Having polished off an enriching meal of makongoro(animal legs and hooves) soup, I need to complimentthat with a beer or two before heading home.
Manka has been attending me because, according to her I’m not a typical Mwasu (erroneously referred to as Mpare). She’s, in other words, saying I’m not strict with budgeting like a true Mwasu should be.
That’s not true, of course, because the most I allow myself to part with in the form of the so-called “keep change” never goes beyond a hundred bob or two.
Manka, however, is an optimist. Her hope is that I maysomehow mellow in due course and gift her with something to buy at least a soda.
I’ve taken two beers, and these, together with my makongoro soup, adds to a bill of Sh9.5k.
After handing over a 10k banknote to Manka, I immediately stretch my hand to her, meaning I need my change. She looks at me in a manner that suggests she’s saying: are you serious?
“Do you mean you want your change of jero?” she asks, with a wry smile. I say yes, of course. For the uneducated, jero is Kiswahili slang for the five hundred bob coin. Just like we’ve the word buku for a thousand bob. Yeah, I say firmly.
“Duh!” she exclaims and continues, “do you have a jero, so you give it to me and I give you a buku?”
As she says that, her hand is busy shuffling in her purse, like she’s in a state of desperation. “I asked if you have jero for me, so that I give you a buku…you aren’t saying anything!” And, as she says that, she’sbrandishing a buku before me.
Some patrons are looking at us, clearly curious at what’s going on. Mwanamme mzima, a whole gentleman, is an altercation with a mhudumu over a mere five hundred bob? You suspect that’s whateverybody looking at us is saying.
I’m burning inside over my jero which is about to vanish, just like that! Yeah, for it looks like I’ve to let it go despite myself. Why, a true gentleman—which I suppose I am (ahem!), knows when he’s licked. I tell her I don’t have a jero.
And with that, I turn to the direction I prefer to take when leaving this place and walk away without saying goodbye. And soon, as I arrive at the bar where I normally take my last beer before heading to the place I call kwangu,this lanky mhudumu ushers me with a lot of civility.
Then as she gets me a stool, the mhudumu, who calls me shemeji because her ex-husband hails from my ancestral village, she says: “Shem, you know, I don’t have the habit, so please believe what I’ll tell you.”
“Believe you on what, shem?” I ask.
“I am seriously in need of two thou… buku mbili tu,please!” she says as she proceeds to ask Rukia the akaunta to give me a warm Castro Laiti.
With this kind of courtesy, what would you have done if you were in my shoes, reader?
