MEN'S CORNER: His car is broken down, but he doesn’t say it!

Since your name appears now and then in a tabloid that brags it’s the most important daily in town, some uninformed people tend to believe you’re a man of significance, while the fact is, like most members of the scribbling fraternity, you’re just a struggling kaperson. Mtu wa vivi-hivi.

Now, you’ve a little mtumba car bought on a loan, but it’s rarely on the road for reasons that you won’t reveal here, since you don’t want everyone in town to know you’re a mere survivor. Actually, you’ve made all those who inquire why you walk long distances or use the daladala while you own a car, that you’re do that on doctor’s orders.

“Why, eh, you’ve a car yet you come to work by a daladala… you’re a very strange man!” a lady colleague would usually ask.

“Doctor’s orders,” you usually say (read “lie”) in response to this kind of intrusive question.

“Doctor’s orders? You mean it has to do with staying fit?” she’d continue probing.

“You guessed right; it’s healthier to take a bus to work than driving…my doctor says that, and I fully agree with him,” you say. This response, of course, is a product of your imaginative head.

Yeah, for the truth is, you use public transport more often than not because you rarely have the money to fuel your car. Oh, yeah…furthermore you dread reaching the mileage threshold, at which point you’re forced to take the car to your mechanic, Fundi Lucas, for service.

You dread dealing with Lucas because you’re sure he cons you on all those little things—oil filter, brake fluid, brake pads…. and so on and so forth—the things you suspect he doesn’t actually buy although you give him money for the same. Mjini hapa! You’re sure the guy, as we say in Kiswahili slang, anakupiga?

All fundis in Bongo will con you in one way or another, no matter how smart you think you are. So, a motorist may as well keep his familiar, crooked fundi, for, as they say, better the devil (read Lucas) you know, than an alien one. That’s why you don’t think much of the lakh-plus you give for car servicing items you’re certain he won’t be buying. In any case, you’re certain, it will take very, very long before he can rob you again in the pretext of servicing your vehicle.

You’ve noted that whenever you arrive to a grocery in your car, the attendants welcome with a lot of respects, referring you to as, not just as mzee, but mzee wetu—our own old man. Eti, it’s like you and they are members of the same clan! However, when you arrive on foot, meaning you just dropped off at the bus stage across the grocery, they treat you like the nobody that you are, but it bothers you not.

But there’re all these drinkers who get really bothered if they’re caught without the four-tyre machine. The type that will hide their faces at the bus stage lest they’re seen by people who have always known them as “mtu wa maana”. You thank your Creator you aren’t like that.

Such guys are the type who, upon taking a seat at your table, will start, without anybody asking him, explaining why he had to come in public transport.

“Today’s children are a really menace… now, my son, I normally lend him my car and you know what he has done? He had been issued with a whole four tickets and he never told me…. The cops just seized my car as I drove here, for I only had money for my beers, not one hundred and twenty thousand, excluding the fine, which they wanted….”

You want to ask him, “Who asked for all those details?” However, you don’t, because, anyway, the whole thing, whether true or false, doesn’t concern you.

Another guy of the same type will be heard say: “You know what? Wives can be a headache; imagine, just because her mother is in town, she cannot let go of my car… wants to drive her to visit relatives and friends, even those who live less than ten-minute walk from our house… women!”

It’s all lies. For weeks now, the guy’s car has been at a garage bubu located in our neighbourhood that operates under a mango tree—you’ve seen it with your own eyes!

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