Andy is crazy. People say it is because of love. Because he hasn't had a chance to confirm or dismiss the rumours, people believe it's true.
There are not so many things Andy did when he was young that
were those of a model child. He was truant, a thief, and generally someone who
had grown immune to parental thumping. At school he wasn’t good at it either.
Dropping out of class three, as was suddenly fashionable when one was circumcised,
he disappeared from the village for close to a decade.
When he emerged, he was totting a digital camera, taking
pictures of villagers who still found it attractive to have themselves printed
in paper. One time I accompanied him in
his rounds of delivering the posed moments, frozen in time. We criss-crossed
villages, and thankfully were successful in not being bitten by dogs. Other
than that, people begged Andy to come another time. We crowned that day with a
cup of chang’aa. He had money, a class three dropout, and I a university
student, broke as broke can be.
On the way back, he told me stories which entailed who had
HIV/Aids in the village. They were all people who we had made acquaintance in
my brief stay at the local primary school. He named names, including that of a
girl I had my eyes on. We later briefly dated, although we never met. She accepted
my advances and left for Mombasa. He told me how Kale men are like currency
especially among other tribes. He told about a Kamba chic whom he had managed
to impregnate. She has my twins, he had said boastfully.
I would later spot one of the guys who he said was carrying
the disease. His face had grown bony, and his hair had adopted a particularly
pale and grayish color. His eyes must have began retreating back to its
sockets, probably having seen enough already. With all the modesty I can
summon, he was carrying death within himself. But then he was with a light skin
girl, barely thirteen or fourteen. Being good with faces, I later saw the girl
and almost warned her.
Andy left for Nairobi, hitchhiking my father’s car. We had
exchanged numbers and promised to look for each other when I got there. I was
not in hurry to get to Nairobi. It was pointless to go to campus during the
official opening date. You spent a few days doing productive things such as
looking after livestock until your classmates tell that they have been given a
CAT. Then you would board a plane. And so a month later, I left for Nairobi. We
never met with Andy, although he tried reaching me.
Fast forward, I cleared university, went to the village
briefly and came back. There was no sign of Andy although I could see that he
had erected a house. Nobody told me it belonged to him, it was just a hunch. He would be in the village when I wasn’t, and
I when he wasn’t. This should not be misconstrued that we had any important
business. We were just playmates who life had caught up with them.
On that fateful day, I spotted my dad’s car in the compound.
I was surprised considering that it was a Wednesday. He always came only on
weekends, but then he always showed up when the sun had, observing the ancient
ritual passed down by our forefathers. But then the sun was still up. Okay, it
had set behind the hills that dotted the horizon, although it had not gone with
its light. I did not give much thought to it. I may even have dismissed it with
a remark such as ‘some rituals are bound to be broken, especially on
Wednesdays.’
In every village, there are people who are always on top of
things. They detect unusual activity, even in the wee hours of the night. You
will be surprised by statements such ‘naskia unataka kuoa’ yet you could swear
by god and sonny Jesus that you have never been seen with a girl, at least in
broad daylight. In fact many girls get pregnant without ever having been seen
with a man. Holy Spirit, you may say. But these people are in touch with these
spirits. Just as Andy’s unusual presence, chauffeured all the way from the city
of thugs, by my father, who would have had important things left to commune
with office dust for a days.
“He was bringing Andy. He is mad,” my source told. “It seems
malaria has climbed to the head,” he had added.
Later, he would tell me his story. Andy had a wife back in
the village. She used to bicker with her mother-in-law a lot especially when Andy
preferred to deal with his mother when it came to finance. When the bickering
escalated, Andy took his wife back to Nairobi, and then came to the village to
finalise a few secret things.
As people are prone to diseases, his wife called him that
she had fallen sick, and had decided to recuperate among her people. I was not
told whether he was aware about the fact that she had already gone to her
people or not. My source informed me that he sold his motor bike and left to be
with the wife. It was there that he parted with a bill of seventy thousand. Broke,
he had sent an SOS back to the village that he was stranded in a strange land.
Then Andy came and did odd jobs here and there, perhaps to
raise money to take him to Nairobi. His hunting ground, where he knew the paths
of large edible animals, and also where the avoid serpents and other dangerous creatures,
like political hit men. Then he went t Nairobi and can back, chauffeured by a Good
Samaritan, and his mind was never the same.
He had gone crazy.
Since the village can never lack an explanation to anything,
they said his wife made away with all his earthly possessions. She stripped the
house of anything that had a value above fermented cow mucus. He now loiters in
the village, finding himself in people’s beds, and sometimes talking about
wanting his wife.
