• The last moments of life can be quite sobering for a man under attack by the public
Image: LINAH MUSANGI
As the mob justice got more vigorous on this very Friday recently, Jumanne Wanyonyi almost passed out. He was losing blood rapidly with each blow from the maddening crowd.
He had stopped feeling the pain after the first 50 minutes. He had felt his left eye burst and mix with his hot and slippery mucous a long while ago. The skin curtain that separates his left and right nostrils had ruptured with the kick that came from tjhe slay queens with similar sneers.
One had attempted to strangle him with a metallic crucifix made of English gold. It snapped as Wanyonyi undertook flatulence, his veins bulging like a cockerel whose neck was about to crow.
Those who knew him as a sulky Bungoma town tuktuk rider-cum-pimp tried shrilly to argue his case out. Some were doing so in the local dialect of the Luhya language, laced with hemp and incoherence. A few were wincing with each blow that rained heavily on the wretched body of this accused. Thwaack! Kuduuf! Makaryaaak! Pondoooooluf! On and on went the mass beatings.
To be honest, the time for sobriety had long ended here with the Samsung phone deemed lost, slithering on blood from this unlucky hustler.
The gadget had come out of his ragged indigo jeans via the zipless hole now exposing his mangled member. He remembered the familiar mongrel with one million puppies and hanging titties that patronises this garbage mound where he was being crucified now.
Juma remembered how normally, it is as full of cowardice as a cop deep at night hunting for weak, maskless Kenyans. Yet today, it had found unfathomable ferocity. It had ferociously tore at his vital organ as the crowd cheered. He could see the inebriated watchman of the only Indian shop in town mock-restraining it with his cheap belt tied on one of its tits.
This sole Indian shop by the way sold spices and sugars of all types. It was a corner shop. From where he was sprawled like useless garbage on top of garbage, the bleeding chap had an upside-down view of this shop at the corner.
All of a sudden, more noises infiltrated his boxed-in ears. “Oh no!” he thought in his violated head. This simply meant more beatings but with fresher energy and dizzying bouts of screams and groans. He braced himself.
He could feel his ruptured liver cry silent tears made of bile. It echoed other pains now thumping like his faint heart – down, down up. Up, down, pause. Repeatedly.
He saw through his remaining eye, now a slit of serious pain, something. He saw that the blue cloudless skies were reddish and a bird of prey circled very high above in ever-widening gyre. Turning and turning, the bird became a black dot before his eye.
He saw a house fly do a mock jig from left to right as it danced between the relentless blows of an unfamiliar beggar. Imagine, he could still feel the urchins of Corner 4, tugging at his war-torn jeans and remaining sneaker!
He knew they are the ones because of the guffaws. The guffaws. Though barely 10 years of age, they always moved in a gang of 10 and named their outfit of pity profits 'Kumi Kumi'.
They had guffaws that formed a haunting orchestra fabricated out of intoxication with cobbling shoe glue.
Sometimes when he was tipsy from marijuana himself, Wanyonyi imitated them. He derived mini sexual pleasures from guffawing like them in his own mind when high and nothing to do is all he was doing.
Now the guffaws changed in sonority. They started matching the tugs by determined itchy fingers about to rob him of his only shoe and only jeans in this world and lifetime, even!
Suddenly he started vomiting. The idiot of the street had suddenly sat on his stomach with his gigantic nyash. Wanyonyi struggled to breathe.
Wanyonyi remembered his tiny, crippled mother, whose well-endowed nyash was one of the tourist attractions of this town in western Kenya.
He remembered her touch. Her touch, he remembered. He remembered her haunting yet lovely eyes. He recalled her name as his pain returned with cataclysmic intensity. “Nanjala Njalale….”
He remembered her one tit. It sagged now. It did. All of a sudden, he dreamt for a minute or six that the whole world was a sagging breast.
He relived the many sweet moments she would love him for stealing sugar. They could sit down in their hovel next to Stendi Matope and lick a whole kilo as they fed their nostrils with bangi.
Mother would smoke, then he smokes, as they ate sugar, granule by granule with their accusing finger. At such times of great family bonding, both would in unison hallucinate about the sweetness of life.
Eventually, they would die temporarily for hours in such sweet stupors of sugar banquets.
Clear like the sky now above minus any dot whatsoever, he saw his Kenyan life fast rush before his shutting eye. It is in that cloud of sugar-mama memories that the spirit of Jumanne Wanyonyi left.
Those from his ghetto of Miwani who witnessed all this and reported it to me claim that suddenly, a light drizzle fell. It fell softly like a comfort to the mob that thus enforced the law here as if they were a cane from heaven.