CHANGES

CHANGES

The weather has changed.

Lately you cannot anticipate the rain. Once it has given its warning, it pours from the skies at its own discretion. Before, it used to start raining from the hills, you could watch it advance as you did the last minute shelter oriented preparations. You could watch it come, usually from the east, seen as a milky mist that could cover the hill, then spread around until you heard it drumming on the iron sheet rooftops of the town center. Then it was time to go inside. Listening to an old man speak the other day, he referred to it as the rain is falling ‘from the nape’.

As kids, School holidays were characterized by countless days spent patronizing the river valley. Under ruse of going to graze the cows, we could stay the whole day  engaging in all the games we imagined possible. The river valley had not been cultivated yet and it was one sprawling grassland punctuated by random thickets and bushes. The banks of the river were full of trees which gave the river a kind of privacy from the rest of the world. Under the shade of these trees, we could sit, light fires and burn the juicy maize cobs or potatoes which we had ‘picked’ from one of the neighboring shambas, thus completing our menu for lunch. Then we could swim until the shadows grew long and thin by which time we couldn’t hear ourselves properly owing to the water in our ears.

The river valley has been cultivated, the trees from the banks have been cleared away and presently you cannot find a single surviving thicket thanks to the charcoal burners and the growing population. The river is no longer as serene as it used to be, the long soft grass, the kind that is makes thatch that was witness to a lot of illicit affairs is no longer there. At one point, the river opens up to form a pool where we used to swim, in our time a tree branch overhung from the bank where we could crawl and dive into the river. All gone. Am told no one even bothers to put that concoction of herbs we used to put in the river when the waters were low to make the big fat mudfish that were a delicacy to us rise drunkenly to the surface.

I am home alone. All the friends I grew up with are away. Since Dommy’s house burnt down, he vowed never to come home, I haven’t seen the dude ever since I was in seconds year. I hear Phanice got married. I can’t find Alex, after finishing from the police academy, he rarely ever comes home.  Edna got married, she now has a kid. No one know where Linet is, Zippy is in Nairobi, she tells me she plans to be married soon and Dorothy flew to the States.

The other kids, the ones we always counted as too young to join our games or those who played children while we played the parents in Kalongolongo have all grown up. They are now strapping brawny young men just breaking their voices and starting to notice the girls. They sit by the rails on the bridge waiting and discussing as we once did.  My own brothers are in this lot. I remember my time here, I remember almost being beaten because of some girl and then almost being beaten again after I had taken Paul to go see Lydia.

My primary school tutor began an Academy  Primary School, way to go man! The school has picked up. One thing about this guy, he never even for one moment ever did treat me as a kid in all the time he was my teacher. He used to tell me everything, his plans, his aspirations for his family and his zeal to learn. He has just completed his diploma and is starting his degree programme in August.  This he tells me over drinks in a bar he began but had to sell due to community pressure. Apparently he was growing too fast for the community’s liking so he had to sell the Bar or else his wife had started saying that he wants to marry another woman and stay at the bar since its some distance off from their homestead.

All the talk I seem to be hearing all over whenever I meet the older portion of the village is how I have become a young man and how I should think about marrying. I fear I am going to be a disappointment to these folks. Marriage is the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. I am still deciding on what I want to do with my life. I am at that stage where having a conversation with people feels bothersome, I’d just rather be left alone to my wiles, but how do you tell your mother that you don’t feel like conversation and that you just want to be alone? And that when she is used to your bubbly nature and sunny disposition

College is done. I need to go out there find a job. The prospect of being all alone in the big wide world is scary. My mother is being of no help either from the way she is speaking. Today the conversation at the table was about this family who all went to college to do education, about six members from the same family. Mum is insinuating that had I done education I could have found a job without any hassle. All am asking for is cash to go rent a house with and start tarmacking, my parents all seem to be broke.

 @mossetti

HOME

HOME

Dorca the neighbor from the other end of the village comes in charging. Purposely as if tasked with the responsibility of the world, she marches and in a booming voice asks, “who is in this compound?”

She has always had a heavy voice, a voice so heavy when she quarrels, the whole village is witness to her squabbles. This doesn’t help either when her husband, a soft spoken guy with the disposition of a retard and the anger to match decides to go ape on her and chases her around the village. The husband is a barrel of a man, and almost shy. A strict protestant, he frowns on people doing anything on the Sabbath, even the tenants on his piece of land are prohibited from doing anything on those lands during Saturday. I remember as a kid, the family used to own some guavas which to us kids were a juicy delicacy. A gang of little boys and girls swarming up the three trees that produced the juicy delicacies would take to his Shamba when the fruits were in season. We’d come on weekends when we were not attending school and terrorize his guavas. It always ended up in a game of hide and seek with everyone scrambling down the branches at a speed monkeys could have envied. Then there was this thing where you could never climb down a tree the same way you went up, to prove your prowess you used a branch and if it wasn’t low enough, you had to jump. Anyone afraid to do so was labeled a total sissy. So the husband used to chase us, his big tummy quivering up and down as he furiously mouthed obscenities to us in low mumbles. We even had a nickname for him, Marindi, owing to his fat legs and barrel of a body.

