KING OF THE ARENA - A STORY

KING OF THE ARENA

N

o one who knew Kamukwa can deny the startling fact that the man was neither one of smartest nor the strongest men in our village. However, his actions on that fateful day where way over the top even for a gentleman who had such a startling gift of stupidity. I have to admit that some people are born with an inconceivable or rather incomprehensible gift of stupidity. I am using stupidity here loosely to refer to that inherent tendency to make wrong decisions.

Kamukwa had retired to Morpheus arms dog tired the previous night after long day of back breaking work tilling his small shamba. Compared to other successful men in the village, his was not much of a piece of land. There were other hard working men who had managed to clear large tracts of land and could afford the large workforce of wives and children needed to till the land. This is a fact that his wife never forgot to remind him of. When it came to marrying, he did not have of a choice but he had to settle on the first thing that looked like, walked like and perhaps spoke with even the least semblance of a woman.

He found himself cornered in his small hut with the greatest regrets of his life. She was a vicious woman who had the tendency to barter him at will and at any slightest provocation. The provocations ranged from simply dozing off while she spoke to him, or any attempt to move too close to her without her invitation as they slept on their shared cow skin pallet. She was most definitely the devil send to finish of what little manhood he had been awarded by the malicious being that created with so many inadequacies.

He slowly bulldozed his tiny frame out the ‘bed’ careful not to awaken the sleeping buffalo that was snoring with a rising crescendo of mating bullfrog next to him. Doing so was a perilous matter that would see him attacked with the viciousness of a bull goring a matador. The sun was peering shyly from the hills on the east sending reddish rays from the horizon for it had not risen fully over the horizon. He stood up, stretched, yawned and rubbed his eyes as he got accustomed to the semi darkness in the room. He looked at his sleeping wife loathingly with the morning fire burning his loins. The torture of unquenched desire, a feeling he had to smother for days now was breaking him. He looked at his example of a wife sleeping soundly like a bull, yearned to get close to her; yet previous experiences had taught him to wait for a formal invitation which apparently had happened twice in the previous year.

Kamukwa wore his badly calico patched pants, took one last glance at his wife and clicked under his breath. Lest she was pretending to be deep asleep and heard him click at her. He walked to the corner of the mud walled grassed that house and picked his jembe and panga. He felt still tired from the previous day’s work and the constant tossing and turning he had to endure the previous night as the unquenchable fire razed through his entire body. It was well past the first cock crow that he managed to doze off. He opened the rickety door as quietly as possible afraid that the creaking hinges might awaken the she devil he shared his life with.

As soon as he stepped out of the hut, the cold dewy grass stung the soles of his feet. It was cold and his threadbare shirt did nothing to counter it but only to remind him of his cycle of woes. He whistled softly, trying to convince himself that a man who had a wife to feed had no option but to break his back working the land. A jembe slung over his shoulder, a panga tightly clung in his hand a forced good humour to boot trickling through his body, and he headed for the shamba.

He emerged out of nowhere, black skinned, dirty and foul mouthed to boot. The sorry apology of a man, Kamukwa’s mortal enemy and evil neighbour just happened out of nowhere. Katio, for that was his name, walked confidently towards Kamukwa loudly and derisively chanting. It was a chant Kamukwa had come to hate since the day at the arena. It went something like

Kamukwa kamundu katheke ta Katheko

Kaendie kiwanzani, kamukwa

Kayenda kutwaa ndumi

Mwitu mutune ta mwei

Ndumi kyeloelwa

Kamukwa kakomana na katio

Ing’andaa nzangume

Ngundi imwe kakoma

Kamukwa , skinny like a rope

Kamukwa went the arena

He wanted to mar Ndumi

A girl as beautiful/light as the moon

Ndumi who everybody admired

Kamukwa challenged  katio

A giant of a man

It was a one blow knock out

They had had several tussles over land and unsettled debts. It did not help matters that, a little bird had told Kamukwa that Katio had managed to tame his buffalo of a wife. They had been seen on numerous occasions emerging from a banana plantation with Kamukwa’s wife giggling and  her face glowing with satisfaction. This was most definitely a run in one too many. Believe you me, fury grabbed Kamukwa, choking his senses and bubbling over into insanity unchained.

