Back in school, I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the workshop, but I remember a thing or two I took home with me. Like the thing that fellow said, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” I think his name was Neutron or something like that.
As explained by Teacher Wambugu, what the fellow meant was, when you sit down on a chair, the chair is sitting up on you or sitting you up. I hope Miss Wangeci, my Ingo teacher, isn’t reading this particular piece. She calls reverse and likes tearing me a new one.
Anyway, my intention for quoting the guy who invented gravity is this: I have seen his theory in practice right here at Jiji Ndogo. You see, my girlfriend Sgt. Sophia only discovered last year that our boss Inspector Tembo is her birth father. Since then, despite my constant mediation, the two have been at loggerheads (I picked that one up from Sophia). Now they’ve made up, and I’m in trouble.
Sophia and I live together. Today, I come home for lunch. Instead of food, I chance upon Sophia and her father packing her stuff.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Tembo glowers down at me, arms akimbo. “Now that I am a proper father, I cannot condone my daughter living in sin.”
“Living in sin? Oh, boy. Hasn’t she told you? All I’ve wanted to do is sin, but we’ve been living like a monk and a nun. I actually think some monks get more action than—”
“Did you just call me boy, boy?”
“No, sir. Oh, boy is like… an adjective.”
“He means interjection, dad,” Sophia says, lugging out a large suitcase. “If English proficiency was part of the dowry, Makini would die a bachelor like the pope.”
“Sophia, why are you doing this? Shouldn’t we have discussed it first?”
“Says the man who told me he must ask my father before he proposes.” She laughs. “‘I’m a gentleman like that.’ Remember?”
“C’mon, Sophie. Being a gentleman sometimes means saying things you don’t necessarily mean literally. Like when I said that green dress you wear looks good on you.”
“It doesn’t?”
“If I wasn’t a gentleman, I’d say it makes you look like the botanical garden.”
Sophia drags the suitcase harder, chugging along comically. “Let’s go, dad. This one will have to steal to afford my dowry.”
Wow! So now it’s dad this, dad that. What am I, chopped liver?
“Where are you going to live, Sophia?”
“She’ll be living with me,” Tembo says, “until you make a decent woman of her.”
“Hey, dad,” Sophia says, “if you say that, Makini might think you want him to turn me into a nun. Tell him he needs to wife me.”
“I know the meaning of making a decent woman,” I retort. “It’s an idiotic expression.”
Tembo throws up his arms. “Sophie, you really want to marry this buffoon? He just called me idiotic.”
Sophia laughs. I love the way she laughs. “He meant to say idiomatic. That’s why I love him. He’s so naïve.”
“Well, naivety never paid the bills. Makini, if you want to marry my daughter, you’ll have to follow proper traditional channels, you hear?”
Sophia gets in my face, wiggles her head playfully. “That’s right, silly. Proposal, wazee, dowry, pre-wedding, wedding, honeymoon the whole nine yards.”
“In the meantime,” Tembo says, “I will make an official announcement to all suitable young men that my daughter is eligible for marriage.”
“Dad, no!”
The look on Sophia’s face makes my day.
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