The cyclist from Leicester

We arrive in Leicester to find blood on the street. There is a bicycle on the tarmac, abandoned like a disgruntled toddler’s toy.  

Police tape has barricaded one of the city’s main traffic arteries. A group of girls has gathered on the pavement, speaking with a gravity that is often absent in teenage whisperings.

The blood is too viscous to flow down the sloping street. Perhaps the cells clotting in a vain attempt to save a body that is no longer in sight?

“Someone’s died here,” I say before turning back to the map of the city that I’ve just pulled up on my phone.

When I think upon it later, I will cringe at the casual tone of my voice and the quick dismissal of this unknown dead person as I walk down the street, trying to find a way around the police barricade.

One of my friends is affected. He speaks in unfinished sentences. “Terrible,” he says, not once, not twice. When we’ve found the path to the university, he comments that I handled the situation well — stoic is what I think he means.

I do not tell him that I hadn’t thought there was anything to handle. My other friend remains silent.

ROCK-STAR ACADEMICS

The enormity of a death dawns on me slowly over the next few days. I am one of hundreds of researchers who have descended on Leicester for four days to talk about memory.

It proves to be simultaneously more boring and more riveting than I expected. The auditorium is wide and high on our first plenary.

If I close my eyes, the voice of a speaker envelops me as though she were reciting something warm and soft, not the need to go “beyond ahistorical approaches” to research in the non-Western world.

Then she says something that bolts me out of near slumber: “violence is normalised in parts of India”. I think back to the missing body of the cyclist. Violence is normalised in parts of me.

This thought follows me through the first day of the conference – in small classrooms as postgrads drone on about monuments and professors try to surgically distinguish the past from the remembered.

Back in the auditorium, I listen to one of those rock-star academics whose autographs you might request. Her words are rehearsed in a way that gently reins in an otherwise unsettling passion.

Memory, she says, is how we fit the past to the present. Fidelity to fact is almost always absent in memory.

TWINS AND LOVERS

The following speaker makes an argument for studying the future, or at least our vision of the future, as a category of memory studies. After all, how we perceive the now and the tomorrow is biologically and culturally embedded in our memories.

Their statements ring with the truth of something that you’ve always known but have never articulated.

Violence is normalised in parts of me. These are the parts of me that remember a time and a place, real or imagined, where the death of a cyclist required as much attention as reading Google Maps.

I have never seen someone die. I have always arrived at the scene of Nairobi’s accidents a moment too late — after the bodies have been moved and the dust has covered the blood.

But one can see only so many cars folded in half and so many motorcycles mangled before these everyday deaths become something small, before they become something to disrupt traffic. Something to groan about when the radio presenter announces a snarl-up on Waiyaki Way or Thika Road: “I am going to be late again, damn it”.

When it rains, one is moved for a day by the stories of entire families lost as a matatu is washed down the river. Around Christmas, one is moved for a week by the stories of twins and lovers separated by a bus going too fast on a famous black spot.

But even these stories begin to pile up on each other and start to sound like the refrain to a song that is quickly becoming tiresome. They are easily overtaken and replaced, on the airwaves and in our thoughts, by late-January concerns over empty wallets.

BROWSING HISTORY

I have almost been in a serious accident several times. The last time was two years ago when our matatu crashed into another on Thika Road.

I saw myself mangled, my head sticking out the windshield. I hoped it would happen fast and thanked God that I’d just cleared the browsing history on my laptop.

On our last evening in Leicester, I decide to peruse the local press. The Leicester Mercury tells me that the cyclist was a young man who swerved into a van to avoid the open door of a taxi. It was a hit-and-run.

As I read the story I realize that until now, I’ve had no confirmation of death. I’d assumed death.

A week later, the Leicester Mercury is still reporting the incident. He was 26, my age. A teacher and a football coach with a slicked-back undercut.

There are flower tributes on the roadside for him. A petition has been started to change the traffic rules in the city after his death. Students have promised to win all upcoming football matches in his honour.

Even when I factor that Leicester is vastly smaller than Nairobi, this is not normal for me. I hope that one day it will be normalised in parts of me, a future built on the memory of a cyclist in Leicester.