My Favourite chizi(mad man)

I have a favourite mad man. He is a beggar stroke madman, according to the rest of the population. Sometimes he’s just a beggar, sometimes he’s a mad man. He has a station near the Tesco flyover, Puchong, that’s where he works between 6 and 11pm. He sleeps on a bench in the park next to Tesco, and recently, he established a living room on the other side of the flyover, next to where the taxi drivers park. He brought a chair, a small table and a glass. He fills the glass with pink flowers and waters them from his drinking bottle. On Sundays he wears jeans and stands near the fly over looking cool. Sometimes he likes to have a smoke as he contemplates the world below of passing cars. On rainy days, he will wear white sports shoes to walk to the sitting room, and when he sits to beg, he removes the shoes and places them neatly beside him.
Sometimes he likes to spread himself out on the fly over, and have the pedestrians walk round him on
the thin bridge. The other day he sat with his arms around his knees surrounded by three purses, a pink one, a brown one, black pouch and his begging cup. I think he probably wanted his donors to just slip the money in the purses and save him the trouble or maybe he was aiming at a certain sum, and when each purse was full he’d take away, I’m not sure.
I was passing by another day with hands full of shopping and I had my afro and serious look on. I stopped to catch a breath and I heard someone say-hey bob Marley, hallo. I turned and there was the beggar, waiting for a response.That left me in stitches. Somehow I had all along assumed he didn’t notice anything going on around him, just concerned about how much he gets.
I had stopped giving him change when I realized he used it on alcohol and cigarettes but when I saw him watering his flowers, I have started to drop a few when I can.
I wonder about mad people sometimes. My friend , Kairu once told me that mad people think it is the rest of the world which is mad.
We had a good share of mad people in my village where I grew up. There was the one who wore a blanket and carried big stones to the shopping centre, and since in his hey day he was a teacher you’d find him addressing a field of grass as if they were his pupils. Then there was Janta, who spoke pure English and dressed up in a suit to go to the market everyday. I remember a young one who sang chai na cocoa from one end of the market to another and liked to eat avocados…..