Women love men that sell them a dream

That Thursday (or was it a Friday?) I sat across her at a dinner in one of those Kileleshwa 200k –a- month apartments. The parking, I noticed, was full of red number plates and a Prado, the official car of embezzlement. What that meant was there was an ambassador or two there, plus their smoking-age daughters, who were, curiously, smoking with their parents, something I’d burst out laughing if my father ever asked to smoke with me. There were a few other diplomats too, American-funded NGO honchos, a brown-nosing politician, and divorced wives with more money than was good for them. Plus, a ‘digital rainmaker’, whoever that was.
 
So that was the scene—me sipping my mimosa and picking on fried shrimps fighting for its life in a garden of salad—you know how it is with these rich fellas, they see ugali, and it’s like you are asking them to reinstitute slavery. I loathe vegetarians and their sibling, the vegans, and I was in the middle of making this point clear to the chef when I saw her; a pretty-looking Russian girl with crooked teeth and raw skin, and say what you want about my morals, but I know which side I’m on, on the Russia-Ukraine war.
 
Maybe it was watching her that made me get closer to her table. Or maybe it was the fact that she was approaching my table, wanting to know how a dreadlocked man knows the owner of this joint. “I don’t,” I told her. “But he knows me.” I must be a funny man because she started laughing.
I don’t know about you, but when you have a Russian girl with skin like slimy butter staring into your eyes, then the world stops.
 
She looked like a plastic doll, like she had just been freshly made. She spoke slowly and deliberately, like there was no hurry in the world, which maybe there wasn’t. And then she pulled out a thin cigarette and asked me, Do you mind? And I remembered my mother telling me that the only thing worse than bringing home a woman who drinks is bringing home one who smokes. “No, I don’t mind,” I said. Sorry ma.
 
She told me about her parents, about her dual citizenship, about her star sign, “Scorpio”, —and what was mine? Who knows? Who cares? And then she told me about the first time she went hunting and fell and had a graze on her knees, which she showed me, and yes, there was a keloid right there. She was now very near to me and making intense eye contact. She was just a stretch and a clasp away, looking like something the world itself was offering me. All I had to do was make the move. Had she told me to deny my mother and father, I think I would have done that too.
 
She wanted to know where I come from. She seemed genuinely interested, and I could have made up enough lies along the way for God to send me straight to hell. I asked her instead to come over, and we exchanged numbers. I didn’t think she would, but she called me, maybe two three weeks later.
I took her to Kawangware, because that’s where I could afford, or more accurately, it’s where I lived. I told her about Wangari, from whom the town Kawangware is named, that mysterious fruit seller who, if you wanted the freshest vegetables, you just had to go to ‘Kwa Wangari’. To Kawangware. She lapped it up like a thirsty spaniel. How was I so knowledgeable about things? If it sounds like I am bragging, well, I am.
 
I was insecure about my bedsitter, so I’d make up excuses about why she couldn’t come to my place. I imagined how painful it would be for her to find out a man can stay in a single room with all his earthly possessions and not suffer from claustrophobia! Besides, what are the optics of a dreadlocked man bringing home a white woman in the ghetto? There was something obscene about it. Miscegenation—or stereotypical, perhaps that’s a better word. Everyone would think that I was with her just for her money, which is only partly true. There is also the visa and connections…
 
I fed her hungry ears with the things she wanted to hear. The plan I had to get out of the ghetto. Be a millionaire by 30. And how women had failed me in love and decided to take a break, maybe until the right one came along, politics of skin aside. We were sharing what the world had done to us that workday, and I would have called myself an orphan, but she happened upon a photo of my father and he looked very much alive. Then I told her about my dreams—being a big writer in the world, and touring the world with my wife, whoever she would be, even if she were white, she telling me her dreams and me fulfilling them.
 
Even if it were you, wouldn’t you have fallen in love with me? To paraphrase Obama Jr, “I do not promise you a good life, but I promise you will not have a boring life.”
The thing with dreams though is that eventually you have to wake up. And perhaps she did, or her parents caught whiff of her spending too much time ‘with that dreadlocked boy’.
It wasn’t a good look, and I am not talking about my hair. I was landing punches above my weight. So they jettisoned her to New York, where she followed me with her private Instagram account, both of us dreaming of what could have been.
 
It didn’t work out for us, but I felt I had learned an important lesson in life: women love dreams, and a dreamer. Less facts, more fantasy. Or as my mother would say, “Bora anajua kupika ugali.” And doesn’t smoke. That too.
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