When Valentine Screws

By Kunal Goel

Happy Valentine’s Day and all.

On this V-day I remember my last year’s V-day. Last year in Febuary I took a trip to a small town in East Africa. Well I have this eccentric friend of mine, Ishan, and he has this crazy young uncle who deals in some leather stuff export business.                        

So what happens is Ishan and me have nothing to do like kites in the rainy season. His crazy young uncle gives him a call and asks him whether he would like to come on a business trip to East Africa and all. “Sure as hell” says Ishan, “but I will take a friend with me” referring to me. So his crazy young uncle says no probs, and we start packing things like crazy for the trip after 2 weeks.             

So on the 16th day after that damn call we all set foot on the soil of East Africa, Somalia to be precise, a strange place I must tell you.

We had to go to Kismayoo, a small town in Southern Somalia. It was a 3 hours journey from Train, and as a Train was just leaving for it when we reached the station, we boarded it running real fast.

Little did we know that the train will be full, and we had to stand for the complete 3 damn hours. So we reach Kismaayo all tired and all at around 8 in the evening. Found a real cheap Hotel, and fell into unconsciousness the moment we hit the bed. Next day the crazy young uncle of Ishan went to check on his business in some agency in the town, and left us two to have fun. It was Valentine’s day and we wanted to celebrate it. So what do we do, we just pick up our wallets and went on a thorough Town investigation.          

It was too damn crowdy, by the way it’s on the shore of Indian Ocean and all, so we had all the Damn dirty ships coming and going and making noises like hell. The town was like a beaten up old marketplace, hawkers selling all those rotten fishes, and dirty old people just roaming around like no business and all.          

That place stinks. We were all dizzied up till noon, so we find this little old shaft of a restaurant and make a quick entry, and boy was that place dirty! Just a piece of bread with some washed up coffee and we were through. The food was pretty cheap though.             

So with all afternoon and evening in our hand in that dirty old place, we just start searching for some adventure. And boy, did we find the adventure or did the adventure find us! We saw the most beautiful girl we ever did saw coming straight to us. We smile nervously, and she asks are we boys new in town or what.        

We tell about our bad condition and position and all, and she takes pity on us. “Come with me” she says, and we follow her like a trail of petrol follows a leaking car. She takes us to this dingy apartment of hers, full of old furniture mostly rust and everything bad.         

She asks to be comfortable, boy the worst irony of our visit. So we sit on an ancient sofa, which has something to say each and every time we move our asses just a little bit, it was very embarrassing I mean, really. So she sits with us and starts talking like Egyptian queen Cleopatra must have talked in the ears of Caesar.              

So we ease up a little bit. The room had barely any light, and we could hardly see each other and all. We were feeling so lazily excited, nervous without being nervous etc. She had this hypnotic voice putting us in deep sleep; we could barely hear what she was whispering. We people really eased up. She was sitting between the two of us, and boy we were both getting so close to her feeling sleepy and all. It was just like a dream. She told us she works in

the market in the mornings and started to laugh. She told us that she really found foreigners attractive and all and likes to talk to them about their cultures and all, but boy was she talking about culture! So we talked and talked and talked till 10 in the night.     

But who cared to consult the watch. Till then we were all getting so horny with her soft wild chat, we both had our hands on her thighs. Wow, just like a dream. Heavens-dickens! The bell rang like hell, the doorbell I mean, all the colour flowed from her face.     

Dammit it was her husband she said, we had to hide somewhere fast, so we made way under her goddamn rusty old goddamn bed. Just then we hear the loud-mouthed drunk bastard come barging in the room. He sat on the bed, our hearts stopped. The bed creaked like hell and we discovered that we had a terrible headache.        

The drunken bastard was shouting at her in some ancient language and we couldn’t understand a syllable of it. She was shouting back at him, and every shout was like a hammer to our heads. They kept shouting and shouting the damn shouts for another half an hour, which was like thirty-two years. Then she came up to him on the bed, with us beneath it and all and they start making frantic love, and the bed all creaking like all the hell’s trumpets blown

together. Our heads were giving way; there was no chance of our getting out of that bed with a head on our shoulders, and the way they were making love they could go on forever. So like snakes we

slide out of the bed, holding our breath, and crawling and crawling little by little, sneaked out of the house. We ran like crazy, and stopped after 16 seconds to catch our breath. There was her purse swinging in the right hand of Ishan. When I asked him about it, he said he had absent-mindedly picked it up. O boy very good, I said.

So we go back to her goddamn shack, open the door quietly, but the damn door creaked like the coffin of an ancient mummy. What the F***, the guy shouted like hell. Scared like hell we start

running with the guy after us and the goddamn purse swinging in the right hand of Ishan like a Jew swings after the first 3 drinks of his Bar Mitzvah. We heard a screeching whistle in the dark, and suddenly a policeman appeared in front of us like lizard from

behind an ancient masterpiece. So with the drunken bastard after us and the policeman before us, we gave up the run and started counting our chances, which were next to none. Two days in an east African jail are like 20 years in Timbuktoo.
After the damn eternal two days the crazy young uncle of
Ishan found us and bailed us out. Since his business was finished and he had already booked the tickets and all, we had to make the return journey the same day. Oh boy we didn’t even had a chance

to lie on the damn Hotel bed, and once again the 3-hour standing ride in the damn train killed us. So when we reached the airport, his crazy young uncle finally got curious and asked us why the damn were we stealing the money from that damn old poor lady and all.          

We had a lot to explain, we were so damn tired, and we had a long and dreary night ahead of us. You must go someday that place called Kismaayo in East Africa. Boy that place rocks like crazy