“You never really know someone.” Said a dark
figure reflectively, smiling enigmatically at the pitch darkness in the tiny
room.
A terribly fouled air
hovered over the room. It was packed beyond capacity. The dark figure moved its
back against the rough wall uneasily. It felt painfully sore, reminding him of
the afternoon flogging by the beastly warders as they went about the routinal
searches for contraband. His silhouette danced briskly on the dirty wall as he
tried to find his sore famished bum a much comfortable position, in a place
where comfort was a word long forgotten.
Through the heavily
grilled ventilator cum window, a pair of eyes clouded in tears got elevated
towards the starry night sky. A full moon resurfaced from behind a heavy mass
of dark clouds. Streaks of moonlight filtered in through the grills and shone
on a weary face, revealing its chiseled features. The eyes squirmed in a mild
pain and a teardrop found the flee-infested floor.
Nodding sagaciously,
the figure was slowly being drawn into believing that life was a meal of bitter
aloes cooked in a pot of honey—a very strange cuisine indeed if you ask any
chef. How can you have everything you ever wished for in a moment, and then
have nothing at all in the next minute?
A man next to him, in
his chloroformic slumber after a day of dehumanizing work in a quarry, tried to
seek the comfort of the figure’s left shoulder, the reeking froth in the
armpits not a deterrent enough to make him mind his distance. But he got more
than he had haggled for—a violent shove off the shoulder whose protruding bones
craved for independence from a dark gummy diseased skin. In retaliation, a mild
crack sound betrayed the fact that a fist had been clenched as directed by a brain
whose judgment had been clouded by social malaise blamed on the erosion of
social norms and ethics which guided our forefathers to a harmonious
coexistence.
With baited breath,
reason slowly reasserted itself and the ugly weapon of jaw dislocation was
lowered as the glue of animosity that held the five digits in a rigid union
melted away. The figure was once a corpulent career banker, now behind bars
because he took for granted the Sunday school lessons on honesty. Now he knew
that contentment is a good thing, for it stands in the way of the senseless and
soul-consuming desire to rake in millions you can’t afford to spend! If only he
had been satisfied with his decent salary….
Thoughts of life after
prison made him shudder. He thought of his wife and wondered if she had not
been compromised by the seven years itch. As for his children, they probably
had a new daddy by now. Opting to shut his eyes to his troubles, images of his
big car and palatial house flashed in the darkness of his eyelids. Something
clogged his throat and a loud sudden fart from a corner jerked his stream of
consciousness. A disturbing snore followed, then a slap and a furious scratch
that left a generous amount of grime beneath long crooked fingernails of a
fellow inmate.
The figure’s sleepy
eyes swept over the multitude of dark smelly bodies trying to solicit the
comfort of rest from a surface that even a church mouse would proudly rebuff
should man turn a friend and offer it a home. Prison was the strangest of
places and had someone told him seven years ago that today he would be here, he
would have arrogantly sworn on Saint Augustine that the person needed
psychiatric care. As a free man, penitentiary was the last address he ever
expected to be associated with him—a high-flying corporate honcho. But with
this life, you really can’t tell of your next move, what with its inexplicable
paradoxes that would probably take more than a lifetime of study to understand
them?
On the corridor
outside, the clanging of the jailer’s heavy boots could be heard, accompanied
by the intimidating jingling of a bunch of old keys. He knew that in a jiffy,
the grilled door would fly open and then the head count would start with every
inmate squatting. He longed for the morning porridge to contain the anger of an
army of worms threatening to rip his intestines into shreds of meatballs. As
they queued for breakfast, memories of a sumptuous breakfast of steamy sweet
coffee and hotdogs in his palatial home came racing through his balding head.
The corners of his heavily mustachioed mouth stretched to accommodate a crooked
spoon full of what should be a pig’s delight.
“Surely it can’t be
over,” a bespectacled man next to him complained of lack of sugar in the
porridge. Three days ago, a truck of sugar had raced through the prison gates
to deliver twenty bags of the precious commodity, unloaded by some of the
prisoners. But the banker had been in jail long enough to know that asking some
questions was considered treason by the jailer’s government. And treason was an
offense punishable by blows, sticks and kicks. Through the corner of his eyes,
he watched the man with big horn-rimmed glasses struggle with the sugarless
porridge and smiled to himself. You know, prison isn’t everybody’s cup of
tea—just how do you adjust from quaffing the finest wines and cigars to
slurping sugarless white porridge and if lucky enough, pulling at an occasional
stub of unfiltered cigarette from another man’s anus? The man was a well known award-winning
journalist, locked up for life for strangling a woman he had never met! But
didn’t the medical autopsy report of the government pathologist clearly
indicate that the deceased had a broken hyoid bone? And didn’t the police,
beyond any apparent doubt, place him in the woman’s house at the time of the
murder, never mind the two had never met?
The banker remembered
his own case. Immediately after his sentence was handed down, like Njeng’a, he
had shouted, “what about the big man?” but he was quickly led away after a hot
slap across the face to a waiting prison van under water-tight security
befitting only a head of state, in a country rocked by civilian and military insurrections.
