The following day there was a surprise twist. Ombima was appointed to work in the compound and not out in the fields with everyone else. This meant he would be working alongside the women, weeding the banana and cassava crops. Normally, everyone welcomed the reprieve, and indeed the rest of the workers would go to any length to get to work in the cool shade of the banana trees away from the sun in the fields. More than that, as Ang’ote fondly put it, they would be working close to the hearth – meaning they would get their food while it was still warm.

But then it was only to their advantage depending on the circumstances. Take this particular day; Ombima was the only man amidst the chatter of village women. It wasn’t very amusing. This was because the women were taking this opportunity to throw barbs at him, away from the support of the rest of his men friends. Also, in Ombima’s opinion the women worked less and talked most of the time: Abiri did this and that to his wife of ten years… Aguvasu’s wife, who had been heard crying the night before, invoked the beating from her husband for refusing to do this and that ‘midnight’ bidding… Abiri’s teenage daughter – that conceited Mmbone in High School, who in the village doesn’t know about her? That she had developed a rather suspect posture of late, hadn’t anyone noticed… And Abiri himself hadn’t he failed to make it to Maneno’s beer drinking ceremony Sunday? Did anyone know why? … blah! blah! blah!

And, worst of all, Ombima found that there was very little he could contribute, being uninitiated in their manner of trading gossip. The long hours they wasted just leaning on their hoe handles prompted him to conclude that bunching a number of women together without a few men in their midst was a sure way of inviting trouble.

It was such a relief finally when the sun started to drop out of the clear late-year sky and the tea picking party was heard approaching back from the buying centre. At the sound of their approach, the women broke from their work and stretched their sore backs. They glanced over their shoulders to survey the work they had done, and one by one they hoisted their hoes on to their shoulders, preparing to depart.

That day, a little surprisingly, Andimi himself was there to give them their pay. he had just arrived from hi business safari as they turned into the compound, and he was in a jovial mood too as indicated from the loud laughter that rang out of the bowels of the rambling bungalow. Perhaps he had just successfully wrestled some prime property away from an equally thrifty real estate mogul after coveting it for some time. Such were the man’s day-to-day activities; the villager who hadn’t had the good fortune to travel beyond the realms of his hill-enclosed home could only speculate.

The labourers sat in a collective bunch on the mown grass in front of the house and waited with bated breath. From a distance, they looked like a bundle of sweat-stained rags left on the expansive manicured grounds by a careless gardener. About them bees and butterflies flitted busily from one flowering bush to another, in the process disturbing the scent enfolded in the petals so that in a short time the garden was a mixture of the perfume of roses and gardenias surrounding the waiting villagers.

Looming in front of them Andimi’s house was an imposing sight. Set up on slightly raised ground, the rambling wings of the awesome edifice seemed to spread on and on in crafty twists and bends. Maximum sunshine flowed directly into the rooms from as many windows as the twisting pen could allow. The walls were painted a brilliant white, almost clinical compared to the smoky grass-thatched hovels of the labourers.

Up these walls, scrambled climbers of various types now in bloom – brilliant pinks, reds, yellows, and even whites. The roof of the bungalow was made of what the villagers jokingly called ‘baked potlings’; bits of pottery shaped in such a way that they overlapped one another and baked in a kiln until they were red and hard. This was a completely new way of roofing. The common villager who knew only the abundant grass of the fields since the days of his forefathers; or, if the produce of his farm was particularly good as in the case of Ngoseywe whose bonus pay for the previous year’s tea crop had outdone everyone else’s in a highly suspect manner, then they went to Mbale and hired the trader, Amugo’s pickup truck to cart their iron sheets to the village.

At such a rare moment in the life of village, a horde of the villagers descended on his homestead to tear down the smoky thatch from his old hut and pass up the shiny sheets of iron to the fundi, who nailed them onto the smoky roof beams using funny-looking nails that had caps on them,; as if he never intended from them to ever come off. and all this work for close to naught expense on the proud fellow who would be moving up in the world, for the excitement of it all was pay enough to the more-than-willing hands.

Afterwards, the finished product was to stand as a beacon of pride amidst the grass-thatched huts that surrounded it, reflecting brightly far and wide all the way to Bukulunya and Chugi, before the weathering mercilessness of the sun and rain rubbed out the bright sheen from the silvery zinc coat and rendered it lustreless, like those old sheets on the latrine beside the tea buying centre in Eruanda which the weighing clerk and the old men of the kamiti used.

After achieving such a roof, a man could stand out on the murram road that passed by the tea buying centre and, rubbing his hanging paunch the way Andimi sometimes did, would point out his home to a friend he was making an appointment with and say: "…tha-at one over the-re, the one between those tall trees; he one with the mabati."

But Andimi’s was in a class of its own. Walking up the crushed limestone drive which snaked up to the solid, lavishly varnished door with a smoked glass plate set in it just at eye level where, the villagers said, it afforded the wealthy man the benefit of scrutinising his visitors in one-way privacy before he let them in. Many a villager was simply awed.

