JIJI NDOGO: Silver lining on a dark marital cloud

On her part, she couldn’t stand me. She had just been posted to Jiji Ndogo, which she hated, and she acted like everyone and everything in our small village had something to do with the decision to haul her here from Nairobi.

One day, I found her pounding on the poor desk, saying over and over, “Why, why, why?”

If there’s anything upcountry knows how to do, it is to humble people. Those who move here from the city arrive with agitated eyes, mad at having to cope with village fellas.

With their city fashion and sensitive stomachs, they turn up their noses at our gumboots and mrenda diet.

With time, I managed to wear Sophia down into a come-we-stay marriage. Never had I known how hard marriage would be.

It was a constant state of give-and-take, with give being more prevalent in my case. But of all the woes we went through, I never thought jealousy would be our biggest enemy.

After I solved a murder case disguised as a suicide, I got my name on the newspaper. For whatever reason, this didn’t sit very well with my wife.

I’m told this happens a lot in relationships, but couples work hard to hide it. Sophia, however, doesn’t know how to mask her feelings.

It’s both a blessing and a curse; one of the qualities I love best about her and fear the most. After she made her sentiments clear, I decided to move out and give us some space. That meant moving in with my boss Inspector Tembo, who’s also Sophia’s father.

The ageing career policeman isn’t doing too well. Mentally, at least. He reminds me of those old Asterix comics I used to read as a kid. Their brave but otherwise delusional Gaulish chief Vitalstatistix was known for his fear of the sky falling on his head.

Tembo is afraid of death and he counts every second of every day as march towards the inevitable. He would do anything, including visiting witches, to at least slow down the process.

This has been my life in a nutshell for the past six months or so. Going to bed next to someone who has set alarms every hour on his phone to remind him that he hasn’t died during the night.

Most mornings I have to remind him one thing or another. Like the proper way to knot his tie or that he’s forgotten to don his trousers.

The recent uprising against our force has changed lots of that, most of it for the better. Call it sowing hope from the seeds of tragedy.

After all the countrywide demonstrations and police shootings in the city and elsewhere, people aren’t very fond of the police. Some of my colleagues in metropolitan areas are having to walk around in disguise to avoid being pelted with insults or worse, stones.

It’s a dark time for my profession, but it has managed to create a silver lining in my personal life. We’ve had to band together more closely at a time when our lives could be in peril.

Here in Jiji Ndogo, it’s not as bad as it is elsewhere. But in this age of lightning-speed communication and a copycat generation, the pangas and jembes are out and the villagers aren’t going farming.

We’ve had to contend with a siege of the police post, with people baying for our blood.

While I condemn the acts of those rogue cops who acted outside of their duty parameters, it is never fair to sentence us all as a group.