A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHT

The person who claims to be a man is also our governor. Claim? Yes claim. I am usually in the small clique of individuals who choose not to believe until we touch the scars on your hands. So claim it is.

You see, he is almost 200kg of fat, bones and thin muscles. If he had a brain he would probably be 201kg. As a result of this superfluous endowment, this ‘man’ has real boobs and buttocks that stretch his trousers furthest north and furthest south while walking. His boobs look silicon, dolly-patoning with every slight movement even a sigh.

His belly is the pink elephant in whatever room he enters. Elephant. Quite literary. Literal in the sense that it can both harbor an elephant to full gestation and well, because it is elephant.

So he paid a visit to our hospital and found us sitting on the usual benches. Ours is a 40 bed capacity ward.

“Karibu, mheshimiwa…errrr excellency.” The nurse in charge chuckled, trying to maintain political correctness. She has to, she must keep her job. You see she took a 80,000kes loan that she has been paying for the last 3 years, she has to keep her job. If she doesn’t the bank would auction her house but still 

that would not be enough.

The rest of us tried to hide under the transparent guise of thin air.

“I can see, your ward is full… you have 40 patients?” the governor asked. Looking all in control.  High-fiving himself that he could construct such a sentence, and that he knew a few medical jargons like ‘patient’ and 

‘ward’.

I could see his heart smile.

“Yes sir,” the nurse in charge responded. And as if trying to be in her best behavior added, “We actually have 102 patients sir”

The governor looked at her. Trying to instruct her to give more information, without wanting go through the trouble of constructing another English sentence.

“The rest are under the beds” the nurse continued.

The governor thought of bending to wave to the under-the-bed patients or at least show his face for the benefit of the next elections.

Wise counsel presided upon him not to bend. A man that endowed cannot bend and leave the median strip of his already tight trousers intact. I was catching my breadth, all too eager to hear the unzipping sound of his trousers being ripped into two by his down-to- earth gesture of bending.

I almost chuckled. I doubt he had any underwear. None would fit him, I bet. So you can imagine the rib cracking scene of the ‘governor who bent, only to rise up and have to hide his scaly scrotum in his hands’. All this was playing in my mind. The little pleasures of my life. My entertainment ‘allowance’.

Just as he was walking out, the tall, thin consultant doctor walked in. unkempt hair, in the same shirt he had two days ago. A man of his stature is also not allowed by standards to ‘rewind’ clothes so he had two shirts to confuse his overindulgence of the 5year old green trousers he has never found a substitute for. This trouser had tales to tell. You could see the ferocious marks of the charcoal iron box at its hem. These were due to frantic efforts at attempting to dry it the night before, every night before.

The doctor was talking to himself. Doing his mental sums. A holy soliloquy.

I heard later that the governor had promised to paint our ward. He had also passed by the emergency area and found patients waiting for their relatives who had gone across the road to buy drugs for them to be attended with. He was a good man. He bought them half litre soda (madiaba) and half a loaf of bread. Each. Great. Just as he was leaving an asthmatic patient who had been sent to buy an oxygen cylinder( for the hospital oxygen had run out)  arrived, panting out of breadth. He too got a loaf of bread for the trouble.

Later that night as I was watching news at my neighbor’s  I saw the first lady of the land doing some exercises outside of statehouse. In an  ill-fitting track suit. Running like she wanted to catch grass hoppers. And eat them. She was planning to attend the London Marathon to raise funds to improve maternal healthcare. She had a task at hand. You see, to raise funds to bring any meaningful change in maternal mortalities that stood at 488/100000 you needed to sprint round the solar system a thousand times. But maybe she will make it. Who am I to judge. Kila mtu anajua strong holds zake.

Then there was some other news. Other governors were taxing chicken. This nauseated my hungry self. How do you tax mboga? How how how can you suggest to tax my chicken? Considering I have a pet chicken called Florence back in Kakamega, this idea gave me ulcers. And high blood pressure. I just hope they will 

not confiscate my Florence. She is the only asset I got.

