I got in to the Nissan (van) and sat at the back not because the van was full but purely on different motivation. Yes, there was girl involved. Soon the van was ready to go and I observed all its occupants starting from the driver.
At the front sat the driver busy conversing in vernacular with someone on the phone at times steering the car with his protruding belly whenever he got agitated and let go of the other hand to emphasize a point to the caller as if he could see him. Next to him was a man with a black hat, one of those given when to you when you buy barbed wire-written “seng’ege ni ng’ombe”. No! Not “Wire fence is a cow!” Don’t translate it okay? Just listen to me! The hat man kept quiet to himself never uttering a word to the drunkard seated next to him, he looked like a lost farmer. Close to the door was the drunken man who kept singing happy birthday to himself. In his song he was 31 but from his balding head and grey-white hair he must have been in his late 60’s, but no one was interested. One would have thought that the hat man being used to dealing with cows would have told him to shut up or get dehorned or neutered.
Behind them sat a woman who knew the value of a balanced diet. She chewed her way throughout the journey changing from boiled eggs to boiled maize and kept insisting that the driver make stops whenever she saw a roadside seller with food. But man or now woman must eat right? One thing you got to give her though is her giving spirit. Half of the food she bought was eaten by the woman next to her and her crying baby. At first I thought the baby was sick but as we went on I realized it was sick alright, sick for the boiled woman’s eggs and other foodstuffs. The baby kept demanding for more. Its mother was more than happy to assist in chewing the food for it and swallowed most of it in the process. No wonder the baby wailed so loudly. The old woman sitting next to them was appalled by their behavior and kept spitting outside at regular intervals while looking at them with scorn.
The man in a heavy leather jacket seated behind them kept looking at the four of them in disgust. He told the two men seated beside him that he hated being in a van with women and children because of all their fuss about nothing. The two men had then stopped their arguments and looked at him for a couple of seconds not knowing how to reply and then continued with their politics. One of them the one with those khaki jackets with many pockets had insinuated that they would be no peace without a new constitution and that he would mobilize “his” people to reject the draft constitution as it was. This was met by a quick rejoinder that the other man also had “his” people who would vote for it. The heavy leather jacket man, he who hated children interrupted them again and asked them if they had read the draft constitution to which they replied that they had not. Their reply invited lots of stares from the whole van .Even the drunkard at the front cut his song short and asked them to tell him how old they thought he was.
We all ignored him except for the man behind the politicians with the day’s newspaper apparently reading the constitution! Show off! He told the drunkard that he was as old as the first constitution in the world. The drunkard by this time was so busy in his world that he did not know he had been insulted. The newspaper man got back to his newspaper world for he had a few hours before the newspaper became stale after all who reads a daily at 6pm? It was just a few minutes to 6pm. This I got to now from the Miraa (Khat) eating man in front of me who had finally “broken the ice” by asking the woman beside him what time it was and had nearly chocked on his saliva in the process. After a few good coughs and minutes had passed he had finally tried his seduction skills again this time asking for her name. She did not respond and there was a long awkward moment which followed.
Now I’m not saying that she was ugly but she was not beautiful. However, she was trying her best to work with what she had. She had a weave which she kept patting every couple of minutes. At first I had thought it was because she wanted to make sure it was still on her head and had not gone with the wind blowing at high speed from the open window beside her. When she dug in to the weave with her fingers, I realized that she must have had an itchy scalp and all the patting had not helped so she had decided to go in for the kill. I think I imagined it but there were some creatures crawling out going down her neck after her long scratch in the weave. She must have felt my eyes on her neck looking at her creatures because when she suddenly turned to face me, she caught me staring and for a moment we were in a gaze.
I broke the gaze and looked away not in fear or shame but in surprise at how grey her face was. She had applied so much white powder on her face that she looked like she’d fallen in to a makeup kit face first. She turned to face the Miraa chewer who had been following her head movements keenly and slapped him! The Miraa chewer spat some greenish saliva on his shirt and quickly faced the front while wiping off the green matter as if nothing had happened. The weave woman pointed a dirty looking index finger at him and told him to keep his hands to himself.
The commotion had woken up the girl sleeping on my shoulder much to my displeasure. The man on my right side who had been punctuating our journey with his loud irritating coughs gave me a wide grin and gestured with his chin and lips at the girl on my left side checking herself out in a small mirror from her bag, as if passing a coded message to me. His grin did not last long for the cough caught up with him and he gave out a big one.
I prayed that the girl would go back to sleep. I did not mind being her mobile pillow. She was pretty. I had immediately known that she did not live in the city and was probably visiting. How? Her fingers. I came from the village so it takes one to know one – she had dirt stuck in her nails. Now this kind of dirt is the one you get off after a lot of washing and zero contact with soil for a long time. Well now you know. (To be continued)
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