A Bachelor and His Warus.

Courtesy of myhealth.co.ke

On your way to Eldoret is an old centre called Timboroa. You’ll find it just past Eldama Ravine but before Burnt Forest. The place does not brag. It does nothing to catch your eye. At its heart lies the aura and picturesque of typical upcountry towns. Like others, Timboroa is quiet and secluded. Just enough life to appease its inhabitants and those accustomed to tranquil and occasional boredom. When cruising by in your Bima via the main highway you’ll see the usual; men in Kiosks sipping hot tea out of metallic cups – cupping them dearly as they stare indistinctively at passer’s by. Some look beat and disinterested. 

Over sunset, these men will be seated on wooden benches outside shops in groups getting consumed by political chit-chat. Or playing poker. By the roadside you’ll find elderly women selling potatoes and carrots in buckets. They will gladly let you know this is their ‘wofishi’ should you try look at them despairingly. And sun-kissed children with bare bottoms will be playing beside them. They look happy. At the last road bump leaving the centre are a couple of young lads selling roasted maize. They perch on the bump and wave the maize as cars slow down. They alternate irregularly to take smoke breaks. 

Yet, beneath this common demeanour, as you interact with the centre, the true person of Timboroa happens, slowly, like a migraine. There’s the cold. Its solid cold over there. Freaking biting cold. The kind that foully shawls itself on exposed cheeks and bites harder than ghetto mosquitos. Only fellas born there know how to brave such kind of vicious weather. Then there’s the forest. A blanket of shrubbery and heavy coppice surrounds the hilly terrain of Timboroa. It’s healthy and scary at the same time. There is the edge of the forest that rubs its shoulder against the highway. It’s christened by the locals as ‘Danger’. This is mostly because of its appetite for delinquency and supernatural interference. Story goes that men and women have walked into that forest and vanished without a trace. A Bermuda of sorts. It is a very unlikely place. Actually, it is the only place in Timboroa where fear runs deeper than the summed courage of Kalenjin warriors on the hillside of Seguton.

I spent most years of my childhood in this place. All my childhood memories were made here. Memories that I now wish I could blow up into a big bubble and live inside and not listen to endless yapping of politicians saying ‘tumetenga pesa’ and ‘kuna mikakati kabambe’ year in year out. Nostalgia wriggles into my whole being every time I visualise the levelled playing field where I made little friends like me. Where we would play football like Ronaldo – or so we thought and drink free milk every second Friday of the month courtesy of the gentility of Mzee Moi and his Nyayo philosophy. We had no care in the world. That is before adult life happened and they took away the milk. Our milk.

Occasionally, my old man would light a fire in the kiln and we would roast fresh warus right from the shamba. It was our equivalent of barbecuing. A sacred family bonding ritual. And this, my friends, is why I am writing this piece. It is all about my waru escapades. My dad would carefully turn the warus on the rutara – no idea what we call this in English – until they were all black and crispy. Hot, black and crispy. We would then sit by a jiko and peel the outer layers off and chew on the inside parts ravenously with infrequent smacking of the lips. Talk of great meals!

Somehow the warus got engraved into my DNA. They shaped my life. My belief. It’s true that you cannot live an honest life without eating warus. They do bring the best in everybody. Like they did in me. And you have to agree with me here. After a sumptuous encounter with warus, for example, you will even forgive your vilest enemies. A guy will splash water on you with his Vitz (those Vitz guys!) but when they open the door and step out with a stretched Kasuku of warus you will be all good - even wave them off with a smile like the ones we see on the rather deceptive Coke adverts. Warus are the unseen force of friendships. They soften hardened hearts. You even win over the ladies with warus.

Her: Sasa Wesh?

Me: Poa. Mambo?

Her: I’m good. Bado tunameet leo?? Umechelewa!

Me: Yeah nakuja. Relax. Nimepitia Githurai kukuchukulia waru babe.

Her: Omg! Warus! You’re such a romantic guy aki. Napenda waru yani. Nakupenda kama waru Wesh!

