The Creepy Man Smoking a Cigarette
Cigarette Smoking
Every time I look outside the window in this god forsaken wasteland of apartments, there is always this one creepy guy smoking a cigarette outside his house. He talks to no one except the landlord and his Girlfriend. Not the landlord’s girlfriend, his. He is always and I mean always, smoking a cigarette outside his house .Young men of today would call that anti-social behavior, or “utiaji” according to shembeteng and its family of ghetto linguistics (rumor has it that even the first scribes of sheng do not understand a word these youngins are saying, I guess one can truly be a hero for so long that they watch themselves become the villain) Anyway, I digress on that, let me tell the story of “ule mzee wa fegi”
Having been born and bred in the village, Mimi maisha ya Nairobi inanishangaza sana.Yaani one can live in some flats for a whole year without knowing their neighbors name, occupation or even know their face vizuri.Unapata unaonanga tu msee akifunga mlango na akifungua.In Kithitu Village, you are your brothers keeper,unakutana na neighbor unampea brief ya security, social happenings na mnasengenya watoto wenu.It’s a community of people who care about each other’s business, mostly in a nosy way but it helps. One of these incidents happened, this time kuku za nyanyangu ziliibiwa, alafu the local itchy fingers aka Quickmart Matheri akaenda kwa soko kuuza “kuku zake” the seller phoned his home akaambiwa the man has never even owned a scorpion .Investigations were done by shouting “nani ameibiwa kuku?”, since my feeble grandma couldn’t shout I had to respond on her behalf, when I reached the market, forensic report conducted by yours truly indicated that the Chicken belonged to my grandma. You must wonder, where the fuck i’m I going with this story, It was just a way to prove that people in my village are more united than the peeps in your beloved town.Forgive e if you know your neigbour,cus i have no idea what i am saying.
Every morning when I go out to work, I see this creepy man sitted outside his house, on a foldable seat just chilling, he just raises his head occasionally to see whoever is passing. The weidest part though as I noticed is that he is always very self aware, always aware of what is happening around him at all times. An open door at 5th floor will raise his eyebrows window open on the 2nd floor will alert him. Having lived in the same area with a National Intelligence Service officer for 23 years, I can spot a police officer from 23 kilometers away. I have escaped a lot of shit just by identifying the cop in the crowd and fled. My girlfriend thinks i have a cop radar,i always tell her nicop radar .On this particular one though, I was sure he was not a cop, but what was he? so I decided to just engage with him and ask questions. My girlfriend was against the idea, something that made me even more inclined to do it. You see, my girlfriend is always right, I wanted to prove to her that this time, she was wrong, I really needed to be right on this one.As a man the act of being wrong always doesn’nt sit,stand or squat with me.
When I looked outside the window, and to no ones surprise, the man was outside, smoking his cigarette, or so I thought.Nilipomkaribia though I could smell a pungent welcoming smell that burns with a pop sound, I was amazed bana,ala kumbe hata wewe ni wa hio kanisa,I commenced, he smiled and said “ vitu zingine unakulia chini ya maji tu”.The ice was already broken so I made myself comfortable, took out a joint from my backpocket,lit it, took a loooong hard swig ,looked at the horizon and said “hii economy ya Nabii hii” Ladies and gentlemen let me introduce to you the ultimate ice breaker.Anytime you are in a unfamiliar just start talking politics and criticizing the govt,everybody hates the government.That was the real ice breaker cus this man just gave me a 5 minute lecture on why Nabii was the wrong choice for president, it did not materialize into an argument because I agreed with most of what he was saying,you see from an Author-Reader POV,I don’t like Nabii at all.Our new president is a religious nincopoomp who hides in the church while doing shady stuff,even Judas Iscariot is ashamed,heck,he is jealous,he feels he could have sold jesus for more more than 30 cents. The political chatter really helped us bond a little, I was already ahead of everyone else in our apartments in his good books, just a step behind the landlord, yesu anafanya miujuza kweli.After the talk, I took out a cigarette and gave it to him, his face literally lit up so much, you couldn’t notice the sun rising from the east. Apparently the reason he was smoking pot was because he was out of cigs and shops were not open at that moment. I handed him the cigarette and the domino effect that ensued was him singing like a broken record.A good dancer always knows when to enter and exit the stage.
What brought him here I asked, are you a cop? I added, are you a detective?, I probed further…all this questions were answered with muchy more gusto than I had expected.”Life, life is funny, I watch all of you here watching me, no one has ever felt the courage to talk to me, except you, you are adventurous, I will give you that. I am not a member of the disciplined forces,atleast not anymore, I was discharged an year ago for asking the wrong people the right questions”.The people without discipline in the disciplined forces.Its more paradoxical than Kidagaa Kimemwozea. What does that even mean? I asked, he explained that he was an army officer in Liboi,a border market to Somaliland, a hotbed for charcoal trading by the Kenyan Army and the Alshabaab terror group. He had questioned why the KDF was in bed with the enemy, the only problem is he was asking the people who were making the enemy pregnant. He was discharged and gave a whooping 35 million severance package with a warning to never say a single word about anything to anyone.The rerward for spilling the bins was plata o plomo…if you have seen Narcos you dig,mandem chose plata as quick as possible and dipped.I know this sounds like those lit compositions we wrote in class 7, because it is, a real life manifestation of it.
He told me that although people ignored him,he was the only person who knew the secrets of Kwa Njoroge Flats aka Plot 10.Apparently Maina in D4, who owns a Hilux Vigo double cab, beats up his wife, she is a teacher, and hence she applies a lot of make up. We all thought she was a slayquueen with a boutique in uptown, you know how our brothers from the mountain love trophy wives, kumbe ni mwalimu anafunzwa na ulimwengu.He told me Engineer Michael had bought the newly launched DNA test kits and the results had made him the newest alcoholic in plot 10.Sisi we thought ni pesa inamsumbua kumbe alichelewa chelewa akapata wana si wake lmao…His Kamba wife had changed teams when it was time to score. Now he was raising anada mans children,own goal.The bachelor lawyer Nimrod was sleeping on a mattress, not because he was broken, his home was not broken into either, but he had chipod 2 women of the night who came with a shipment from Mwea mostly known as pishori, put the mchele in his drink, took him to his house and wiped the house clean. The even stole his confidence,now he only gets out at 6 pm like the sun .Even the landlord thought wakili amehama bila kusema until alimpata Kwa closet akiwa uchi with a banner Kwa shingo saying “you have been served” He is a lawyer so atapata pesa soon, he says. Mama Jose from ground floor has been seeing their nduthi guy when the husband is at work. The husband is a contractor for a construction company here in Kajiado, anajenga nchi jamaa wa nduthi akibomoa bibi yake, haidhuru, nobody knows why people do the things they do, he says while sighing. The young couple from c6 is pregnant, it’s mostly their parent’s money but they hustle, the girl wants to maries topes but the guy wants to keep it. The drama in these flats only gets better. Apparently the reason why Kioko who is a software developer walks around this days is because a month ago, he parked his red VW gold tsi outside Naivas, went inside to shop, only for his car to have AoB in town, gari ilienda fom haijawahi rudi mpaka wa leo.I hear he looked for his car even in the watchman’s pocket, he ransacked his mouth asking him,”ama umeimeza?” Now Kioko walks from kajiado to galleria kama wildbeast.The juiciest piece of Intel was how the building was being sold, the landlord wanted to con his ailing wife who was in hospital before she passed away. Now the building had a new owner, who is it I asked “unaongea na yeye sahii”
I jumped to the realization that I owed the creepy man 8k by end month, so I got my ass up and went to work.
Yours Trully,
St. Bervon
