The Local: When the long-suffering wife calls

The recent epidemic of sudden rains lasting hours has revealed stuff men - with parental hair on their chests - vumilia at the hands of their long-suffering wives while pretending to call the shots at the local.

Take Diameter, the political analyst, whose two brats will finally get free laptops from the Jubilee government of kusema na ku-tender.

It was raining cats, dogs and not a few hyenas, when Diameter received a call, which one could tell was from his Mother Goose wife. Why else did he have to cusp his hands over the phone while speaking with eyes bulging like he had seen the ghost of Alice Lakwena?

Other times, Diameter receives his wife’s calls from under the table, from where he mumbles stuff like, “Ndio hawa polisi!” then cuts the call and surreptitiously darts his big brown eyes around to see who noticed his slurred white lie. Diameter also has an uncanny ability of knowing it’s his wife calling, even when his phone is vibrating from inside the pocket of his 1.5 Freezer jeans trousers.

He listens to the vibrations like one mentally assessing whether he’s getting high enough, before sliding his right hand to fish the phone and then checks the caller from an outstretched arm under the seat with squinting eyes.

“Niko mahali pabaya... nita kupigia!” he explains, yet the call is about one of his brats who had swallowed a rusty Kenyatta coin that was issued in 1978.

Back to the day Diameter received a call from his wife when it was raining.

He told her from inside the small unisex urinal that he was going to have two more bottles of poison “niki ngoja mvua iishe.” The demands the wife made from the other end of the line left everyone stifling drunken laughter.

Never mind at the time Diameter was struggling with an overflowing sufuria of rain water and which was competing for space with his beer due to that small matter of the leaking makuti roof at Wa-Hannah’s.

Diameter went outside, stood in the heavy downpour and began taking a selfie! He returned dripping wet to assess his efforts and proceeded to send the picture to his wife as proof it was raining at the local!