Being a highly sensational case, the cameras had flashed till he became
literally blind. As the van sped away, he remembered like it was yesterday, his
boss at the bank approaching him with a get-rich-quick proposal that he took
hook, line and sinker.
The National Reserve Bank had just lowered its base lending rate to the country’s commercial banks,
making personal unsecured loans quite affordable to those with payslips. As
customers came in droves to sign up for loans, the banker would promise to
speed up the loan processing and elated, the gullible clients would leave him
their contacts so that he could call them when the money was available in their
accounts. Now, once a client showed up for withdrawal and tipped the banker, a
hit squad strategically positioned across the street outside the bank, would
receive a phone call with instructions to trail a described customer leaving
the banking hall. A primary school teacher was once pulled out of a Matatu by the hit squad alleging he was
a wanted dangerous carjacker. The other passengers counted their lucky stars
and helped bundle the wailing teacher into a waiting saloon car. Ten minutes
later, he was alone in a bush, stunned with his ears ringing from the hot slaps
and two hundred thousand shillings poorer!
The banker’s case was
lined up for appeal. But what he didn’t know was that in the next six months,
he would let up the ghost in his cell as he waited for the feedback on his
appeal from the high court. The official cause of death would be ‘SADS’—Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. However, the ugly secret truth would be that he was
actually bludgeoned by a blunt object on the nape by a prison officer paid to
do the job by the ‘big man,’ who believed in letting sleeping dogs lie. Feeling
the appeal could open up a Pandora’s Box, he decided with finality to get rid
of the thorn in his precious flesh.
A shoddy interment in
the prison cemetery would then mark the banker’s end, but not before his bones
got unearthed by inmates condemned to the same fate a few years later. Whenever
the prison authority felt that one had overstayed his welcome to enjoy their coveted
pit, disregarding a horde of potential tenants in wait—the uttermost expression
of ungratefulness, they would joke—the inmates were called in to
unceremoniously throw one out to scatter before the wind and get washed down
the streets by a heavy downpour.
At the morning parade,
the scary consequences of yielding to the temptation to find freedom other than
that offered within the humiliating prison walls was made very clear. A single
glance at the grim-faced man at the watchtower wielding a doom-breathing
sub-machine gun left the banker wondering why the plump wardress was bothering
herself yet she could benefit from saving her breath. Looking around the
mammoth crowd of men who through their own sheer faults and others’, had thrown
their lives into total disarray, he couldn’t figure out a single man daring
enough to take a double dozen of bullets on his back should the cranium be
missed. All of them appeared sickly as the whoosh of the cold morning air swept
through their ragged uniforms, transmitting a nauseating stench of fermented
sweat. The drone of the wardress’ speech made him sick to the stomach for it
only dampened his iota of ever being free.
As the assembly
dispersed, the banker couldn’t help but wonder if it was worth the trouble to
tempt fate by trying to escape a maximum security prison, yet chances were very
high that you could end up biting more than you could actually chew. You could
escape, yes, but to the next world!
One by one, once men of
integrity in the society, sixteen inmates—mostly barefooted with the lucky ones
wearing a pair of then worn out mismatched slippers, brought in by a visiting
friend or relative and delivered to them after the warder on duty had pocketed
something—were squeezed into a poorly ventilated backside of a rickety prison
van and the door locked with a padlock that could have served better to
safeguard the treasures in the Egyptian pyramids in Giza. Four warders sought
the comfort of an alternative automobile since who enjoys the perfume of
unwashed armpits, loins and worst, a mouth that parted ways with toothbrush and
paste an eon ago?
The sun was still
rising when the van sped past the creaking prison gates, its smooth pneumatic
tyres groaning under the overload. An equally dilapidated sedan soon followed
suit, ugly muzzles of four G3 guns pointing out of its windows.
Inside the van,
everybody was clearly lost in thoughts, apparently mourning over a paradise
lost through a miscalculated step while trudging the dreaded path of law. Some
were renowned academicians and others thieving men of the cloth. But most were
simply kleptomaniacs and thus seasoned jailbirds who felt at home in the
correction institution. The banker even knew of a man who had swore never to
leave the confines of prison because everything was free and you didn’t have to
worry about where to get your next meal!
As the van screeched to
a halt, the banker sighed heavily, then buried his clean-shaven head in his
rough palms covered with scars and scabs as he waited for the door to swing
open. It had been a bumpy and torturous journey on a cushionless metal bench.
His chest whizzed and he recalled that he had left behind the painkillers that
were to take care of the pain of his lung-ripping dry cough. There won’t be a
break till four in the evening. If the chest pains and the cough persisted for
a fortnight, he thought, his chances of living would be next to nil. But the
nurse at the dispensary had said it was nothing to stop him working in the
quarry and recommended him fit for hard labour.
Alighting from the van,
deep inside him, he regretted the imminent fact that he would die in prison
unless the head of state came to his rescue through the presidential amnesty.
Thoughts of being thrown into a ditch and then being rained on with clods of
soil as if to punish the dead body, followed by exhumation as soon as a new
tenant availed himself made him realize why a dog is always referred to as
man’s best friend. He missed his own dog, knowing that if it were possible to
have it around when he breathed his last, he could rest in eternal peace, a
tear having been shed for a fallen gallant master and the grave always being
watched over—an absolute honour for the dead.
