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By WAHOME MUTAHI
A week ago, I was in that part of Kenya where you can go to bed in one location and wake up in another the following morning.
You can buy a farm and when you go there again, you find that it has shifted and landed on the one owned by your neighbour. It is the land of landslides.
That place is on the slopes of the Aberdare Ranges where once upon a time there lived a paramount chief called Karuri wa Gakure. Years after Karuri became past tense, another chief came on the scene and ruled the place called Tuthu. The man is John Joseph Kamotho, he who used to crow like a rooster — until some of his feathers were plucked off.
I was at Tuthu to join the creed of that Italian priest, Father Camissassius, who came all the way from Milan to fight the devil on the Slopes of Mt Kenya where I was born and brought up. I had joined the relatives to remember the day the earlier relatives of the Italian priest arrived in our part of the world.
It happens that three hundred and sixty five hundred days have passed ever since the earlier relatives of Fr Camissassius came to this country and thus it is time to sing and dance about it.
So I arrived at Tuthu, the former kingdom of JJ, and two things happened. The Italian priest with a peeling nose turned and smiled in his grave, then he threatened to wake up and commit murder.
He smiled when he saw all those people of all sizes, colours and shapes who had gathered to sing a song called Magnificat, a song of happiness, because of his ancestors who were the first to travel from Milano to preach the gospel in Tuthu.
Fr Camissassius wanted to rise from his grave because of what followed later in the evening. I, the son of the Soil, thought that it was bad manners to leave Tuthu without signing the visitors’ book at the places where the frothy beverage is sold at the right price and right temperature. I decided that my throat must register its presence in those places.
That is why I ended up in a place where people sleep in one location and wake up in the same bed but in another location.
The place was calling itself New Young Bar and the man at the counter was a bearded character who looked as if he had taken a day off from strangling elephants in the Aberdares to come and sell alcohol.
In short, he had a face that said if you made attempts to take off with the bill, he would just break your legs with his bare hands.
Personal assistant
Suffering from someone’s mouth I chose not to deal with him. Instead I spoke to his personal assistant, a man called Muiga, who was engaged in a conversation with a fellow drinker called Wa Gituiku.
I learned that Wa Gituiku, the man, loves listening to his voice so his idea of asking for a drink was to make a very loud speech. It was to announce that he has the blood of the Paramount Chief Karuri, he who welcomed the relatives of Fr Camissassius to Tuthu.
He announced that those with Karuri’s blood have the habit of fathering twins and that he was no exception.
He reminded Muiga and the others listening that those with the blood of Chief Karuri were not famous for being enemies of real money.
“Money does not grow wings when it sees my face. In short, Muiga, bring me a swallow.”
As the obedient Muiga started going to get the man a drink, Wa Gituiku shouted, “Muiga, bring me two tribes of drink. Bring me a green and a frog.” In the language of the kanywanji drinkers of Tuthu, a green is a bottle of the beer called Citizen. It is called a green because it has a green label.
A frog is a sachet of a drink that refuses to define itself either as whisky, brandy, vodka or any other spirit. However, the thing is so full of spirit that it can drive the engine of a tractor. That thing is called a frog not because it makes its drinker look like a toad when drunk but because the huge sachet in which it is sold looks like a well-fed toad resting on its belly.
A man who can afford a green and a frog is supposed to be a tough one on the slopes of the Aberdares and so Wa Gituiku asked for his drink as if he was ordering for vintage wine from France.
As he waited for his drink, he drew from his jacket a two day-old newspaper and started telling those who were willing to listen to things to the effect that he had read it very well and therefore understood what he called “the psychology of our dear president”.
By the time his drinks arrived, he had told his audience that since he learned psychology, he understood “our dear president” to have what he called “an excess of what is produced by some glands in the centre of the brain, the result of which is to like touring the country at every excuse”.
I left the man expounding on his theory to visit the little room called the toilet. The one behind the bar was full so I decided to go to the lavatory outside a church in Tuthu that is so daring that it stands next to a bar.
A lavatory does not call itself a toilet because it happens to be a pit latrine. This is to say that it has a pit instead of a seat.
I had not been to a place like that for a long time, but that was neither here nor there. What was there and then was that in the process of doing what had taken me there, the devil went to work. The devil made my trousers turn ominously and my wallet dropped out.
My wallet has always missed the target of having real money. However, this time it was not willing to miss. Its new target was to go though a hole and end up in the stomach of the pit that was the latrine. It did exactly that. In a matter of seconds I was minus my wallet.
Something told me that I was being punished for what I had done during the day, had done it during the mass for the relatives of Father Camissassius.
When the basket was being passed around for people to give their offerings, I opened my mouth very wide and pretended that all my attention was being taken by the hymn I was singing.
Closing my eyes
I even closed my eyes to show how much I was being moved by the hymn. The truth was that I was closing my eyes to avoid putting something in the collection basket.
The truth was that I had told myself that there was already enough money in the basket and mine could not have made a difference.
Now here I was without a wallet, real proof that God had not been amused by what I had done earlier in the day. My first reaction was to look up in the heavens, or rather at the roof of the toilet, and to shout, “God, if you decide that the wallet must go down, also take my poor soul for I am not worth living any more without a wallet in my pocket”.
Something told me that God might take that suggestion rather seriously and so I changed the prayer to, “God, give me back my wallet; all my Ng’arua farm is yours”. Then I realised that I was trying to bribe God and I changed the prayer once again.
This time I promised God that I would never again try to bribe him if only he could be kind enough to return the wallet to me. By the time I was finishing the prayer, the wallet was announcing its arrival on the bottom of the pit latrine with a thudding sound.
It was then that I remembered that my prayers should have been directed to a lesser god. That lesser god was the barman who, as I have already whispered, looked as if he spent his time in wrestling matches with elephants.
I needed to say prayers to him because I owed him money for what I had swallowed and I can assure you that it was not a mixture of a green and a frog, it was something more expensive.
That is why I stormed out of the latrine shouting as if I had lost the nuts from my head. I was yelling that the devil had snatched my wallet and thrown it into the pit. I looked a gone case as my trousers were half done when I was shouting those things.
The first one to spot me was Wa Gituiku, and his beard did a small dance when I came out of the latrine. He stopped me in my tracks and before anybody had asked me what happened, I had quickly told them about the wallet and its rich history.
Wa Gituiku was the first to let out very loud laughter. He was followed by an old man in a leather jacket who was eating a chapati and escorting it down his stomach with a frog. Yes, burning the chapati down with that spirited liquid.
The third one to join in the laughter was a man who called himself Wanyabeste. They were all laughing at me as I stood there unable to belt my trousers. Then the bar owner appeared rolling up his shirtsleeves.
War was a few steps away as Wa Gituiku announced that he had seen bigger con men before and so I should come up with another script instead of the small lie that I had lost my wallet.
The bar owner was now a foot from me and was about to reach for my neck when I shouted, “Landslide behind you!”. Instantly, all looked behind the barman and started running in all directions. I ran towards the Whispermobile. The fear of a landslide in the land of landslides gave me a chance to slide off to safety.