The Young Couple in my Neighbourhood

There is a young couple that moved to my part of the street recently. In fact they came to my neighbourhood. I caught a glimpse of them just last week. They present an interesting spectacle.

When I caught a glimpse of them last week, I had all along been yearning to ‘see’ them (even from far). The curiosity to see what kind of people they are was initiated by what I had been hearing from the men and women in my neighbourhood. But the women talked more than the men. I guess they also embellished the stories they told one another.

There is one good thing I have learnt to do before believing anything I hear from these women. I always take everything they tell me (or hear from them) with a pinch of salt. And that has saved me many a time.

Before I tell you about this young couple, let me tell you something about the women in my neighbourhood.

First things first, these women are all old women. By old women I mean women who look old and have an average of three children each. These are women I cannot freely converse with. You might ask yourself how come, then, they tell me so many things about whichever and whatever.

Well, truthfully I just wonder how they find the energy and ‘morale’ to come to me after the lack of interest in their stories that I have been showing them. But they keep on coming to me. They open their mouths wide – they blurt, twaddle, twitter and rabbit all manner of things which are embedded in their hearts. After spewing what they believe to be something of interest to me, they bound homewards to prepare the evening meal for their raucous children and ever-irascible husbands.

The evenings are never peaceful in my neighbourhood. Immediately these irascible husbands arrived home from work, all hell breaks loose. Their houses become war zones. They pull and punch each other as strings of unprintable expletives hang heavily in the screams released.

Now I understand why these women are always talking about this young couple. These two young people are different from their old neighbours. Firstly, they don’t engage in unnecessary “wars and bandying” every evening like their ‘elderly’ neighbours.

Another thing, they don’t hide their admiration for each other. When the man comes home after work, he is met at the door by his loving wife. A strong kiss is planted on his massive lips (all this happens outside their house – while all the old women are huddled nearby, gossiping). This greatly irks them – for they remember not when they last experienced the same in their married lives.

Five minutes after this wonderful show of fondness and love, the young couple head to the bathroom together (there are two bathrooms at the centre of the compound shared by the tenants).

Incidentally these old women always sit near the bathroom for there is good shade there. When the young couple start bathing the old women feel like running away. The sounds of pleasure emanating from the bathroom are more than they can take. They can’t bring themselves to remember when they last shared the bathroom with their husbands (now aptly termed “harsh bands” by these ‘creative’ women).

At the end of the relaxing bath, the young people strut from the bathroom in style – with their hands around each other’s waist. The old women cannot stand this. Some of them noisily clear their throats, while others jeer, while the most moronic of them burst out in raucous laughs.

The young couple, in a stroke of genius defiance, stall for a bit, look into each other’s eyes and start kissing in front of the whole world. The old women go mad and before they can say anything the couple has already disappeared inside their room.

This is the interesting couple we have here in my neighbourhood.

As recently as yesterday, I heard some of the old women telling their friends that they had persuaded their husbands to look for alternative places of residence elsewhere, in a different estate, because the environment “in this estate is growing unconducive by the day” and that the children “will very soon become very ill because the air here brings with it the poisonous fumes of the factory that is five kilometres away”.

I laughed out loud when I head this and hoped that they had learned something from the “couple”: That life is not about war and strife; it is about peace, love and respect. I just hope they are reading this.