Once upon a time, there lived a man and his wife. Life was great at first, until the husband began coming home late. First, at 9pm, then 10pm and he, thereafter, graduated to midnight.The excuses were sundry. “I was out with my boys, you know it was Friday, Baby!” “We had a cocktail at work”, “I have to clinch this deal honey,” and “I had dinner with my managing director, he is looking for a successor darling; it could be your man!”
The wife did not take this lying down. She developed a strategy to hit back. Her husband came home to a sulky woman in an ugly nightdress and stinky head wrap. Sometimes she still had the pyjamas he left her in when he was going to work in the morning.
She would refuse to open the door for him. She clicked her tongue and pouted when he asked her about dinner and rolled her eyes when he attempted to touch her.
She scowled when he asked for dessert. She shrugged off his apologies for coming home late, and many times she would not bother to stay up waiting for him. “He is a grown man. I am not his mother,” she would say.
So one day, the husband stopped asking for dinner or dessert. And arrival time, too, changed. He would come home at 3am and leave by 6am.
The wife pretended not to notice the sudden change in her husband’s behaviour, but deep down, she had questions. She wanted to know where he did have his dinner? Who gave him dessert and who, in God’s name, helped him pick that purple shirt?
One night, she pretended to be asleep when she heard her husband’s Subaru Impreza, no forget that junk, let’s make it a Mercedes Benz, vroom into their compound. She heard somebody from inside the house unlock the door and loudly ‘whisper’,
“Baba Boyi umefika! Karibu sana,” (Baba Boyi, you have arrived, welcome home!)
That was Maria, the house help. The sulky wife didn’t quite hear what her husband mumbled to Maria, but she heard her say,
“Nikuwekee chakula kwasitting room ama kwangu kama kawaida?” (Will you have dinner in the sitting room or in my room as usual?)
These words struck her like a thunderbolt.
“How dare he?” she asked.
How dare he what? I ask. Sleep with the house help? Sleep with that Pretty Young Thing (PYT) called Sheila who lives in a servants’ quarters in Nairobi South ‘B’?
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Well, it’s pretty simple if you ask me. Very straightforward, ma’am. Aren’t you the one who sulks when he comes home a minute past 9pm?
Which man wants to come home to a troublemaker? So you are not willing to talk to him, huh? You are not willing to warm his dinner and dessert? Great, go on; let’s see how far you will go.
The truth is that the man you are not willing to talk to when he comes home at 10pm, is celebrated elsewhere.
That man you treat like a homeless boy, never mind that he is the one paying rent and for your acrylic nails; that man you sulk at all week is a king and a master in another house, if not in the bedroom downstairs, which Maria shares with cockroaches.
That man you belittle with words and actions might look like a small boy to you, but he is the honcho in a hen pen elsewhere.
You may sulk all you want and throw this newspaper down in disgust, but you know as much as I do that this society we live in is lopsided and there are some painful truths you’ve got to accept; your fancy London degrees and the big job aside.
He will come home late. Guaranteed. He will lie he was with the boys. Guaranteed. But why sulk, really? Sulk for an entire week, deny him dinner and dessert, and watch your man slip through your fingers right into the hands of a PYT?
By Njoki Chege.
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