When I was nine years old, people started whispering in the village. To be honest, that in itself wasn’t news because in a proper village, it is a given that people must whisper.
What struck me was that when they whispered, they discreetly pointed with their lips in the direction of one of my distant grannies.
She had changed, they mumbled. She had discarded the long dresses expected of a woman of her stature and developed a liking for ‘things’ that ended half a foot below the knee. Riswa!
As if that was not enough, it was whispered, she now wore a string of bungles on her hand and a whole raft of necklaces.
Most scandalous was that she had resumed eating chicken, a delicacy she was supposed to have quit by custom the moment her eldest daughter reached puberty.
I don’t know how this became public knowledge, though. But probably because women bathed by the stream then, I eavesdropped on her co-wives saying she had stopped wearing eshibunguyi, the knee length boxer-like innerwear deemed decent for proper women.
Instead, she had taken to wearing those things for small girls. Further proof that something was terribly amiss lay in the fact that once in a while, she would be heard giggling girlishly on one footpath or other.
I never got to connect the dots, till I bumped into her on a small muddy footpath snaking through a sugarcane farm. She was not alone.
Facing her was an elderly gentlemen who was a man of stature in the village because he had retired as a lorry driver and come back home to invest in a shop with dusty shelves at the local market.
Even to my baby eyes, there was something decidedly odd about the pair.
First, they were standing rather too close to each other. Second, she looked rather shy, which was odd for a woman in her 50s.
I would have sworn she was behaving like a girl I saw my uncle wooing a week earlier.
I greeted them politely and walked past, disturbed. Something was amiss, but I couldn’t quite wrap my nine-year-old mind around it. But two weeks later, the news broke.
You know the way women are prone to whispering nasty things about each other? Well my distant granny snidely made a comment about how one of her co-wife’s daughters was giving birth like a ‘prostitute yet she had no husband’.
As happens in the village, the woman she whispered to started behaving like she had ants in the seat of her pants.
She was unable to sit still, until she found the so-called woman whose daughter was giving birth like a prostitute and told her: “Wah! Do you know what Fulani is saying about your daughter?”
When that woman received the whole news bulletin, she rose seething with fury, wrapped a khanga around her waist and walked with great haste in the direction of my distant granny’s hut. War!
It was around 5.30pm, I recall – that hour in the village when responsible men would be watching their cows graze in the compound as calves that had just suckled romped happily from one end of the homestead to another.
She stood on an old anthill and deftly initiated a quarrel. Back then, a verbal spat between two women was an art form, not the crass nonsense we see on social media these days.
She began deftly, throwing in mild stings, until her target emerged out of her hut and found herself an old anthill where she could return fire.
As verbal wars go, my distant granny was no joke. After she had unleashed deadly al-Shabaab style missiles against her ‘weak opponent’ opponent, the tide changed suddenly when the aggrieved party sent in KDF jet fighters from her Nanyuki Airbase.
“You are saying my daughters give birth at home, yet they have no husbands, huh? At least mine give birth, you harlot."
“Yours abort; all of them. You think we don’t know that it is you who gets them the medicine to abort? You think we don’t know where you bury the foetuses in the night?” she spat.
A hush fell over the village. I could have sworn that even the galloping calves stopped midflight. But more was coming: “You should be ashamed of yourself, a woman of your age dressing like a whore and sneaking into sugarcane farms with that potbellied man."
“Your daughters creep into this sugarcane row with men and you creep into the next row with that man. Shame on you!” she hurled the TKO.
At that point, my distant granny realised that battle was over, and without a backward glance tiptoed down her old anthill and stole into her hut, the wind of scandal behind her back.