A few minutes into 3pm, Kampalan time. My stomach totally disagrees with me on sharing matters, the last meal I shared with it was last night’s Rolex(a generally affordable Ugandan snack). So I slope to my Kafunda in the slums of Kikoni, to get a quick meal, at least there I’m assuredly going to eat too much by spending too little.
On entering, the aroma from the various customers’ food makes my stomach even more rebellious. Since it is a Sunday, the place is packed to capacity so I can only spot one small spot that I can fix into; at the extreme end.
I trot my way there and sit. Next to me is a very attractive woman, a Muhima, if I am to go stereotypical. She avoids eye contact with everyone but her plate and glass. Perhaps she is not used to eating from places of this kind. By the look of it, her plate of food is not anything hotter than the glass of juice next to it, but she eats as if it were a wild fire devouring her polished tongue. She carefully smears a portion of food onto her fork and lifts it swiftly to her teeth, which clean it off with a whispering screech, “scrrrr…” without it touching her lips at all, and with a serviette she wipes the corners of her lips, although I hadn’t seen anything that needed to be wiped. Then she lifts her sparkling glass of juice as if it were a small precious stone hiding among grains of rice; the closer she brought it to her lips, the steeper the golden liquid in it slanted, and before it reached, she pouts her mouth and then plants a peck on it, I can even see a beautiful, red sketch of her plump lower lip on the glass when she puts it back down. Amazingly, she seems to swallow something, but wait, did I see her drink anything?
Well, I suddenly hear someone asking me, “Ndeete ki, Ssebo?” That’s when I realised I was lost in fantasy. It was the waitress that brought me back.
The person I was lost into, however, never seemed to even notice me, but I love such girls; they make the task more thrilling. Checking my phone I realise I have been seated for about 15 minutes, my stomach had even forgotten about my hunger, such a satisfying optical meal she is. Then I say to the waitress, “Mpa ennyama mu binyebwa, n’emmere yonna. Bya mmeka?” I expected her to mention a price below two thousand shillings, but she said, “Bbiri bitaano.” Eh! Things were starting to get tricky since two thousand five hundred shillings plus a drink could not be catered for by my pockets at that time. So I tell her, “Kale leeta juice.” She has been busy noting on a small piece of paper all through our conversation, so she rolls it, picks her trays and moves on.
God of Israel, this is the moment when I, a lost-and-found sheep, got lost again; now in a new scenery: the waitress was dressed in a thing which, I swear I would be lying if I called a skirt. It looked like two side-pieces of one long serviette, separated and rolled one below the other, around her well-endowed backside and hips; I could even see the dimples on both her cheeks, though she had none on her face. But then that’s normal, every Kafunda has skimpily-dressed, big-bottomed women for waitresses.
So I turn away to my Fantasy. I am shocked, though: She hasn’t even eaten a quarter of what’s on her plate, and her glass, well, it is still about three quarters full.
As if she were waiting for me to give my attention back to her so that she could leave. Hmm! So she picks up her blue Gucci bag, stands up and gives me the most arresting eye contact that has ever happened on planet earth, ever since the biblical Last Supper, and I got a chance to realise that the fantasies I had about her while she was seated, compared to those I got when I analysed her silhouette while standing, were like one bubble in a full glass of bubbly juice. I can confirm that at that moment, I was no longer hungry: I was feeling a million fat squirrels playing hide-and-seek in my belly, like it was a garden of legumes, I had fallen in love. I started thinking to myself, “This is the right time to make the first move.” So I said to her as I stood up in the most sexy style, that I copied from the ‘How To Impress A Girl’ YouTube series, composed myself to her like gentlemen do, while I asked her, “May I eat that food?”
[To Be Continued…]