Now, am I exaggerating? Maybe a little bit. Did I fake a chat just to root for warus? Hell yeah! Anything for warus. Do I make waru sound better than Pizza? Definitely! And do I bit on warus with some pathetic level of delight? You betcha! And I am proud of all this. I am unafraid of publicly declaring that I love warus. Fighting for equal opportunity to warus for every other child out there is part of me. Azin we all need a fair chance to chomp on warus in pricey restaurant without fear if discrimination. Don’t we? And without waiters asking if you’re from Kiambu or where your parents hailed from. Nobody should look at you with a side eye just because your cologne’s scent is inspired by the smell of fresh warus. Nobody! And neither should you be ashamed of displaying artistic sculpture of a wild waru beside that elephant carving you bought at Maasai Market. And should you hold back that proposal you have for Sasini Tea Company on a waru flavoured teabags? I don’t think so! We need those too!

You want to succeed in life? Eat what you like. Eat what everyone likes. Eat warus.

How about that for my upcoming campaign on warus? Genius right?

Okay, enough of that.

Here is the thing though; I am tired of eating warus. And I am trapped on a loop that has me doing waru embellished meals all through the week. How, you ask? Well, mostly because my culinary expertise is finessed around the damn warus! These I alternate with Ugali but then who will scrub that Sufuria? Not me. I might end up buying a new Sufuria half the time I eat Ugali.

I know what you’re thinking. Why can’t you learn to cook other things Wesh? I have an answer; I once googled a recipe and I kinda had nothing on the list except water and salt. They said pinches of salt. I had many pinches. You should have bought those ingredients then Wesh! I know! But then I had a thing with my boys the day I hoped to buy them – we played monopoly the whole afternoon. Then the whole idea of cooking new stuff somehow slid away. The moment passed. 

But I will learn how to cook other things. Eventually. But as of now it’s a game of warus over here.

The Archetype of Misfits

When I am not writing, I am reading. I look for personal blogs and take peeks into the souls of the writers. Believe you me (my high school math teacher was addicted to this phrase) words reflect souls. You’ll read about Magunga’s visit to the massage parlour and in the end you’ll be like, “Filthy, filthy man! God help him!” On another occasion, say waiting in the Cooperative Bank queue at TRM which is painfully slow, you’ll read about Biko’s view on the askari at the airport queue calling out numbers;

“Sigisti one, sigisti two, sigisti three…” - a true Kisii.

And you forget about the stalling queue. You find the world to be a humorous place. Each read is like stepping out on a different body. And I can tell you some are dark, some desolate, some plain, some scary but the best are the weird. Why? Because normal is boring.

I also hate writing when I am tired because then I write like Njoki Chege – hardly-a-point-in-sight kinda posts. 

You see how after a few Jameson’s a guy will pee in the fridge and wonder why the toilet has so much light coming from it? Well, that echoes my push-back with penning down thoughts with a shifty mind. And memory. It is hard to settle on a single line of thought. Every thought becomes a blurred story line. Like the blurred line between a fridge and a toilet to a drunk mind. That’s when I’d rather read what akina Luseka are writing about fancy hotels and resorts. 

Perhaps I am in love with reading. I’ve been flirting with her far too long that I forget to write regularly. That’s why my ardent reader Siloma will once-over into this blog and find cobwebs dangling over pieces that were authored months ago. I bet he sneers with disbelief before resorting to come poke me from wherever it is I got take my mucene after reading (Normally at Biko’s blog). Sorry Siloma, I have been such a disappointment. 

But I always write. In my dreams, in class, at work, over those nightly rides from town going home, over coffee dates and pizza dates and pretty much anything else I do. Oh and those lazy morning showers. Shower writing sessions are actually the best, second from pooping sessions of course. Under the steamy water, it’s always calm; just the right amount of calm to get ideas flowing with every string of water bouncing off my head. I get to write stories of life. Of how I want to be about something – like author more ‘bangi sio mboga memes’ and maybe plant a tree somewhere in Nkubu in the spirit of keeping global warming down. I also write about how I am going to make this Kuyu neighbor who plays loud Taarab music disappear. Like they do in the movies.

“Mwambiee, awache kujizuzuaaa….para parara rampa” (You have to play this in your head with a Taarab swing)

I think if I hear this line one more time I’ll pass out. 

If you’re my Kuyu neighbor – the one who pretends to be from sijui Migadini by playing loud Taarab please stop. You suck and I PS I have hears your accent and it definitely whispers I-grew-up-in-Gatundu. Anyone can hear that ka- whisper in between you Swahili weng.

Point is, I write much. Only that those pieces remain tucked away in my head. In there, are great grandfathers of stories, stories that are still children and their grand-kids all crammed into one corner. Let me loop you in on how it goes down.

