What makes people like each other? What draws them together? I stumled into these questions when a relative suddenly announced that he is getting married, after 60 years. How could a very old guy, jobless, trying hard to be a businessman, ex-alcoholic?( I really don't knowif he has quit). Imagine, he receives the girls (as his girl has to be accompanied by a friend always), in dark lit sala, and serves them canned food. Many of his spiritual advisers are advising him to get away from the girl, which I presume is a woman of the night. She was dressed in a sleeveless blouse, when she visited him last night. Now it was told that he would make him sleep in his room come the 20th, when her landlady will have booted her out for nonpayment of rent.
This guy is a romantic, very fond of highly imaginative Don Quixote who fell in love with his Dulcinea, but who in his real life was a whore. He is very fond of Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Rimbaud, all poets who lived in the world of imagination. All his life, he was cradled, coddled, pampered by his mother who recently died. Now he perhaps is seeking that kind of attention, that rapt attention which made him turn away from facing the flying years.
Well, hitching up could be good also for him because he could have a child by her, and possibly bear a good looking child considering that he belongs to a family of beautiful sisters and a brother, apart from his similarly becoming parents.
What is awry here however is that the girl, 18, belongs to class C and D and did not finish elementary education. How could he possibly rear her to like all the literary poems that he used to write, apart from read all his collection of books - novels, poetry, magazines and newspaper feature articles, and many more? It will take about ten years to make her learn, that is if she is wont to learning and by then he would have been 70, perhaps even using a cane to walk about. In effect he would just be making her a nurse to his weakening body which he had never really taken care of.
Now is that not a case of cradle-snatching? Or using the girl or taking advantage of her financial vulnerability? But maybe that is his fate. This girl who could, I hope not bring down his own standing in the community. Already, a couple of renters in the compound where he lives is moving out. The wife came from a similar background and probably felt very good living in that wealthy-looking compound. But now that a similar person would be joining the compound of residents, but, and that is a big BUT, she would be living with the owner, the disparity of incomes has become very stark. They are moving out probably because they could not stand seeing someone of their ranks rise so fast to a class level which they could never get to, at all, in such a short time, or maybe never at all. Another woman from the same compound, working for the guy, is eyeing having a business of her own, which eventually could make her independent and possibly rent another place bigger than what they are occupying right now.
Well, time will tell what will happen when that girl and her girlfriend get into the picture finally. God forbid anything untoward from happening.
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