Chapter eight

It was a good day then, Christmas was just around the corner. Life was pretty smooth for almost everybody, including the laziest man in the village whom they called Moto because of his immense love for the song; moto, umewaka leo, moto wa kazi ya mungu.... had harvested. The cows liked these times because they was free to gossip with each other and share a disease or two. We of course were happier than the cows. We on that day like any other December day settled for a game of ‘BANO’ I was the master and after the ‘kitch no payee” warning, I got into action. Mine was a new edition marble, sea blue in colour while they had some battered things that didn’t even have the necessary round shape and guess who was the sole cause of these? Guilty as charged. I was ten points ahead of them after ten minutes and we were all bored.

Kiprotich roused the topic everyone loved, nguo za Christmas. We was the richest folks if you compared our level of poverty to the two other boys, so I would go first. A young man who had gone to the big city to look for greener pastures had returned to the village about five months before for a short visit to his parents. We almost worshipped him when he appeared. Everything about him had changed, from his gait to dressing and even smell. Wait, did I mention his speech? The man who used to stink of cow dung was now smelling like a bunch of freshly plucked flowers. He no longer wore the monotonous brown Kaunda trouser. A jeans trouser with a 05 imprinted on it did the trick. The problem is that he had become very thin for his trouser didn’t seem to recognize the waist and always stayed below his bums. The bottomline is, when he had had enough of the village, four girls were heavy with his child. It was two years later that i came to learn that the good smell on him was actually ‘doom’, a mosquito repellent. I nevertheless wanted a trouser like his for Christmas. Kipkemoi said he hoped to atleast he would eat bread that day. To be honest, I almost cried. The little negro had been through hell, I’ll tell you about his hell next time. Kiprotich...that young man is going to kill me one day. His turn arrived. He first asked us not to laugh at what he was going to say and as usual we swore. After vowing with the ‘bible red’ and ‘mungu moja’ phrase, he said it. He didn’t want clothes. He wanted to run away, rather elope with Chemutai and marry her. He really was obsessed with her curves, the reason for our laughter was that the only curve she had was her buck teeth which couldn’t fit in her mouth. That’s when the jibe started and as usual, I was king, atleast until he brought the issue of my father’s crying. That’s when my rage was aroused. He claimed my father cried that day and wiped mucus from his nose with my best shirt. Nobody jokes around with that shirt. That’s when a stone fought my war. Nobody jokes around with that shirt