He dropped his tools and swung a left at what at that moment was an embodiment of the devil incarnate-Katio. Poor him, oh poor him, had he been wiser, he would have realized the futility of attacking that rock of a man. It was a grave mistake. Challenging a 6’4’’ man under whose 120 kilogrammes of weight the earth groaned was record breaking folly and stupidity.

Kamukwa’s blow landed squarely on Katio’s chest (for that was his maximum reach) and sounded faintly like a far off thud of stool dropping in a 30 foot pit latrine. The demons in  Katio erupted  in a volcanic rage. Kamukwa’s emaciated 60 kilogramme 5’4’’ frame was no match to the fury fuelled mountain of a man Katio was. Before he could curse his stupid ego and little wit, Katio grabbed him by the neck and hoisted him to his eye level. In that fleeting moment, kamukwa most definitely saw the devil stoking the fires of hell’s kiln through Katio’s eyes. Blood shot eyes , a twitching moustache and a frothy mouth spelt doom as he gasped for breath. Katio stammered word after word as anger gleefully swallowed each word he intended to say.

Kamukwa’s life flashed right past his eyes in a few seconds as he embraced the arms of death. He had never forgiven Katio for ‘taking’ the love of his life. She had been the village beauty- Ndumi, of the famous chant he hated and loathed. A truer picture of God’s grace and mastery of creation had never existed. Unfortunately, the arena  and prize women where never for the weak and the faint hearted.

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Kamukwa had always vividly remembered  and sipped the venomous memories of the wrestling day. Wrestling for Ndumi. Just like his father and other before him had to wrestle for the girl of their dreams, he had vowed to wrestle, even if it killed him, for the love of his dreams. Ndumi, she who  was like the moon, ndumi whose eyes twinkled brighter that the stars, Ndumi, whose laughter was medicine to hurting souls. Ndumi, Ndumi, Ndumi the girl of his dreams.

As he stepped into  the arena, Ndumi’s star like eyes and luscious lips enchanted him and fantasies of consummating his lifelong desires fanned his courage-courage that honestly could only be equated to a chicken’s! As he stood face to face with Katio, he dreamt of her swaying hips as she balanced her water pot on her head, he thought of that supple back, he  rode to  fantasy land  as he dreamt of the timbre of her mellow voice as she crooned lullabies to the many children he would sire with her.

He was this reverie ,when Katio landed a jab on his chin. It was a canon of a blow that etched his name permanently in the village’s annals of history as the fasted knock out ever. It also earned him a special spot in every village musicians name as the weakest man the village ever saw for every time they sang katio’s praises, they had to sing of the coward, weakling he fell with one blow, kamukwa. By the time he came to, katio was already spreading his leopard skins to deflower his jewel as village youngsters, bare chested boys and girls with round firms breast danced in the arena. Danced, singing dirty suggestive songs of what might happen that night. He crawled quietly from under the banana grove where he had be placed to recover, shoulders hunched, head bowed, ego bruised and with an aching jaw, carried his broken fantasies home.

*************************************************************                                                                                            Their chance meeting that morning was the rematch he had dreamt of and conjured up in his brain many a time. Being the opportunist he was, he had hoped that the element of surprise would play to his advantage. Yes, his feeble blow took Katio by surprise, but it gave him a solid reason to finish off what he had started in the Arena that fateful evening. As Kamukwa looked at katio, he could feel warm urine trickling down his thighs. Katio flung the skinny man against a huge rock. The devil of a rock embraced Kamukwa as needles of excruciating pain stitched through his shattered ribs. A torrent of horrendous pain gushed through every inch of his body. Black out

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As he lay on his pallet, his devil of a wife maybe somewhere in a banana grove smiling and giggling with Katio.He tried to sip the sour tasting porridge she had left next to him. Every sip felt like a fight for life itself. It had been days of insurmountable agony. Every sip of porridge bitter in his mouth was like swallowing a capsule of hurt and trepidations. He made one  resolve, resolute and unyielding.