Sometimes they even forgot what business it was that had brought them there and, when the wealthy man finally opened the door to their timid ting-tong from the enormous brass knocker, they often broke off mumbling incoherent things that weren’t even within a kilometre of the initial problem. To this the wealthy man thunderously laughed with good cheer. Then the over-awed villager was sent on his way with a dismissive promise to ‘look into that’. When Andimi was in a good mood, the visitor might even be allowed to stand in the entrance hall a while and watch through a window the televisheni picture of the president all the way in Nairobi on the seven o’clock news.

This solid front door now opened and Angimi emerged, garbed in a flowing, delicately embroidered kitenge robe that he usually wore in the village evenings. His plump, rather feminine, pink–soled feet were planted inside soft leather sandals. He stepped down the polished red step and approached the crowd on the front lawn with a wide smile on his round face, flashing teeth that bit only into soft-boiled eggs and other choice foods. He stopped a metre or so away and stood there a while with his hand raised mid-air as if in a terminated giving gesture, clutching a small white khaki money-bag that was fastened with a draw-string. The other hand was buried in the fold of his robe, idly caressing the curly hairs on his stomach. He stood thus, inspecting them a while before he bowled a general greeting in a rich warm baritone that Ang’ote imagined would give wonderful accompaniment to his old lyre.

He went on to deliver his short customary speech, walking among his employees the way an army officer might do amid a company of fresh recruits, scrutinising their grime and squalor with spiteful little eyes that pretended to proffer friendliness.

Andimi radiated only riches from his delicate calfskin sandals which, it was said, were made in London to his own specifications, to his stylish haircut that gave the impression every one of his curly black hairs had been groomed and brilliantined separately.

They said that besides owning an unmeasurable tea estate in bits and pieces which scattered far and wide within the surrounding villages, the man also owned a string of all sorts of businesses all the way from Kakamega to Kisumu and back again the other side of the road; butcheries, mills, drinking places, and even a pawn business that specialised in recovering at a fee money and other goods for creditors from debtors who wouldn’t pay. All these, together with numerous other petty businesses like a fleet of handcarts for hire in Kakamega town for instance – which could mint money with least investment and hassle. Mind, all these properties of just one man. That, despite his huge mass and rather sluggish predisposition, the fellow was actually a computing wizard who shrewdly kept track of his every cent and what it did at what time. The joke went that you could steal a whole cow and get away with it but not ten shillings from him. He would sniff you out sooner than later. That if you tried to hoodwink him in a transaction, he kept up that chubby smile of his to make you feel like he hadn’t sensed a thing, but in reality he was giving you the benefit of the doubt. Indeed he was so wealthy none of his children – incidentally all girls – attended the local schools. They came visiting sometimes once in a year, or not at all, from wherever it was they went to school far away in another country, no one knew where.

Eventually, the wealthy man came to the end of his small-talk and started doling out their pay which the tired labourers right then needed more than words: words could not keep a hungry mouth fed until the next day.

They lined up and received their share one by one, thereafter making a beeline for the open gates, wide smiles written on their sunburned, sweat-moistened faces. They were like people coming from Holy Communion, but heading right back to their old sinful ways.

Ombima came up in his turn and basked in the brief instant that the wealthy man’s attention was focused on him; a common layabout with not a penny to his name who also happened to bloodlessly rob the same provider to keep himself and his family fed. He lived through a brief moment of near glee there as he made contact with Riches and Splendour.

It struck him as interesting that Andimi had to actually come out of his ‘baked potling’ palace to give them what was their due, and – he humoured himself – actually took the trouble to keep smiling while at it to make sure that his work force would not desert him the following day for another master somewhere else. For a brief moment, Ombima found himself wondering just what it actually felt like to be rich and famous.

As Ombima left the compound, he noticed Madam Tabitha standing in the open doorway, one of her ‘clan’ children playing with a fat white-and-chestnut pussycat at her feet. There was a serene look in her eyes, as if her thoughts were focussed somewhere distant. He wondered what she was thinking about. Or, for that matter, if someone like her had any problems worth giving thought to at all.

The talk of the menfolk as they walked down the village path was of the beer drinking ceremony that was timed for that coming Sunday at Eregwa, the brewer’s. Now they were rich men with a week’s wages in their pockets they could afford talk of drink and merrymaking.

As for the women, they were all about the market day the following day at Mbale and the mitumba clothes they would purchase for their children. They talked of purchases of meat and all those coveted condiments for their stew pots which, had they had mouths, would have complained about the watery vegetable soups they had been doling out every other day. One in the group also talked of a new pair of rubber sandals and another of a bottle of orange juice to stow away for the children in early preparation for the approaching Christmas. They all talked of a great deal of things, some that they could afford and others well beyond their reach, all in this deceptively delightful moment of reprieve for the wage-earner. and they could afford to do so, for today was pay day; the tireless wage-earner’s short-lived paradise.