The Road to Rosalinda

Photo: Jan Tinneberg

On this Friday night, it is drizzling. The disgruntled husband adjusts the polka-dotted cap drawn over his brow and above his moustache to keep the drizzle away from his face. He skips over puddles and rivulets of muddy water. Someone coos. He ignores. He walks past the dinginess of Confucius Pub, throwing a hasty look at liquor brands, coke soda, and latest smartphone advertisements displayed in the winks of neon flashes. He squelches up a veranda.

“Soja?”

The disgruntled husband’s disjointed mind struggles to string words together. He wonders if it is better to run into Confucius Pub. His body needs a place. St. Stephen’s Church would be a good place too. But both Pub and Church are beyond reach like the mute wishes of the dead. St. Stephen’s Church is dark and the doors are bolted; Confucius Pub is a sombre place like the depths of his soul. At present, the only road to his soul’s light is aimless walking and groping in search of meaning. To find places like this shop’s veranda and quiet the night out, away from the drizzle and the muddle in his head.

“Omwami?”

“Soja, it is…” the disgruntled husband says. “I have a long story.”

“And who are you?”

“A man of troubles.”

 “Who is he?”

“A man of troubles.”

“Huh!”

“That’s what he says.”

“Makoyi,” the disgruntled husband pauses hesitantly, “I am called Makoyi. I have a sickened broken heart.” He shivers. “I have a long story.”

 “Huh! Speak it fast, make it run or walk fast, that long story, even if it can jump the better. Boss, we are not pastors and therefore we are impatient.” It is a young comrade soja, more suspicious than the old comrade soja he was speaking to earlier.

The two sojas stand before Makoyi. He holds onto his patience with every bone in his flesh like one resisting the urge to fart in public at the expense of indigestion. He is irritated by the young comrade soja’s arrogance and hanging on the old comrade soja’s patience.

“I wish my story could fly from my mouth but can I rest somewhere from this drizzle, please?”

“We can find you some ears. We are not deaf.”

The young comrade soja sneezes and blows his nose into folds of a newer Maasai shuka of the same fabric as the threadbare one his older comrade soja wears.

“Omwami Makoyi, there’s nothing we sojas can do.” Just for the sake of it, the older comrade soja croaks, brushing his hand through a mass of grey hair and picking his teeth.

“We don’t know if he is collecting stories, throwing dust in good people’s eyes, or preparing to cut the good pastor’s throat.”

The words fetch a scowl on Makoyi’s face. He can’t see a pastor anywhere. The young soja is unnecessarily rough with him.

“Sojas, you are men like me.” The scowl melts into lines of frustration. The two sojas are stiff.  “I’m in a hole. You know life. My wife and I are having matters we can’t agree on,” he begs. “Let me swallow the night of my troubles here on this shop’s veranda.”

“Sojas, you are men like me,” the young comrade soja mimics, cutting him short. “Blaaaaaa! Swallow your night from the top of a tree if you like. I see your head can cook stories. I am sure your legs remember the road they have come from.”

“The irritating imbecile.” Makoyi suppresses the insult.

“I was not born yesterday,” the older comrade soja scoffs. “Omwami Makoyi, I am not a child. I know women have not started keeping men and throwing them out late in the night like soiled diapers into the pit latrine.” He picks his teeth and spits. “There is something up that your cap which I cannot put my finger on. Anyway, to make the long road short, I guard the shop, that’s my job. Problems, no.”

Makoyi sighs.

“As I told you we are just sojas, there is nothing we can do.” Sensing the young comrade soja has had buckets of mischief that could overrun into sourness and seeing also that Makoyi was starting to clench his fists, the old comrade soja orders Makoyi away by waving a toothpick.

Within earshot, in the dinginess of Confucius Pub, there is giggling. Some twilights haggle, tips of their glowing cigarettes beaming in thick clouds of smoke. Then out of a deal gone sour, one screams. She digs her claws in the face of a man, then all over his body tearing into his shirt. Several twilights feast in meting out their comrade’s fury with the bloodthirsty pointed tips of their heels.

“Mbwa!”

“Ghasia!”

They spew profanities in husky voices. The drizzle has thinned into streaks of cold pricking needles on the skin. Makoyi avoids the scuffle and diverts into Nkrumah Street, the hub of all trades. It is dotted with hand carts, trucks, petroleum tankers, and tuk-tuks. Lined along the street are LED light poles—some leaning like old men on the weight of old age, some resiliently splashing the street with their light, a few blinking as if protesting, at intervals, their neglect. He aimlessly trudges on like a stray dog with broken limbs. There is no particular place he can perch his oppressed marital soul. He feels like a drop of rain in the sea, from the journey of freshness in the sky into the vast uncertainties of a saline world.

“There is something up that your cap which I cannot put my finger on. Anyway, to make the long road short, I guard the shop, that’s my job. Problems, no”

Flashing lights streak from metres ahead. His head clears fast. From the sound of its engine and raspy orders being tossed from among its occupants, he figures it must be a police pickup truck. Instinct ducks him behind some rusty charity sweepstake lottery stall. Police are never on a goodnight kissing mission. The pickup drives past. He resurfaces from his hideout. Two dogs, their tongues out, cross ahead of him, one in hot pursuit of the other. An unfortunate augury. He riffles his jeans pockets for a cigarette, finds one, and lights.

