I heard the story on the day following the one that the Prime Minister had a meal at the Ronalo Restaurant in Nairobi. When I went there for lunch, the restaurant was overflowing with customers, most of who did not look like the regulars and perhaps had just come in because of seeing the joint on TV the previous night. As a result, the sitting space was more squeezed than usual and I happened to share a table with the guy who was telling the story to two of his friends.

The story teller was an expensively dressed huge man with dark spectacles tastefully aligned along his hairline and had that light complexion that makes a black man look dashing, no matter what his looks are. And he had such overbearing flamboyance that right now, I can’t even remember what his two friends looked like. But the story, I cannot forget.

According to him, a guy he knows failed to keep a keen eye on the rising prices of petrol and ended up with an empty tank on the highway at night. The guy then decided that his best option was to walk to the nearest petrol station to get some fuel in a Jerry can so that he could revive his car. Unfortunately, the guy was accosted by thugs before he got to the petrol station. The thugs were of a particularly nasty breed since apart from robbing him, they also sodomized him.

At this point, the story teller posed for effect and took a moment to make a call from his cell phone. He must have been talking to a taxi driver because he asked him to pick him up from the restaurant and drop him at the airport so that he could catch a flight to Dubai. With that done, he went back to telling his story to the two listeners who seemed thoroughly impressed either by the story telling skills, or by the fact that they were having lunch with a person who apparently was going to have dinner in a different continent that evening.

Back to the story, the traumatized man somehow managed to make it home where he found his wife and tearfully narrated his ordeal. However, rather than offer sympathy, his wife looked at him squarely and said; “Now you know how it feels like each time you ask me to do that with you!” She then added, “You are wailing and it has happened to you only once; what would you do if it was to be done to you each time one of those men came home drunk?”

We never got to know what the guy’s response was, or what happened after that since the story teller’s phone rang and it turned out that the taxi driver was waiting for him outside the restaurant. He quickly snapped his flipping phone shut, picked up a small travel bag from between his legs, shook the hands of his two friends in a hurry and left them bewildered, just as a waiter came to ask if they needed any more drinks to be added to their tab. It must have been expected by everyone including the waiter that the flamboyant story teller would pay for the drinks and this was just a ploy to ensure that the two would be willing to take the responsibility. You could almost hear their mental calculators being punched ruthlessly as they recalculated their budgets before they grudgingly chipped in to pay the bill.

As I left the restaurant, it occurred to me that the moral of the story was that we should always be capable and willing to give what it is that we demand from others.