‘Armageddon seems to have arrived sooner. Much sooner than I expected. Tumepelekwa ndani.’, read Suraya’s text.
It had to be her. Suraya, the angel of darkness. Suraya who prays for the cockroaches in her house. Suraya who gets arrested on a Friday morning. Suraya who texts me about Armageddon when I am anxiously waiting for an M-Pesa message from my village men. How mean can a person be as to text me about Christ’s second coming when I am forestalling a life-saving message from M-pesa? In Kenya, that ranks as the highest level of cruelty. So yes, Suraya the cruel woman.
One time, she asked me to escort her to the chapel so that she can pray for her household. Just so we understand Suraya’s psychotic tendencies, when she mentions her household, she is talking about a bed that creaks too loud when someone sits on it and one cockroach she spotted rushing across her shelf and thought it worthy of her prayers. Insects bother her. Now, when your best friend asks you to accompany her to go have a conversation with the Lord concerning one cockroach, the walk to the chapel gets longer and confusing by minute. Because you and God are close alright, but not close enough to sustain a conversation about cockroaches. You never really know whether to just go beg Christ for some denarii as you always do or to just go and repent for your endless sins. It’s even tougher when you and Gabriel are not exactly besties and you need to rehearse on how to behave around his Master.
Suraya’s paranoia is so huge that its rear is probably knocking against the doors of heaven, unknowingly. She sees crocies and chameleons everywhere. Her paranoia is infectious. Stay around her for a day and your world will be colored with chameleons and crocies soon before you can know it. She was already cringing at the thought of feeding on half-cooked vegetables and having to sleep on a cold, bug-infested floor amidst Rambo Bambo-sized women who’d make a rhino’s butt to shrink into a fistful just by a glance.
Like bags of infected corn, they were huddled into the Land rover. She and the other rogue passengers who had seen no need to fasten their seatbelts that morning. And even better, see no need to bribe the afande before the situation worsened. Getting into that land rover, however, was harder than peeling off the crusted blood of Jesus from under the soldier’s fingernails. She had to crouch in several positions, none of which worked in the end. Upon realizing that the land rover was even higher than the stakes to heaven, she clung to the knees of one guy who was already in the land rover as a ladder.
Once inside the Landover, the guy whose knees acted as a ladder to her temporary hell asked her, ‘Hii ni mara yako ya kwanza?’ Now people, you do not ask people questions that could have obscene interpretations when stacked in a stuffy police Land Rover.
Suraya thought of giving him the evil eye but thought better. You do not bite the knees that lift you, do you? And, why could a guy with black fingernails be hell bent on holding a conversation in a vehicle where everyone’s mood is sour than last month’s milk? Magoti guy is not one to be deterred by silence. He proceeded to say, ‘Mimi hii ni mara yangu ya nne.’ Suraya almost laughs at how he chuckles and rubs his hands proudly after saying that. It is hard to imagine of the kind of stuff Kenyans consider achievements. Like getting successfully arrested.
While in that Land Rover, bribe and cell are the two words that keep buzzing in your mind. The fact that the afande with a thick accent cannot stop making endless calls while referring to you guys as mahabusu (felons) only serves to make you feel more condemned. But then again, doesn’t getting arrested at 8 am say a lot about your relationship with the gods? I’ve not known the gods to despise someone that much. Well, except that group of churchgoers who purposefully sleep in so as to skip the lesson study on Sabbath mornings. In resignation, you decide to spend your last moments as a decent Kenyan citizen holding tasteless banter with an equally hopeless mahabusu who has been arrested four times before. And has no medal to show for it.