The balls of smoke he puffs into the thinned drizzle pricking like needles on the skin chase each other in quick succession like the reflections trolling in his mind.

“She is pushing me. Rosalinda. She is pushing me. One of these days. One of these days, I am going to take my children and ask for a separation, maybe a divorce. A solution perhaps. I don’t know. But one of these days.” He speaks the last sentence out loud, tapping ash away from his cigarette and blowing a new ball of smoke to pursue the others as the drizzle stabs into them, distorting their shapes.

“Boss!”

His cap is knocked off. Reflections are distorted. The cap is grabbed before it hits the tarmac. A piece of wood hooks his neck, shooting pain in his throat. A knife that glimmers in the stretching glare of the street light, over an empty stall from straight ahead, is brandished in his face. Hands, hard as the piece of wood, frisk his pockets. They fish out his mobile phone. His half-smoked cigarette has fallen on the tarmac scattering shards of glowing embers that soon die in the drizzle.

Makoyi is sat down and is stripped of his muddy safari boots and wet t-shirt. The wet trousers also. He is left in his boxers. In a few minutes, the hands vanish like ghosts.  

The wet tarmac pricks his toes as he clambers to his feet still dazed. The drizzle pricks his face. He steadies himself and wipes his face with his palms. He feels the iron saltiness of blood in his mouth. He spits into the drizzle. The night’s cold wind sifting through the drizzle burns on his bare chest. “For better or for worse.” The matrimonial vow reincarnates in his shivers. His ring is gone. “Such meticulous thieves.” Further up Nkrumah Street, he notices a yellow light from the awning of a building. It is several street lights away from the one under whose light he has been robbed. He staggers towards it.

A gang of glue-sniffing urchins, huddled in an empty groceries stall, mock and shriek at him.

“Chizi!”

Some, with long ghastly fingers like tattered curtain strips, hurl plastic bags with putrid urine at him. He ducks and breaks into a limp run.  

A sharp scream explodes in his ears as soon as he gets in the yellow light, on the concrete ramp of the double-door passage into the Guardian Transport and Courier services office. It is the scream of the night receptionist, a heavily built lady in a hoodie with the bus company logo. The nightshift supervisor and security guard are right beside her. The nightshift supervisor walks up to him. He knows it’s the work of the notorious street gang, The Taliban.

“I have been robbed. Everything. Gone. My wallet. My shoes. My clothes. My cap. Gone. I have been robbed.”

 “The Taliban.”

“Everything is gone.”

“Everyone can see everything. They eat with the police.”

“The Taliban?”

 “Yes. They are night shadows. Come inside quickly.”

Makoyi shivers into the reception. The nightshift supervisor, who has invited him, bends and rummages in a box behind the counter barricaded with a mesh, from where he retrieves and throws him a stuffy company overcoat.

 “Lucky they found something on you, otherwise.”

“Other—” his teeth clatter, “wise?”

“Your intestines would be out of your stomach and your head looking for your precious neck,” says the security guard, as he walks towards the street with a torch to see if more shadows were trailing Makoyi.

“Water.”

“But both Pub and Church are beyond reach like the mute wishes of the dead. St. Stephen’s Church is dark and the doors are bolted; Confucius Pub is a sombre place like the depths of his soul. ”

“Omwami?”

“Makoyi.”

“Makoyi, it’s dangerous to walk alone on this road at this hour, come and sit in the passengers’ waiting lounge.” The nightshift supervisor hiccups. “I’ll get you water.”

“Someone is gossiping you.”

“Hiccups and superstitions, not my cup of water.” The words disappear with the nightshift supervisor into a store.

A mixture of tragedy and gratitude pervades through Makoyi in the waiting lounge as he swallows gulps of water which the nightshift supervisor has brought him in a plastic cup. God is love, a poster with the portrait of Jesus shouts on a wall. He digests the message quietly, gratified by its presence.

“You have to make a report.”

“But you said they eat with them.”

“Just make a report.”

“He is lucky,” the receptionist has composed herself behind the counter behind a mesh where she speaks from, her voice coiling round the wall, echoing through the door that separates the reception from the passengers’ waiting lounge.

“I’ll walk to the station in the morning and narrate my story.”

Thoughts sieve through Makoyi’s mind like smoke escaping through mist. He cannot hold onto a thread of consistency. Flashing memories of his daughters playing with a skipping rope, his son engaging imaginary gears and driving an imaginary car, like shadows, camouflage in his thoughts. These cocktail of thoughts and flashing memories are tugging him into a drowsy state. He finally falls into a slumber. And there is a dream.

