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He felt that there was something unusual about that morning. This peculiarly uncommon thing may have been witnessed in how late people had woken up. Or perhaps in how unusually neighbours shouted greetings to each other. He realized it was Saturday because that morning, his neighbour’s six-year old daughter was not heard screaming her lungs out and stumping her petit feet inside a washing basin. She always threw such tantrums when was being prepared for school.
The regular dogs that normally scurried out through the gate once any of the neighbours opened the door were not in any particular hurry to repeat the routine. These stray dogs (a pair of them) instead wore a perplexed visage as they gazed eastwards at the horizon overlooking the Kirisia Hills. Beni noticed that it was already seven in the morning yet the morning was not as bright as it otherwise would have been by six thirty. The dark clouds covered the sky, reaching the whole extent of the western horizon.
At that moment, Beni did not know what to make of this apparent change in the atmosphere. The notorious chickens within the compound did not do their usual squawking. They got out of their pen and hardly did more than stretch and mildly flap their wings. They then folded their wings and hunched themselves on the eaves of the houses. Anyone would have even imagined that they observed the goings on through their transparent eyes. Beni watched as the chicks kept going in and out of their mothers’ underbellies through the fluffy feathers without the slightest sound. Maybe the chickens knew it was coming and so decided to wait for it apprehensively.
He rubbed his eyes, still trying to get fully awake. He had slept late after lingering in the region between sleep and wakefulness. This way, he had been forced to half-listen to the Samburu hyenas gallivanting around Kisima town with greedy intentions. Beni recalled how, as a result of the resurgence of hyena activities, the nocturnal engagements of the perennial drunkards in the town had reduced. Beni would have liked this turn of events if he himself did not like going out on Friday evenings. Because he could not go out most evenings, he resorted to playing scrabble against himself at the time when he would be having one or two at Jere’s.
This marauding pack of hyenas had forced Leren, who lived in the neighbourhood, to stop staging his rather uninspiring performances of the national anthem in Samburu language. Beni considered Leren’s attempt at being patriotic as something sacrilegious to the state. His Samburu version of the national anthem often went hand in hand with insults to people he did not like. Recently, Beni had heard him singing while punctuating it with unpalatable words to the effect that Jere was a good-for-nothing foreigner who was not bright enough to take up the responsibility of selling him beer on credit.
It was getting darker as the hue of the cloud cover intensified but Beni refused to be tricked into believing that it would rain. He had got used to the teasing clouds that came, darkened and went. The clouds would soon diffuse and give way to the lasting dryness. Anyone who had witnessed this mockery of a people desperate for rain by nature had to be forgiven if he gave up imagining it would ever rain. In fact, rain was real rain if it threatened to fall in the afternoon, or in the evening. It was early morning and he was not going to be taken into circles again; he was not again to be made wishing and silently begin imploring the clouds to turn into rainfall.
Stop! Flash! Wait. Weighty flash! The flash was so blinding that it left Beni blinking rapidly in a bid to regain his usual sight. Silence. Thick, concrete silence. Beni knew that there had been silence. But this was of a different aspect. It was a silence so real that it could be sliced into tiny shreds on the closest kitchen table. The wind that had been causing the creaking of iron sheets above seemed to stop; the weaver birds that had been covering Beni’s TV antenna with nests paused in their tracks. For the briefest of times, the birds maintained a speculative moment of what appeared to be a mixture of wonder and fear; Pastor Lesaat who had been praying three houses away may have finished his prayer or not, but his voice was not heard again. Beni held tightly onto the frame of his door and waited for it. His neighbour’s wife got out of the house opposite Beni’s. One hand on the door frame and the other slightly touching her parted lips, she said weakly, “Mtoto Wangu!” (My child). It did not wait for her to finish.
Beni knew it was coming. At first it came like the sound of drumrolls in a play depicting the setting of an African ceremony. Just at the time when Beni was about to sigh with relief and dismiss it as a weak one, it graduated into what he had feared it would be. A cold, deadly, calculating and rapturous sound tore the silence. It erased all thoughts from Beni’s mind and shook him to the core of his being. He watched in a daze as the neighbour’s son bolted from one of the latrines and raced. The khaki shorts he had gone to the latrine with were lying on the ground at the door of the convenience. He rushed forward with his mouth wide open, giving the indication that he was screaming. Beni was deaf for the moment.
The mother went out of the house for his son. The naked boy went flying into the mother’s arms and swung his legs, circling them around her mother’s waist. The weight being troubling and the mother unstable, the pair descended to the ground, scattering the unwashed utensils nearby. Then the smell and the smoke caught his senses. First it was the smell of dry timber burning, then smoke followed. Plumes of smoke were issuing from the neighbour’s house. Beni dashed forward, met the coughing girl and yanked her from the house. At the same time, the worn out woman and her son collapsed just inside Beni’s house.
Then as sudden as the flash and the deadly sound had been, it began to rain. It was a sure and insistent downpour. It was heavier and more confident than any he had ever witnessed in his time in Samburu. Beni shut the door and the windows, enveloping himself and the three neighbours in the humble safety of his room. He locked the terror of the water and the oppression of the smoke outside. And then, it rained.
