So the love
week is finally here with us. It’s difficult not to notice, not with the
town painted red and sublime reminders from yours truly that this time Valentine's
falls on a weekend. She knows you have a calendar and can of course find out that by
yourself. The message here is twofold. You can’t claim to be busy building the
nation and it would be in your burgeoning love’s best interest to make early
reservations for two at a fancy establishment outside Nairobi. It won’t matter
if you’ll rob a bank or you’ll take advantage of the ‘kidnapping’ services offered
on that day by the ever eccentric Kenyans. Trust me, you do not want to be
reported to Maina and King’an’gi.
But when did
impressing women become this hard. When did we start hiring choppers from Nairobi
to take flowers to girls in Kitale? When did one gender start dreading an ordinaryday while the other looked forward to it with hitherto unseen relish?
My
grandfather, the late Bernadus, a great story teller loved to narrate how his
fathers married. It was literally a stroll in the market. They would work into
a market, select the girls of their choice, just as one picks good
tomatoes at city market and bang, you got yourself a wife. The lady would of
course make noise, not to protest the 'capture' but to inform others that she
was already taken.
Fast forward
to 2015, the dating scene is like an auction where the highest bidder wins. A lady
friend of mine tells me it's better to cry at the back of a land rover than to
smile on a bicycle. Solid argument there. Pretty difficult to argue with.
I miss high
school Valentine's. With less than a hundred shillings you could unequivocally
and without a shred of a doubt be the world’s most romantic guy since Solomon.
Five days to
the day would find Mzee Macabre and I holed up in our corner in Form 2G
drafting our Valentine’s specials. He would be writing to Nadia, a ‘mzunguish’
lady whose picture he treasured with the same affinity only felt for his plates and spoons. (There was actually a
time he forgot to carry all his exercise books to school but remembered to pack Nadia’s
photo).
I, on the hand, would be
writing to my Angela; short and rotund, compact yet not suffocating, simple yet
enchanting. If the routine letters required a degree of craft and dedication, then Valentine’s letters required nothing less than artistic wizardry. After all
you do not want your letter to be read aloud and laughed at. Your girl should
know that her man isn’t just from ‘a school has passed here’, but from the great Maseno,
the only national school on the equator, the only national school outside
Nairobi.
Two preps
and one dawn were exclusively dedicated to writing these letters. You did the
first drafts on a foolscap and exchanged for proof reading. It’s at this point
where you changed yours lovingly, to yours affectionately; letter to missive;
hope you are doing well into hope you are fantabolous.
It’s here
where you made sure that ‘tough’ words like bourgeoisie, debonair (not the
pizza shop), incredible, tremendous, blissful etc. replaced mediocre words like
happy and sad. It’s at this stage where you made sure that you inserted figures
of speech and lexical items. ‘I hope you are as fit as fiddle’. However, care
needed to be taken not to become cliché. Statements like you make my heart beat
as fast as a hare were discouraged. Maybe as fast as a Dik-dik. It didn’t matter
that you had no idea what a Dik-dik was. The badge allowed you to get away with
murder.
The thing
about this letters is that you could fully immerse yourself in the prose.
Whereas 95% of the letter was factually untrue, the recipients would hang on to
every word. Take for example my friend Willis Ogada claiming that he
hasn’t eaten or slept much since he last spoke to Lady X yet he takes his meals in doubles.
Eight drafts
later you had a letter fit for a queen. It would then hit the messengers office
but not before being neatly transferred into a colorful writing pad, using your
best possible handwriting and sealed
with sweet scented spray from a borrowed perfume. Those of us who were not blessed
with good handwriting had to outsource penmanship services from calligraphy
experts at a fee, usually full loaf, stamp for his personal letters or a
small introduction at the bottom of the letter to your bae’s desk mate
extolling his virtues. You would be required to say how the sun rises on his
face and how his six pack would put the Rock’s to shame.
What about
the dedications? Here, we would dedicate sweet songs to our one true loves. The
most popular songs were VIP Love by Osmourne, Catch a Grenade for you by Bruno
Mars, Lie about us by Avant and Nicole, Love is Strange by Mickey and Sylvia among
others. Needless to say the bad boys from Nairobi preferred the Lil Wayne’s and
the Becky’s from Plies. Something about eating cats.....
One would
then insert his best photo, most probably taken in a borrowed trouser (juniors
never wore trousers), ‘harvested’ shirt and socks and with Mega City
prominently featuring in the background.
And just like
that you were in contention for the coveted Boyfriend of the Year Award.
That’s not
to say that am not buying flowers or taking people to Githurai Resort and spa.
My publicist will issue a comprehensive statement on the same considering West Brom and West Ham are locking horns in the prestigious FA cup that day as well.
By the way
do those ‘flamboyant’ red and yellow one-hundred-bob earrings still exist? (Asking for a friend)
In the
spirit of Dedications:
Maselina, Musa Juma
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