A pandemonium. Darting eyes, dashing feet. Rushing. shouts, shouting!
Mshike!! Mwizi huyo! Ashikwe![1]
The matatu has suddenly halted. All vehicles have. You – still intact – are tired. The mama next to you has her whole head out the window, following the noise with her eyes and craning her neck in all directions. She is giving a commentary as she does so; nilijua tu kuna mtu ataibiwa hapa. Hakukosangi![2]
***
Once when in high school you went to a supermarket. You were passing by one of the aisles and you saw the deodorant your friend used. It was 300Ksh – and your mother had pressed onto your palm a 1000Ksh. note to use for the semester, a third of her monthly wages, and asked you to spend it wisely in a city where 1000Ksh could disappear in a day.
And you looked at that deodorant, promising coconut breeze and you imagined yourself smelling of the ocean in school, hanging out with friends saying you smell like dreams. You imagined spraying yourself in the bathroom and leaving the scent to linger for other students – so that they would know you had been there. You imagined attending a function and all the girls would want to speak to you. Swarming over you and following you around like the children did the piper.
So it is only natural that you took the deodorant and stuffed it in your inner pocket, that you acted shocked when you walked to leave and the detectors blared, that you answered innocently to the guard who advised you to pass through the detectors again convinced that they must be faulty, that you got apprehended, denied having stolen anything, and when they found the deodorant stuffed in your inner lining of your high school uniform jacket, that you said you’d bought it from a different supermarket. It is only natural when they pulled up the CCTV tapes that you denied being the person wearing the school uniform stuffing a deodorant furtively under their arm.
When they threatened to call the police and inform the school of your thievery, you broke down, sweared on the over-worked hands of your mother that you shall never steal.
***
The thief is running towards you and the crowd, like an avalanche in its tumble downhill, is getting bigger. You see in his eyes that he is desperate, he is done – and he leaps to jump over a sugarcane-seller’s cart when a shot rings, and you see him with his right hand clutching something still, mid-air pause, and crash like a sack of potatoes, blood pooling around his ribs through his greasy must-have-been-green shirt and you see, in the waning crowd and the commotion, someone stealing the sugarcane from the now-overturned cart.
You are stricken, no words. The mama beside you; no longer craning nor commenting. Your matatu resumes driving, now that the traffic is easing up and the driver veers off to avoid the bloody body holding a sack of onions that no one bothered to retrieve and yet was enough to pay for with a life.
[1] Catch them! A thief! Let them be caught!
[2] I knew there was going to be thievery going on here