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The sight of a healthy adult with parental hair on his chest falling down with a thud kwa rough concrete is so embarrassing, unsightly and funny, all rolled into one - kwanza, when the falling is a violent meeting of that bone at the tip of the butt crack and the edge of the concrete staircase. Ouch!
But falling down while drunk is a different ball game all together. There is something comically involuntary about it. There is no better place to watch inebriated adults falling down than the local. Every drunk has his own style of falling down and with varying consequences.
Take Owish for instance.
After knocking down half a bottle of Johnnie Mtembezi Double Black, our Jakom gets his knees going all jelly and ana jiachilia from his seat the way gunia ya waru falls from a lorry in Maritikiti...tuff!!
The only grouse one has with this kind of kuanguka is that when his mango head contacts the simiti, it sounds like a collision between a miraa-ferrying Probox and those exhauster lorries with words Honey Sucker across their sides.
That Jakom is still alive is testimony that God in heaven loves drunkards.
Kang’ethe, the old metal at the local, is so selective on where his drunken self falls: mitaro! His wobbly legs, then under the influence of several quarter ‘Rotich’ brandy bottles, and with only Sh20 mutura for stomach defence, have a way of wheeling themselves towards water bodies, where he falls in a kuteleza fashion and really struggles to lift his head, which at the time weighs like a chuma ya reli, from the mud.
Diameter, the political analyst, after knocking down 10 bottles on an empty stomach, falls like mtu amejitega and doubles up, half his torso towards the ground such that the following day he reports to the local with an Elastoplast on his swollen forehead that is so bruised, it resembles a crime scene.
Waka-Knife, the butcher, simply tries to hold on to the air, his legs a few inches shy of the ground and finding no support, obeys the law of gravity.
How women at the local, the likes of Miss Penny, Sister Lucy, Karembo and Nyambu the counter girl, fall when high like kites, is a story for another Furahi Day.
