"Vunja mifupa kama bado meno iko". That is the song I am humming loudly while in the shower. Sherry, who is my 'one-but-not-only' is in the living room section of my spacious bedsitter. Suddenly, she calls out to me, "Bae, your phone is ringing", she says. "Who is it?" I ask her. "Man U Tubz", she obediently answers. My mind does a Usain Boltish sprint before I tell her to just let it ring.
After a few minutes it rings again, and Sherry repeats the ritual of informing me about it. I get out of the bathroom and take the phone from the table. As I start keying in the unlocking password, a text message from 'Man U Tubz' flashes on my notification bar. It reads: "Hi. I would really like to see you ASAP. Pick up your phone and give me the venue and time. I love you". 'I love you'. That phrase on Man U Tubz message rings awkwardly on my mind. What does she mean when she says 'I love you'?
You see, Man U Tubz is a girl I recently met on a Friday evening. It was raining cats and dogs and there were the usual messy traffic snarl-ups that go hand in hand with the rains in Nairobi. I was trying to shield myself from the downpour with a newspaper I had stolen from the mathree plying our route.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a chocolate, tiny girl with red braids struggling to hold onto her umbrella as the wind threatened to snatch it from her. I decided to be her angel in the situation, grabbed the umbrella from her and smiled heroically at her while welcoming her under her own umbrella. "Thank you," she said coolly as she looked at me with a smile.
"You are welcome. Let me hold it for you," I said as I gave a half wink towards her direction. We walked across the street to an exhibition hall that was sparsely crowded by people like us who were sheltering from the downpour. My relevance to her was coming to an end because she no longer needed someone to hold the umbrella.
I took a look at her from the corner of my eye and saw her shudder a little from the cold. "This type of weather needs a hot cup of coffee," I said while looking down at her. She did not seem to have heard what I had said, so I added more swag to what I wanted to mean. "This kind of weather requires a hot cup of coffee to good people like us, but to the not so good it requires some warm smoke of sheesha." The mention of sheesha made her turn her head and she looked straight at me and asked, "Why are you saying that sheesha is for bad people?" "I haven't said that it is for bad people. I said that it is for the not so good people." From then on the constructive argument between Man U Tubz and I began and we ended up taking some coffee as we waited for the traffic to open up. We even went ahead and exchanged contacts.
Since I did not want to look like a starving Team Fisi member, I took her number but did not want to ask her what her name was. I simply entered it as 'Man U Tubz', because she had a Manchester United jersey and we were taking coffee at Tubz Cafe. Just as I was thinking of what she meant by that 'I Love You' phrase, Sherry asked me who the caller was.
"He is one of my friends. He supports Man United and his work place is next to Tubz Cafe," I blubbered an answer "But Tubz is situated next to a mosque. Could he be an Imam?" Sherry asked again, and this time the questioning started getting into my nerves. "Una maswali mengi, kwani wewe ni polisi?" I asked her with a devilish look. I was not in the mood to think deeply on how to cook up my responses to Sherry while I had a date to set up with Man U Tubz.
