My sister’s lovers are her greatest assets; she never played with them and would never want any one of us to insult them. She loved them and expected me, in particular, to love them too and accord them the respect I would accord to her husband – or any man that would later be. Any form of disobedience to their orders attracted severe punishments.

The city is a great place to become everything you dream of becoming. In the city one person can have more than two lovers and owe no one apologies; the women are ‘higglers’ and men are hustlers. People of the city are a different set of people with different ideologies and views of life.

Everything about the city fascinated me; the carbon monoxide that circulated in the air, the rushing people, the humming of vehicles, the commercial motorcycles and the street-fighters. I liked watching the boys that had dropped out from school without work fighting, sometimes throwing stones at one another or just raining insults on one another. I saw all of these things because I sold mkate – bread, while in the city.

When I first came to the city, I posed as an msafiri that would soon change location. But everything changed when the ‘figure’ next door captivated me like a witch’s enchantment on lovers at lovers’ night. The figure was my soul; my heart longs for more of the figure even now.

Before the figure, I despised everything about the city, though I was enthusiastic about the whole idea of coming to the city. The idea almost got me mad; I would immediately start laughing each time I remembered I was coming to the city.

So, I was coming to the city as a reformer to take the gospel of repentance to the corrupt people of the city. I was hoping to inculcate good morals into the lives of the people of the city who lacked morals. I hardened my mind that they would never influence me. For that I would not make any friend because my friend might corrupt me also, I thought.

Now, I have every fascinating story to tell my friends.

Especially you, who have not been to the city or visited someone there and never learnt the way of the people of the city as I did. I do not mean to hurt your feelings by saying you have not gone to the city, but the city you visited was different from mine. I promise you that you will know everything about the city life if you go through my diary to the end.

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