Others were taxing the dead. I imagined, with the creativity of Kenyans, our people will deny they buried a dead person. Perharps they will argue and say “huyo  mtu hajakufa, tumemuweka tu hapo ndio apigwe na upepo, hapo chini ya mchanga”

Next I know another one will tax anyone walking around with a penis. After all it has the potential of increasing our population. If it’s erect my friend, you are doomed. Double taxation will hit your sorry ass. You see a man walking around with an erect penis makes the county government go through the extra cost of providing security; rape issues my friend, rape issues. A man walking around with an erect something something is a threat to the security of our sisters. Maybe they will suggest an 'erection zone' more like the 'smoking zones'. Where you go sit until it goes away, then after confirmation, you are released to the streets to drop your job applications.We are a proactive society.

All was cool but for one suggestion I had. Why wouldn’t the first lady do a marathon to raise money to build the railway and we use that ‘borrowed’ money from the Chinese to keep our mothers alive?

I have a bank loan too, I choose to keep quiet and be in my good behaviors. I need my job. Hapo ndio devolution imetufikisha.

I SIT HERE WRITING

His liquid petite eyes told a story. Delicately emblazoned on his seemingly decrepit face would tell you of the tales in his short life. His nose sticking out and letting out a camber like a whip. His temporals sunk to an almost meeting distance. The skin on his brow and cheeks established thin creases as he changed from one facial expression to another. While his neck struggled to hold up the weight of his head, you could see monstrous veins threatening to let way occasionally distracted as he swallowed saliva.

Cupping his left hand to support his cheek, he looked at the floor as if reading it. You could easily tell how deeply in thought he was but never guess the filling. He momentarily shifted his eyes from the floor to the empty ceiling and back to the floor again. Avoiding as much as he could our eyes being caught in the snare of the silent tête-à-tête.

When I just thought he would open up and mumble, he ended up calmly swaying his right hand and noisily scratch the dorsum of his left. Letting out white skin marks. He would then look underneath his nails as if he expected something different.

I sat there pensively. Wondering what in his one decade of experience in life had disturbed him to this extent.

“Mmmmmmhh…” he finally started.

I leaned forward to encourage him on. Our skulls almost touching. I could smell the sweat of his once white T-shirt.

“I wish she could love us as much as my mother did,” looking from his left side then to his right side he continued. This time creases formed on my forehead as I tried to read his opaque minds. His disturbingly slow let-out sending out an avalanche of thoughts and conclusions.

He continued to narrate the ordeal of his life. His spongy penetrating voiceand  girlish fidgeting informing me of a distressed mind.

So he narrated.

He had lost his mother two years back while she was giving birth to his sister Shida. She had bled to death, doctors told his father. He was eight years old then when his father came home carrying a noisy shrilly bundle of a baby and some clothes in a paper-bag. He ran out of the house to see if his mother was taking her shoes off to get into the house, but no one was there. Then his father broke it to him.

 His father, a man who used to labor in the rich neighborhoods, would shortly get married and bestow them to his new wife. He would then be ‘lucky’ as he got a job as a truck driver in the United Arab Emirates. Time to time, he would send them money for food and clothes. He can only bare witness for the food bit as he never saw any for the clothing. I could tell. Perhaps you too could tell.

Earlier that week, he said, Shida’s body was increasingly becoming hot. She would sweat in the middle of the night. Cold water did her no good. She would now get seemingly strong thrusts in her chest and let out everything she ate. She couldn’t sleep at night. Not that she could but also because he wouldn’t let her. What if she slept and never woke up.

Little Maneno had come to ask for dawa for his sister. The hospital was half a day’s trek in good weather. He couldn’t have come with her because thin as she was, she was still too heavy for him.

It was at this point that I sat back. My pen subconsciously tipped at the edge of my mouth.

I remembered our empty shelves. The circumstances. We would have to get this girl and have her checked up. The machines that were donated by the Chinese government had broken down just around the time Shida’s mother died. So we would have to send them away to get the investigations done elsewhere. Then come back for a prescription.  Then send them away to go buy the dawa.

It was now, like it had started. When we started he was dumbfounded. Now, I am dumbfounded.

It’s been twelve hours since; you might not be interested in how the situation was sorted out. I chose to sit out in the lawn. Gaze at the endless ocean embrace the sky. A sky so starless and lifeless. A sea so selfish and quiet despite having a lot to itself.  Just as endless as the ocean and its infinite love for touching the sky at the horizon, my thoughts race as to the exact meaning of the word FREE.

From the moment of the evening when grayness replaced the earthly colors. When that same grayness was itself consumed by the dark of nothingness. Throughout the sulky sky and quiet sea. I have had nothing to say but just sit and wonder.

So I sit.I sit here writing.