Snapshots: The twelve tales of Christmas

Last year, at a time like this, I miraculously convinced a Luo beauty who spends most of her time studying wild-coloured bacteria, to have dinner with me.

After we had munched on a curious assemblage of tasteless leaves that modern women like to chew, I walked her to a cab. Then remembering that her father is a retired soldier who could match to my place of work the next morning and beat me up if anything happened to her, I asked the driver if I could ride along and come back with him. He said no problem.

So we drive to Embakasi and drop this Luo beauty. But on the way back, the taxi driver receives a call from a drunk client who urgently needs to be picked from a pub and dropped home before his wife matches over and pounds him to a pulp.

Being a reasonable man, and in the spirit of Christmas, I agree when he offers to drop me by the side of the road.

“Bus stop iko hapo mbele tu,” he announced helpfully before speeding off. What he, however, didn’t mention is that ‘hapo mbele’ was a kilometre away!

Thus, if you happened to see an unfit and ageing man huffing and panting along Mombasa Road last year at midnight, that fellow was me. Thankfully, thugs and all the dangerous creatures of the night were either deep asleep or had laid down arms, all in the spirit of Christmas.

The next morning, I woke up at 4am to catch the earliest means of public transport to my village. But by the time I landed at the bus stop, there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. One enterprising fellow had, however, converted his private car into a ‘shuttle’ so we all piled in – at double the usual cost.

Being someone who drives a ramshackle myself, I knew in a few moments that his full-time occupation was probably a tractor driver. But I didn’t sweat much because I knew the local church back home had been praying for the safe return of it sons and daughters who ‘work in distant’ places.

At a place called Awasi, we ran into a speed trap. The fine was more than the driver had collected from us, so we left the poor fellow attempting to ‘talk nicely’ to the officers.

I arrived in Kisumu at 7pm, found yet another shuttle to Bungoma and waited for it to fill up. After two hours of waiting for just two passengers, a man and wife with a baby sauntered in. You should have heard us sigh with relief! But just when the driver was about to gun it, the guy’s wife said, “Nataka chips na kuku!”

Hubby would hear none of it and judging by the restrained but edgy look on his face, we knew this couple was on the verge of screwing up their holiday even before it begun.

Guess who saved the day? The matatu driver. The battle-scarred veteran assessed the situation like an elder, switched off the ignition and told the man, “Mzee, tafadhali wacha mama aende anunue chips na kuku!”