Stoney Cold

Head shake. Another head shake. Yet another head shake, and still a lot more heads on the queue waiting to shake in defiance to the destitute face of the street pauper.

Stiff heads won’t tweak a tad. Even their eyes lie frozen; the occasional blink ruled out for a moment. They seem lifeless and unresponsive.

Perhaps the only sign of life on stiff heads is the gentle inconspicuous spasms of the nose, as streams of oxygen bulge their way in, and the off-putting carbon dioxide escapes, faintly inflating the nose’s ala.

So hard is a pauper’s gaze that this has to be the level of detail they see, might I suggest the blue and red arrows of air entering and leaving the nostrils, as the textbook described it in elementary school.

Far-reaching queues are the perfect hunting ground for street paupers, and Tom Mboya Avenue has never known queues so long as Super Metro’s.

It has been alluded that the company has top-tier management, professional enough to run a country. The good repute has worked well for them, stretching their queues and fleets longer and farther by the day.

Paupers will move along the queue, scouting through all the faces and looking for clues of weakness.

You must understand that in Nairobi, strength is considered being nonchalant; mindful of your business alone and unfazed by anyone else around you.

Even if you dropped a leg and someone called you out, you’d have to hop forward headstrong. For all you know, they could be luring you to pluck out the other.

Anyone trying to catch your attention is perceived as a swindler. That’s how bad it is.

Because of its notoriety with conmanship, Nairobi has earned itself the name shamba la mawe. Translation: a garden of rocks.

For the slothful among the many jobless, making ends meet here without a good hustle is a lot like tilling on a hard rock.

It amounts to nothing, not unless one is willing to play foul, and what better setting for foul game than Nairobi?

Scores of people frequent the city, unwary of its guile. Swindlers constantly prawl on the streets, scouting for naivety.

In whoever they find it, they strike with deceptive tactics, and work their way up with a dogged persuasion. Eyes on the big reap.

To survive shamba la mawe, you have to be intently cold, you have to have a stone heart. Stoney cold is what you have to be. But do you, though?

It’s what we’ve all been groomed to believe. What if it’s a little too extreme?

Standing on the long boarding queue on Tom Mboya avenue, the sight of shaking heads, and stiff, unfazed heads struck a nerve of memory.

It’s not every day you get to relive a memorable moment of your past; one that has been lying sandwiched in between pages of years and years of memories.

The first time a head shake intrigued me this much was back in elementary, at Salem, the teeny weeny school at the base of the huge rock of Mwingi.

We’d go rock climbing for breaks, drop tires from the top of the rock and watch them madly race down as if they’d been launched on rocket fuel.

There’s a special, unmistakable kind of adrenaline that kicks in on a race and our hearts wallowed in it. It felt so rewarding.

Salem was a small school, with an enviable pupil – teacher ratio. Enrolment was growing steadily. Consequently, every now and then, the pecking order would be upset by a new face, especially for the lasses.

But something was different about this new girl. She was braver, more outspoken and easily spooked. I’d be right to say she was a slay queen of the day. One would have been a fool to cross her hairs.

She wouldn’t spare a breath to assert her dominance to her victims. The head shake was her signature stamp of victory.

She would swirl and shake her head like whirlwind to our dismay and while on it, this was her victory chant, every word matching with her moves:

Shado mado, avocado mado, shake shake!

Evidently teased, we would ask for another ‘shake shake’.

Come on, do it again!

Mscheeeew!

So good were the dismissals that the drama queen etched her dominance, and took her place on the throne. But just when she had the throne to herself, she left Salem.

Now more than a decade later, her memory lingers. She was indeed a queen, stoney cold but still cool.

Well, hi Karen! I must have crossed your hairs with this one. I’d appreciate a long mscheeeew in the comments, just like old times!

[Cover photo credits/Freepik/wayhomestudio]