Tabby Munyoki | The Green Paper Bag

I was eight years old.

My formative years were drawing their last breaths, though I did not know that then. In twenty-four months, I would be “a big girl.” That is what adults said when they wanted to hurry you toward something unnamed.

My mother liked to say I was too thin — that a strong wind might one day blow me away. She said it with half-threat, half-laughter, usually while sliding ugali onto my plate, pressing sukuma wiki beside it with the back of a spoon.

“Eat,” she would insist. “Or you will disappear.”

Many years later, the story would return with a chuckle. Especially when my firstborn spent her entire first year clamping her lips shut, refusing anything edible as though nourishment were a conspiracy.

“Karma,” my mother would say.

Our landlord, Susu Kendi, woke before the sun and before God, I suspect. At sixty, she moved like someone with unfinished business. She kept ducks in a wooden structure by the gate. Every morning she fed them; scattering leftover vegetables like a priest performing a ritual.

The male duck hated us. Every morning the male duck would charge, wings flapping and neck extended.

My siblings and I would burst from the house in navy-blue sweaters and scuffed Bata shoes, and every morning he charged as if defending his ancestral land. We ran screaming down the dirt path, half terrified, half thrilled.

That was our first lesson in survival: run fast, don’t look back in a bid to protect your ankles.

We ran for our lives down the narrow path, half screaming, and half laughing. An adrenaline shot before arithmetic.

There were whispers in the neighborhood that Susu Kendi had poisoned her husband to inherit the building. In my innocence, I once asked her whether it was true.

She chased me around the compound and threatened to pull out my teeth.

After that, I kept my curiosity to myself.

School began at seven.

My father insisted we attend the “best” school in the area, though it required a thirty-minute walk.

“Education is the only inheritance I can guarantee,” he would say.

He paid fees on time. That was how he showed us that he loved us.

That morning there was a drizzle — light and mischievous. It danced in the wind and tapped at my cheeks. I pulled my pullover sleeves over my hands and walked faster. My brother, six, kicked a stone ahead of him. My sister who was five, hummed to herself following closely.

Buildings lined the road without order — concrete, iron sheets, mud, wood, imagination. Beside Mama Kevo’s supermarket, behind the open-air market, a sewage pipe had burst. It spilled lazily into potholes, claiming the tarmac as its own.

We took the familiar narrow path beside it, hands clamped over our noses.

It was just another school morning.

The garbage heap at the T-junction had existed longer than my memory. It rose higher than the single-storey shops around it. Plastic bags fluttered from its sides like tired flags.

It was a landmark.

“Alight at the garbage stage,” conductors would shout from matatus.

That morning, the heap had gathered a different kind of crowd.

People pressed inward. Women in lesos and men in faded jackets. School children stood on tiptoe. Whispers multiplied like flies.

Five stories were circulating before we reached the edge of the throng.

“It was a prostitute.”

“It was a house girl.”

“It was a mad woman.”

“It was twins. The other one is missing.”

A schoolmate narrated his, eyes wide as oranges. I felt the pull. Being small had advantages. I slipped between bodies and elbows and fabric until I stood at the very front.

Partially wrapped in a green paper bag, beside potato peels and ash, lay a tiny body. It was curved inward its skin donning a strange bluish hue.

Not crying. Not moving.

The smell came second — thick and undeniable.

Someone clicked their tongue. Someone said, “These girls of nowadays.”

I remember thinking: It is cold. The baby must be cold.

My chest tightened. Tears arrived without asking permission. My stomach twisted into something unsteady.

The adults murmured. Some shook their heads. Some stared too long.

Death was not yet a language I understood. I decided the baby was asleep. It was easier that way

But the question lodged itself somewhere behind my ribs:

If she is sleeping, why leave her here?

I thought of my mother’s plate: of her threats about the wind carrying me away into a far land. Of her hands insisting I swallow

At that age, I believed parents loved their children the way the sky holds clouds — automatically, without question.

Why would someone discard their own child?

My siblings found me easily. They had not seen. They were discussing something urgent — whose turn it was to carry the shared lunch box. A metallic set of small circular containers held together in a tower like fashion.

We walked to school in silence.

The drizzle had stopped.

“Good morning, children,” Mrs. Otieno sang when we arrived. Her hips swayed as she crossed to the front of the class. Chalk dust clung to the green board behind her like faint clouds.

Her voice always carried warmth, like it had been dipped in honey. We stood in our checked navy-blue uniforms and replied in practiced chorus.

“Good morning, Mrs. Otieno. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. How are you?”

She called the register and adjusted her glasses then proceeded to read from a paper.

“May the following students come to the front!”

My father’s fees were paid. My name was safe.

I stared at the board, but I saw green everywhere — green sweater, green board, green paper bag.

No one ever mentioned the heap again.

Fractions were introduced that morning; how to divide wholes into smaller pieces.

I wondered silently how something so small could divide a morning so completely.

At home that evening, I ate without protest.

I chewed deliberately and swallowed everything.

My mother watched me with narrowed eyes, suspicious of sudden obedience.

The wind could not have me.

I would anchor myself in food, in school, in the ordinary rituals of everyday life.

Years passed.

The garbage heap was eventually cleared. A small kiosk stands there now, painted bright yellow. People buy airtime where we once gathered to stare at little baby whose chance at life had been muted much too early.

No plaque marks the ground.

No name was ever spoken.

But I remember.

I remember the duck and the rumor about a woman who killed for property. Because at the time it was unfathomable for a woman to own property, patriarchy was a strong chokehold holding the women hostage.

I remember the crowd assigning blame, there was no mention of the man responsible for the pregnancy. But I remember the unkind words said about the woman who had carried and birthed the baby. I still wonder what had driven whoever had left that baby beside the towering garbage that chilly morning.

I remember how quickly life resumed its schedule.

I remember how my body learned, in that instant, that being wanted was a privilege.

And now, as a mother, when my child refuses food, I do not threaten her with wind.

I sit beside her.

I think of the unnamed baby at the heap — how she never had the privilege of being begged to eat their food.

I was eight years old.

I saw her.

I am writing her story.

=====

Image: ChatGPT remixed