I’ll wake up at 5 am on Saturday morning. Sleep deficient but too hungry to keep going. I’ll take ten minutes to debate whether fixing breakfast at this time is even humanly possible. Then under the influence of persistent hunger I’ll fix a bachelor’s deluxe morning meal – eggs and tea. It will take around 15 minutes to eat – from my bedroom. Then I’ll try to sleep again but because of the sugar rush I’ll simply be staring into a dark space. Inevitably I will create a story, a kick-ass introduction, a moral somewhere in there and plenty of humor and I will promise myself to write it down on a word document. “Wapi!” It all ends at the bed. The bed of untold stories.

That aside, I want to ask, how are you fitting in the rhymes of life? And I am asking because lately I have been feeling like we are in a big dancefloor with DJ Life bringing the house down and that everyone one else practiced the dance moves but me. Why you ask? Well because all I want is to make ‘bangi sio mboga memes’ when everyone outchea is trying too hard to own a Ferrari and make me own one. Okay, perhaps I could use a Ferrari 458 Italia, 597 horsepower, 4.5L V8 engine with a dual-clutch transmission, 14:1 compression ratio, interiors that have an ego and a Formula 1 inspired suspension system, but I also want to make memes because my happiness comes from weird places. Places like seeing a goat given birth in a farm rather than riding a roller-coaster. 

Not that I hate roller-coasters but the on the happiness list there is memes, then running away from wild animals (I know the thrill), then that ka-feeling I get when using a cotton earbud (when the earbud hits your soul its orgasmic), then there’s food (I’m thinking this should go up the list), then the goat birthing on the rough slopes of Kerio Valley and now maybe roller-coasters. 

Reading Donna Tart’s Goldfinch is more exciting for me than spending a night in crowded places with younglings smoking their lungs out and wiggling their behinds into the darkness of night. That’s too tiring for me. I am also a believer in sobriety because I know only broken people need intoxication to have fun. And these things are the opium of the masses. 

But the good thing is that I am not the only one, there are others. Other who do wacky and wild-like things that make them inimitable and different. There’s the hopeless romantics that still believe in love and the fairy tales starring cupid. I have a friend that thinks love is a myth just because one guy shredded her delicate heart into pieces (poor soul!). But then I know more that find their strength in rhyming heartbeats. Men that listen to rhythms and blues all day and cry (that I’ve exaggerated) when she won’t text back, and women that will go down on their knee if that brings him home. I know such people. A tribe that sees your person first before they get enticed by your dollar.

There’s also the terminally weird fellas that have no pleasure in well-cut suits and polished shoes. Men that spend half their lives in the salon plaiting women’s hair – akina Tony Airo. They know all the shampoos – like by name not the “it was written shampoo on it” vibe that guys use when shopping for hair shampoo. And they can name hairstyles other than the infamous matuta. Men that are different. Then the weird women that wear aprons and climb on poles. Electricity poles. Fixing your lights as you rest your feet on that Italian coffee table that Naomi Mutua, a carpenter and plumber, made. And those in chic concodis in mathrees. A while back I came across one manning those rugged Githurai buses. She had a spooky hairstyle, a fanny pack, a faded Calvin Klein jean trousers and an attitude from here to Meru. When she was hanging off the door – both feet in the air – I could see the disapproving looks from men.  Looks screaming, 

“Wewe. Shindwe. Hio ni kazi ya wanaume!”   "Na sasa akianguka?" One guy quipped.

She stood ahead of the pack – a different one.

The outcast school kids that are constantly reminded they you have to be cool (perhaps buy the led-lit shoes) to be let in on the circle. Who wears those anyway? It’s like being a baby all over again on that you’re a baby that has a beard. Only Octoppizo pulls those off without a fuss. Ok, can we can also include all people who one led-lit shoes in the weird list? I feel they are different. Their happiness sure comes from a weirdly baby-ish place. Then there are also those with manic fixations over little pleasures in life. Like my church gang that find happiness in lollipops and jawbreakers. There’s those IT guys that make awkward conversations because their language is better with computers. And those peeps that believe they are star-crossed because they are jobless and money seems too elusive to them. Holding on to ideas and refusing to give in even as vultures circle around awaiting their last shred of hope to fade. 

These are the misfits. The weird ones. But weird changes things. Those crazy fellas that think they can change the world are the ones that do change the world. So here is to all the round pegs in square holes, the outrageously ambitious and those attracted to broken things. To those who curve their own archetypes. 

These are the true archetypes of misfits.