My mother answers, “we are in the house, what is it?” we are having lunch, kienyeji vegetables; masosa mixed with enderema , Ugali and curdled milk. Oh how I have missed curdled milk all the time I have been away at school.

She wants to call her son using my aunt’s phone. She had called earlier to ask for money with which to buy unga to to cook Ugali for the men repairing one of the doors in her shack of a house. Mom tells me later that the son had bought cement, sand, timber and even paid the Fundi to come do the repair. “Just lunch money is what makes a mother bother her sons like that? No wonder her sons are so rude to her on phone,”

This is how the conversation between my mother and her goes.

 “I want to call my son to send me money to by flour to cook ugali for the Fundis. I have even already cooked the vegetables, can you imagine up to now they haven’t eaten” she booms pauses for effect and then continues, “or could you spare me a kilo of flour and I will give it back to you later.”

“Where did you take your phone?” my mother asks.

“It is at the fundi being repaired, do you think that is a phone I have? It’s just scrap. So anyway, I had spoken with him earlier and he told me he was going to sends something on Mpesa.”

“Dorca, do you mean to say that you cannot afford to get lunch for your Fundis?” mom inquires

“where do I get the money?”

Then the palaver takes an unexpected twist.

“even those women I have living in my house cannot contribute food, they are in the house right now drunk and sleeping. Can you believe I hear one had 200 shillings which she finished at the Chang’aa place.” She says conspiratorially.

“Well, it’s your fault, you made them get used to that kind of a life.” My mother points out.

“She flings out her hands dramatically and says, “I’m tired I can’t handle them any more, they have defeated me.”

My mother steers the topic back to hand.

“My phone doesn’t have credit, why don’t you go buy Bamba and come speak with him?”

“Let me see about that then.” She responds and shuffles away not to return.

As she leaves my mother switches into gossip mode, “some women really have bad manners. Imagine the house she that is being repaired is the same house they sold land some years ago to build, that door had been rained so much it rotted away and they were almost sleeping in the open. Now that the son has offered to repair it for her, how difficult is it to get lunch for her Fundis?” I realize this question is rhetorical as my mother goes on, “those women you hear her talking about, the younger one is her grandchild and is a prostitute and she drinks like a fish. The elder one is her sister-in-law’s child who I hear couldn’t maintain her marriage so was kicked away. She had started of nicely doing business before she started interacting with the likes of, Irene, then her life went downhill. Irene and her gang is not good company, they can totally ruin you.  But she is such a strong worker, she wakes up at four, goes digging, by six she is in the tea plantations plucking tea, and by nine she is back to the again digging. Where does one get such energy, does she smoke Bhang?” My mom muses to herself.

To keep the conversation going, my aunt and I grunt along and punctuate her tirade with random questions.

“What became of the younger sister to the elder girl, the sister-in-law’s kid, I ask.

“She got married, I hear she lives in Nairobi with her husband these days, sometime ago she came home and she was looking really smart.” Mom answers me and goes back to her tale.

“will a grown woman live her life begging from other people, am sure she will not return with the credit, that is the kind of thing she likes, she borrows, salt from here, cooking fat from there and even fire. You know she says she can’t even work for anything. She has sold her land almost up to her doorstep. And the children she is bothering for money are not even employed, like the eldest son finished from a teacher’s training college with his wife recently. They even lessened her load by taking one of the younger kids to live with them. Her eldest daughter resorted to prostitution some time ago and Dorca used to tell her, please send me sugar, oh am sleeping hungry I don’t have anything to eat, some women really have no shame.!” With this she concludes her gossip and changes the topic to something else.

After lunch I decide to go visit that old lady who usually fills me in on all the village stories that have passed me by since I was last home. On the way there, I decide to pass by Deno’s. Deno is my childhood friend, on the way there, I meet Mogere his best friend and we proceed there.

We don’t find him but his wife is there, sweeping the compound, she is heavy with child and she has another daughter who is just starting to make coherence in her sentences when she speaks. Very cute too. I remember how Deno married, looking back now, it almost seems like a joke. He used to date this girl and I recall how she used to visit, then one day she came and she never went away. Now they seem happily married and yet they are both just kids in their early twenties.

The woman I wanted to see is not at her place. I had told her I could come today after she asked me yesterday why I had not been to see her. She also asked me when, I‘d bring home a girl. Her eldest son has married, I was a class ahead of him in secondary school, after he finished he joined the police force and has graduated not long ago from training school. “We could not allow the money to go anywhere else once he finished and started working so we advised him to bring home a girl so we can see where the money was going, you also do the same once you find a job. The world has become a dangerous place these days.” She told me.

As I leave, they clouds are casting a grim shadow in the air with promise of heavy rains. I want to listen to music as I walk home but I realize I forgot my earphones. Heck! This is the village, who cares? I put on the music anyway and walk along as I listen to the Essential Mix by Perseus and Jonas Rathsman.

@Mossetti