By Ted Malanda
It is an old tradition that when a man comes of age, he gathers his sons and passes forth a few words of wisdom.
He needn’t do this on his death bead. As a matter of fact, a wise man starts talking to his sons the moment they become men, which is hours after they are born.
And so it was with my father. When I was four, he looked me in the eye and said, “Son? If you want peace, leave your wife’s money alone.”
I had no idea what he was talking about because I was awfully fond of his wife’s money — especially when she converted them into sweets.
I was also more interested in the peanuts on the table, which we were munching in an old stomach bonding ritual between father and son.
Guard
Thinking back in retrospect, I suspect that gem of wisdom had arisen after a little fiscal policy disagreement between the old warrior and his better half.
A year later, I was encroaching on his plate of boiled cassava when he said, “Son? Give your woman freedom. You cannot guard her like a child. There are men in this village, when their wives go to the river, they follow. How do they know what happens when she is behind a bush for six seconds?”
Wisdom
As usual, I had no idea what he was talking about although I was certain the only thing a woman would do behind a bush for six seconds was to irrigate the nation.
But I didn’t, of course, bring my little gem of wisdom to his attention.
But last week, it hit me. Travelling from Bungoma, I had the fortune to share the front seat with this well endowed sister. I was considering throwing a few lines as they say, but then she removed a little parcel that forced me to wait.
Sour milk
That parcel had a packet of sour milk, one chapatti and an avocado, which she proceeded to make a meal out of. I was already in love because my mother once told me, “If you want a good wife, my son, marry a woman who eats. She will cook for you.”
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Unfortunately, we couldn’t have much of a conversation because it turned out that she was married. I got to know that because her husband called her all the way from Bungoma where she’d gone to visit her parents to Nairobi asking, “Uko wapi?”
He wanted to know why her father’s phone was switched off and why she was taking forever to get back to Nairobi. “Imagine he called me at 4am this morning. He thinks I am with another man,” she fumed.
When we got to Nairobi at 9pm, he rang for the last time. “Don’t come to my house because I will not open the door.”
Do you know what elders would have told him? He worries another will ‘steal’ her because she is kilometres away. But he has no idea what happens in the five minutes she spends in the communal bathroom on his plot, right within earshot!
The volcanic eruptions men date
When sages said hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they forgot to mention that fury is like a volcanic eruption if the woman in question is at the door.
I was reminded of this when my phone roused me from deep within my sheets as I shivered in hibernation and made futile attempts to sweat out this July chill.
It was one of my young friends. “Hello,” I mumbled, my mind longing for the weekend I spent sweating like a pig in Lodwar.
“You know I’m married, don’t you?” the young man asked.
I mumbled sagely that I was well aware of the fact.
“Now my ex came to my house uninvited. She began causing a scene so I dragged her out of the house and shut the door,” he reported.
I sat upright, now fully awake. He had my attention. This was a perfect bridging course to separate riffraff from junior elder and I’m desperate to become a junior elder.
“The problem is, instead of leaving, she is screaming out there. All the neighbours are out. Should I drag her back to the house and, er, pinch her nose?” he enquired.
I scratched one of my three grey hairs, stroked my goatee intellectually, coughed politely like a proper elder should and said, “Do nothing of the kind. If there is an alcoholic beverage in your house, send memsaf for a glass, sit in the husband’s ‘official’ seat, stick your scaly feet on the table and watch TV like a man.”
That is what he did for two hours. But when he attempted to walk out to replenish the frothy substances his body was now badly in need of, he discovered she’d virtually locked him inside his own house.
“Imagine she has stuffed pieces of wood inside the keyhole so I can’t open the door. She has even broken some windows. You should have let me beat that woman up...”
I reminded him that had he done that, Justice Njoki Ndung’u would have been compelled to hold fruitful discussions with him in Latin that would have ended with him becoming a carpenter at Shimo la Tewa Maximum Prison. I advised him to instead report to the police.
And you know what an officer told him? “That is not a serious matter!”
I may just be a junior elder, but I suspect it will only become a serious matter when that woman torches my young friend’s house.