Mr Survivor: Why my lionhearted Queen has been reduced to a nervous wreck
Queen was quite shaken over the graffiti on the wall.
Good times do not last forever, so they say. Although my Queen has always been a very confident and courageous woman, she is now walking on eggshells. I should know because I have been her husband for the last half a dozen years.
Queen’s courage is not unfounded, if her steady rise in religious, social and financial circles is anything to go by. Religiously, Queen is the long standing secretary to the Mothers’ Union in the parish. Socially, she is the treasurer of the giant women’s chama in Happy Valley. More importantly, in matters of finance, she is the CEO of Slopes Supermarket.
With such an impressive CV, Queen has been straddling the Happy Valley countryside like a peacock. Her admirable social mobility has not been taken lightly by our enemies of development, with the Happy Valley rumour mills operating at an overdrive to destroy her good name and consequently wreck our marriage. But I have stood by her, even when she does not reciprocate when the same rumour mills weave juicy tales about my association with Mrembo.
So you can now imagine my shock when I saw Queen quite shaken last Monday evening. She was not the Queen I have known for a decade plus. That evening as the family settled for supper, Makena, our CPA (comptroller of palace affairs) joined us in the dining room.
“Karibu ni sahau (I almost forgot), there is something written on the door of the shop,” she said.
“What is written?” Queen asked.
Makena looked at me, then Queen and back to me as if asking for protection.
“They are the same words that were written on baba’s car,” she dropped the bombshell.
Last week, some nefarious fellas wrote the name ‘Dynasty’ on both the wind screen and rear window of my Beetle. Now, owning a car is a mark of riches this side of the world and as you also well know, it is a crime to be rich in Kenya. Shouting silence enveloped the house and I feared that my Queen was going to faint.
“What are you saying now? When did you see it and why did you have to wait until now?” Queen asked looking murderously at Makena.
In her signature style, Makena disappeared to the kitchen throwing words behind her, “I said karibu ni sahau.”
“How can we know that you are not the one who wrote?” Queen shot back.
Turning to me, she shouted, “You are just seated there saying nothing as if you have not heard anything!”
It was the first time she was shouting at me since our last family outing to Holiday Premier Hotel. It therefore caught me by surprise and I had to think fast and save myself from instant banishment to marital Siberia.
“I never trust whatever she says. Let us go and see for ourselves,” I told her.
The fact that I had cast doubts on the authenticity of Makena’s information worked miracles. It meant two things: One, there was a probability that Makena had read wrongly. Secondly, I had shown my distrust for Makena, which was a pledge of my loyalty to Queen.
I walked Queen to her supermarket and, there, the profanity glared on the door with an incisive arrogance. “Duka la Dynasty, Pesa ya Dynasty!”
None of us verbalised the words. The writing was done in permanent paint and the writer seemed to have had all the time in the world to do it.
For the first time since our marriage, I saw Queen in real shock. All her religious convictions seemed to have evaporated in one fell swoop. She could not wait for morning to erase the graffiti. She literally ordered me to go to the house and get a panga to erase the ‘desecration’. The cleansing ceremony took me a whole hour.
“What do we do now? Queen asked me when we went back to the house. At that moment, I remembered how she had contemptuously dismissed me when a similar graffiti was discovered on my Beetle. She had said that I exhibited the carelessness of one who valued his beer more than he valued his life. This was, however, the wrong time to remind her of her words.
“Ignore them. They are just joking,” I told her. It took me a whole hour’s lecture to convince her that the writers of the graffiti would not come for us at night. I was forced to lie to her that the same writings were all over town and that they were harmless. She finally accepted to go to bed after a long prayer to God to save her business and family from the evil one.
The thing is, Queen believes that we are hustlers and does anything within her means to be as far as possible from the dynasties’ tag. Since that Monday, the issue of dynasties and hustlers has been item number one in her prayers. She was so scared that she has been reporting to the supermarket the first thing every morning before washing her face.
