallenato songs are sad,” my colleague Alejandra once told me, “The only happy vallenato song is the Happy Birthday song.” The genre offered the perfect soundtrack to my life there. I had started teaching at a new school in 2018, a fancier school than the public one in Los Chorros. There was only one other Black teacher, Jesús, a bald stocky man with the warmest face who one day found me listening to a Pimsleur language program, repeating what the man in the computer said, and told me, in Spanish, not to embarrass our people. I had only spotted a few Black people in town. The only one I saw regularly worked in the kitchen at Yong Fu where I bought fried rice when I was too lazy or sad to cook. Many times I would try and wave, but she was always too busy to notice me.
A few weeks after I saw you on your bicycle for the first time I told my therapist how alone I felt in this town. She smiled and said, “You are not the only Black person in Cajicá.” I listened to her as she spoke, and wondered if she would ever know what it meant to be a stranger in the village, to walk through life not belonging, knowing that you are both seen and unseen in equal measure. As she continued speaking, I thought of you. I saw you moving, fast, towards somewhere else, and I thought of us, the places we had left, the ones we had arrived at, and the ones we were moving towards.
For a long time you were like a ghost. But I knew you were real the day I was in the D1 in Cajicá centro, passing items from the shopping cart to the till. The cashier, a young woman in her mid-20s kept looking at me as she passed the salchichas and queso doble crema past the scanner. We both had masks on and as a teacher teaching in a pandemic, I had learned to listen to my students’ eyes: their questions, doubts, moments of boredom and enjoyment, their needs. I studied the confusion in her eyes and my mask moved up. A smile. “Dime,” I said.
“I thought you were taller,” she said. I asked her if we had met before and she told me that she had seen me a few times on my bike, sometimes with my son. The smile stayed as I told her that it was not me but my friend. My friend—a lie. But it didn’t feel like a lie. Afterall, she saw you and saw me. To her, we were the same person, and isn’t that what it means to look like us in this world?
Still, even for me, looking at you felt like looking into a mirror.
*
“I saw you moving, fast, towards somewhere else, and I thought of us, the places we had left, the ones we had arrived at, and the ones we were moving towards.”
I don’t think our meeting would have been as significant had we met in Cali. It is not because you are unremarkable, but because meeting you along Camino de la Laguna felt like dancing salsa in MalaMaña. It felt like smoking a cigarette on La Quinta as another Black person called me “caramelo.” Everytime I greeted you—“Rasta!”—it felt like hanging out with my Kenyan friends in La Unión De Vivienda Popular, like you were the only person in Cajicá who understood the languages I spoke beyond Spanish. As brief as the encounters were, they were a necessary punctuation to an unceasing longing.
I often thought of what it would have been like if we were friends. It would have been nice to sit at the tienda close to my house and drink Poker as we listened to vallenato and watched the sun sink behind La Cumbre, talking about how we had things in common across continents, like música rastrillo, the Colombian name given to benga music from Kenya and Tanzania, and how East African artists like D.O. Misiani are revered in Cartagena. You would probably have laughed at my accent the way my old colleague Jesús did. Or maybe we would have walked through centro looking for ingredients to make sancocho de pescado, walked into D1 just to see the look on the cashier’s face who thought we were the same person. It would have been a magical thing, to live all the years I did in Cajicá knowing you were my friend.
When I came back to Nairobi, I thought of you often. I saw your face on the man cycling home towards the sunset after work, on the man next to the crocodile farm close to my house who knows everything about the plants he grows, on the man walking from the ocean with fish dangling off the line in his hand. I imagined you would have loved to be here. I would have loved to take you to the towns along the Kenyan coast—Diani and Kilifi and Malindi and Lamu, just so that you could see the ocean and feel like you were in Chocó or Buenaventura or Cartagena or Barranquilla.
I worry sometimes that I projected my longing onto you, that maybe you were happy in Cajicá, that you had found a place to raise your son, a place to call home, that Cajicá was to you what it could never be to me. Perhaps this is true, but seeing you on your bicycle on those cold mornings gave me the strength to keep moving.
About the Author
Ras Mengesha is a writer, zinemaker, and teacher based in Kilifi, Kenya.
Read Ras’ “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Carey Baraka.
Header photo by Cassidy Dickens.
