Character always beats looks

 

 

Many a man will want to take for a wife a woman with a goddess’ looks, besides other good attributes. A woman who turns heads. A woman who dresses well. A woman of grace in gait, mien and countenance. Yet if she had all those things, but went ahead and did one of the things even lascivious or violent men themselves would run away from, that woman, though she may need the till-death-part-us company of a man, might die chaste.

 

This particular girl was the beauty to end all beauties. Add to this that when the incident occurred, she was at that age when everything about a maiden conspires to make her irresistibly gorgeous and matters were compounded beyond paragon. 

 

Then one day, a fellow student, an official, caught this beauty and another girl doing things women only used to do with men, before the air was tainted with new practices. There they were, in a secluded old building, at it. It became a disciplinary issue, and by evening that day, everybody was saying: “It was bad enough that two schoolgirls did that; but even Y? Why?”

 

After that incident, it was impossible to see guys hang around Y the way they previously did. The chatter in the boys’ dormitories, where they fantasised about cute, amazing-bodied lasses now edited Y out; it was like she no longer existed. 

When she passed by a group of boys, they behaved worse than when the head teacher, himself not an easy man, passed by. Y had become a kind of abominable enigma.

 

Just consider the days when kimansulo reigned in the city. Wasn’t it the one form of ‘entertainment’ that many rushed to, and many more wished could be there to see the nude dancers? 

 

I will tell you something you probably haven’t considered: None of those girls is right now married to any of the men who used to watch, grope and sometimes even sleep with them at those shows. Just in case you get so pious, it is not because those men got saved, and realised they did not want those women near them. 

 

No, the reason is that those men would rather meet those women in those dingy places, darkened not just by the dim lights, but also the kind of actions going on there; than make them the women they find at home whenever they stagger back there, after groping the new crop of strip-tease dancers.

 

Finally, there is the ‘venerable’ Draru. This name no longer needs introduction. I am not one to find ease in exhuming past mistakes, but how can I explain Draru without making mention of Gen. Kazini, the indomitable soldier-man Lydia Draru confessed to slaying, unaided? 

 

Now give Draru the looks of a genuine beauty queen. Give her a body to match the pretty face. Okay? Now dress her like a good model and then send her to the door of a random man — any man who knew Kazini, read or heard about his death, its cause and at whose hands. Let Draru knock at that man’s door. Let’s say it is either early morning or late evening.

 

Either way there is more light inside than outside, so when the guy opens the door, he sees this angel of a woman, and welcomes her inside. But when she steps in, and the light shows her for who she is...

 

I would have been a fool to complete that, for who would believe that a grown man screamed, calling out his mother’s name? That’s if he wouldn’t plain collapse into comatose. Such is the power of character over looks.