A huge pyramid with chunks of banknotes in many currencies stands before him: RMBs, Pounds Sterling, Deutschmarks, Yens, Rupees, Kroners, Rubbles and Dollars at the top. He clambers up the pyramid. There are three stages. He passes the first stage without a hitch. When he gets to the second stage he faces a bateleur eagle that strikes its talons at him. He ducks and it narrowly misses his jugular. For what seems like an eternity, he fights to escape the eagle and he does. He jumps to the next stage but from here he can hardly move. The impediment in his path is a venomous puff udder that keeps shifting in its shape: sometimes, it has multiple heads; sometimes, it is a dragon; sometimes, it’s a beautiful woman in a seductive posture; other times, it is a cobra. As soon as he learns how to deal with its current shape, it mutates. It is a futile struggle; the apex of the pyramid is vanity. He remains stuck in the second stage.

He stirs up in the early hours of Saturday morning; a Guardian bus has made a stop. Travellers stroll in and out of the Guardian buses’ waiting lounge, dragging with them hefty bags and suitcases, many looking relieved but for the occasional yawn and wearied long faces. Some quaff from Dasani mineral water bottles. Young men sporting Mohawks and kaleidoscopic colour patterns in their hair gawk at girls. The girls are lost in their phones. He stretches and yawns. There is a Sony TV set that had played Naija movies all night on an Africa Magic channel. Some women swaddled in colourful warm thick lesos are riveted on the screen hoisted up in a box on a wall. Travellers who arrived earlier in other buses from far-flung places like Nairobi are quietly sleeping; some are snoring like the crackle of a faulty exhaust pipe.

There is no drizzle. The morning is ripe. The sun is out, drying the night’s wetness on the tarmac; scattered leaves are blown around by a soft wind from bristling crotons and fountain trees. Nkrumah Street is full of bustling morning traffic. A season has passed, remnants of the night’s ordeal are but a memory in the salvation of Saturday morning’s hubbub. The old is gone, behold the new. There are men pushing carts, women with sacks and young men on motorbikes. Makoyi has some tea and five plain toasts of bread; he avoids roasted sweet potatoes since they never agree with his stomach. The man in a nightshift supervisor overall manages to get him a trouser and a t-shirt. He is feeling warmer. His next stop is The Central Police Station. The urchins like, nomadic scavengers, are gone, perhaps to pitch tent somewhere else in the township. The criminals must be hibernating in some hole. He heaves a sigh and walks on in the direction of The Central Police Station. Happy to be alive. God is love.

At the police station, a young lady officer with braids fills an occurrence book as Makoyi pours out the details of the night’s story, tipping it with inflexions here and there to spike it with the acute taste of vileness that will inflict the arms of law with a sense of urgency.

“Anything else?”

“Just that.”

“Just, that?”

“Yes, afande.”

“And you say you quarrelled with your wife that’s why you loitered the streets?”

“Yes, we had a misunderstanding.”

“Just, a misunderstanding?”

She looks suspiciously at him. He nods.

“Mm hmm.”

“Okay.”

“What next?”

“You have filed the report. We will take it from here.”

“So?”

“So, you are free to go.”

We will take it from here—that’s what they always say. Makoyi steps out onto a different road. He wipes his hand over his face and moustache. This road leads to a turn that is a short cut road behind Confucius Pub, parallel to the one he crossed last night before skipping over puddles and rivulets of muddy rainwater. He breathes in some air. He is fevered in his mind with the thought that he must return to his children. He has been out all night, the disgruntled husband, just to punish his wife. But what of my children? he thinks. 

Rosalinda. The night has been long, mother of my children. Let me hold my children. Let me hear their laughter and forget the miseries I have endured. The untold suffering of an angry man out in the cold streets of our township. In the cold of exile, unable to solicit even the mercy of solitude. Out there, I was robbed of my mind, stripped and left only with my life—naked in spirit. I met a good Samaritan who gave me an overcoat and a place to sleep, a glimpse of love. I had a dream. A strange dream but that is not for now. Here I am, is it not what counts? Yes, we had a quarrel but I have returned. I have taken the road to return to my family like a prodigal husband, but also to my wife. I don’t want us to break into fragments that will be scattered into untold misery and the lips of gossip. I saw urchins out there—you call them chokora—and I saw lives that are chunking away to waste in the gutter. I heard the failures of fathers somewhere in their groans and heard the absence of a family’s love in the wheeze of the putrid urine plastic bags hurled at me. I smelt depression in the air clogged with stagnation in Nkrumah Street and in my thoughts. I passed and saw mistrust and fear in the sojas of the shops. My cold feet trudged on the tarmac as asphalt pricked my toes and the drizzle pricked like needles on my skin. I rummaged my memories to find the Christmases we never quarrelled. Rosalinda. I found few. Last night we fought. What is a perfect husband? Forgive my disgruntlement. Forgive my leaving. Let’s walk a new road. The road to Rosalinda. Let’s find a perfect husband. This morning. I have returned from my unhappy road.

These thoughts echo in every stride he makes until finally he is at the gate of his house and he stops. To think again.

About the Author

Abukutsa Moses studied English and Literature which he currently teaches at a Secondary school in Busia County, Western Kenya. His short story Abraham’s Cremation was shortlisted in the 2017 Nalif (Nyanza Literary Festival). He has published three poems with Praxis online magazine for the arts, two poems with African Writer online magazine, a short story with Kikwetu literary online magazine, several short stories on khusoko.com an East African online Business platform and a short story on afritondo.com.