How You See It

Men can be beautiful. 

So this is a story about beautiful men, or rather, a beautiful man. A man of Perfect legal years, not young enough for sling bags and fake chains around his neck, nor old enough for a front shirt pocket where everything goes in first with a pen always hanging there, sometimes a rosary around the neck, a tucked-in T-shirt, safari boots, and khaki pants, just old enough and defiantly happy.

It's also a story about words and their definition. Not from a dictionary, but from a perspective. Words are like chameleons, and it's all about where they sit that you can define the colour. It's also a story about familiarity and and it's effects. So it's a story about a lot of things. Of course, you never expect a story to be about a specific thing. Like a story about mangoes, a story can never be entirely about mangoes, or watermelons, or sneakers.

A gentleman is standing in a Matatu that is almost two times filled. It's rush hour, and everybody is lazily rushing back to where they came from in the morning to this busy Nairobi town. Some to their houses, others to their homes, some to their loved ones, others to those they live with, so everybody is tiredly in a hurry as the clouds are already darker with some little light since the sun is still somewhere in the horizon, and the rains are halfway there from wherever they come from.

A gentleman clutches tightly the safety rail on the now full Matatu,  veins running from the thumb into a neatly folded long-sleeved cotton shirt. Huge veins that seem to have direct correlation to all problems solving, huge enough to make you wonder whether it's the blood or the chaos in the heart trying to make a statement, huge enough to make you want to be around them, to trace the veins from back there where they came from into the deep harbour of their existence, to get their story, be there for them and just to let them know that you understand, and It's okay not to be okay.

There's a little spillage of some desperate soul still trying to get some space inside the now two-times-plus-full-to-capacity Matatu. The clippie is hanging by the door, trying to signal the bus to start off, equally tired to get everybody to wherever they are going.

 As the Matatu starts to make its way down the Odeon stage, there's a lady in what looks like should have been high heels, but due to some technicalities, it has been reduced to just heels, the high is missing. She's in a long ruggedy dirty skirt, a multicoloured( largely due to dirt) shawl hanging by her shoulder, a hand bag that's Almost crossing the threshold of one and a sieve and seems to be shouting something to herself and making motion as if trying to capture whatever is coming from her mouth before it gets to anyone else, then stare as if she's trying download some left pieces of common sense from what seems to be a down network as she's almost hit by another bus which she doesn't even seem to notice or maybe it doesn't even exist in the world she's in.

The clippie shouts, "Ona hii Wazimu". 

Here's where the words and definitions come in. Don't bother looking them up in the dictionary because by the time you find them, they will have changed their meaning. 

Wazimu is a mad person right now as the word leaves the clippie's mouth who seems to have been so irritated and found it necessary to let the rest of the bus know that it's a case of a Mad person they were dealing with as she clicks and try to shut the door, then stops for a second like she's trying to gather all the possible common senses at her disposal and when she seems to have missed it, tries again to force the door almost hitting the gentleman, who looks at her like he has just realised it possible for someone to exist with everything in their heads and not use them. 

In a moment of forgetting  how words can be cunning he tries to clear his throat as if something that wasn't supposed to come out just did and now he's left feeling guilty. In his attempt to confirm, the gentleman in frustration from almost being hit by what seemed to be a full-headed human being, did let out a " Wewe ni Wazimu" and seemed to have regretted it immediately as he noticed I had heard it. 

Familiarity brings understanding, and words can never be trusted; they are like the wind, changing course as they wish.

The Gentleman is Robert, and we are on our routine duty  returning to whatever is back where we left. We are standing a person-between-distance from each other that leaves us unable to chit chat since we think it would be rude for the person between us to hear that I have few avocado ready at my place so Bob(Robert) should pass by on the way to his and pick a couple for supper. It's heartbreaking to overhear such a conversation and not get invited, so we turn to think of whatever thought that comes rushing in, and I'm thinking of Robert.

This story was partly about words and perspectives. I'll give a few. In Roberts' perspective, Mad or Crazy people are just people. People who have no problem that makes them less people, rather they are just people we love and care about, and the rest of the world fails to understand that they are just different but still humans. From the clippie's perspective, Mad or Crazy people are people who have a problem and can't figure out how high, high heels should be, make sense of what they are saying or even in the absence of common sense use unique sense to move out the way of an oncoming vehicle and as if that's not enough, deserves the dignity to be handled as humans. Then, from a dictionary perspective, the words are chameleons, and it depends on what they stand on that you can tell their colours. So I'll help you with a few surfaces they are on; 

1. Are you mad?

2. Oh, this is crazy.

3. That's a mad person

4. And you are mad to think this is crazy!

This is a story of a beautiful man, from my perspective.

This is also a story about a Mad Woman, Robert's mother, and that doesn't require a perspective to explain the "Mad"; it is just a clinical definition of a Mad person. So Robert lives with his Mad mother and a househelp crazy enough to be there to help around. 

Every morning he wakes up before everyone else in the house, proceeds to get ready for work then makes three cups of tea, sure enough that two will be put to the right use and the remaining one unsure where it will end up under no supervision. Then, he locks away all the cutlery and squeezes the key down the househelp's bedroom door on his way out to work.

He keeps checking his phone at work, which hardly rings, and hardly receives messages other than work- or wellness-centre-related. The phone sometimes rings, and as he picks it up, you'll see the veins running even at the back of his wrist and another erect on his forehead to reveal the chaos of his life. Then he'll drop it, give me the  mum has disappeared again look, and not disappear in the sense that maybeif you give her time, she can reappear. She takes off and goes wherever the spaces she can squeeze herself through allow her, and the call is usually for him to check the tracker to see where she is and relay the location, once or twice a week.

There's isn't much to tell on the origin of Robert's veins all he knows or can remember is never growing up around the mother but endless ridicule whenever he made a mistake from peers and angry relatives of his similarities to the mother  who he came to know of and be around as a teeneger after the father passed on and no one was Crazy enough to take care of a mad relative other than the wellness centre. A mother who seemed to know nothing about her existence, let alone him, a mother who can just start pulling out her hair and nails like someone uprooting weeds from a flowerbed. So that has been his weekend, to shave and cut her nails and all the times she's always staring like she has just discovered all that exists on her, the nails and hands, and forget about them immediately.

 He only knows of a family feud back in the village that resulted in his mother being mad and of a clinical explanation from the wellness centre of a brain-eating bacteria and constantly wish she could talk and feed him in on her perspective since it seems they are in this together and forever. He's been staying with his mother since his twenty-third birthday, when he landed his first job basically making the mother his rightfully earned responsibility.

He doesn't talk much, there's never much to speak of anyway if much of what you think of can't be relayed to words, so i think of him as a stone for remaining outwardly unbroken through all his devastations and struggles and even if he breaks at times, he's always pieces of stone, nothing less of a stone, just beautiful broken strong stone.

It must be boring to be mad alone, the first statement that always comes out of his mouth whenever I find him talking to the mother, making stories as he cuts her nails and hair, seated with her eyes darting from one thing to another, like she can see different types of air particles in competition and have to keep up. He'll finish up with, "Who knows if she can still hear people in this world and what she thinks of them, kind enough or they are just mad.