Diary,

I’m back home from my trip to India. How was it? The sightseeing and change of pace were delightful. As a study to unravel why people like me decide to remain single, it was a dud. Besides feeling like a proper lab rat, we’re nowhere close to cracking that nut. Maybe we’ll find out once we figure out why the chicken crossed the road.

Back at home, things are a mess. Despite years of floods and hundreds of lives lost (in the dozens this year alone), it seems no one has come up with a solution to this nasty problem. Proper drainage system anyone? Luckily, after taking proper measures after the last time I lost everything in my house, the water made it past me without any significant effect. The floods, however, seem determined to leave a mark.

This lady I know from work had been trying to reach me while I was out of the country. More than 10 of her missed calls awaited me at the airport when my phone picked up the local network. To say I’m surprised is an understatement.

“Hi, Jenny,” I said soon as I called her. “Just got your calls. What’s up?”

The usual chitchat follows — colleagues catching up and all that. Colleagues here is the operative term. Jenny is a very beautiful, very smart doctor. But Jenny is also kind of standoffish. She doesn’t entertain any chatter outside of work business.

I respect her resolve, but being that I was cursed with the need to conquer every female in sight, it never sat well with me. Do you know how many points dinner with Jenny would add on my man-card? And now here she was, leaving me a tonne of calls.

Unfortunately, Jenny hasn’t been looking for me for the reasons I hoped she would.

“Tom,” she said in a voice less confident than usual, “I hate to put you in a spot, but I’ll go straight to the point. My house flooded and everything is ruined. With all my folks upcountry, I had no one else I could turn to.”

“Oh, Jenny, I’m sorry to hear that.”

I went on to explain how come I hadn’t replied to her calls and asked her if she had found a solution yet.

“I shacked with Dr Msenge for a couple days, but it wasn’t ideal,” she explained. “Now I’m living in a hotel and it’s only as a last resort.”

Dr Msenge is another colleague of ours, and if my horny rating is at 8 on a scale of 1-10, his is at 25. He’s not a bad bloke, just a guy who goes after everything in a skirt. It might seem like I’m describing myself, but unlike Msenge, I have more tact in my approach, accompanied by tonnes of patience.

Without a solution to her problems, the hotel stay was eating out of Jenny’s reserves like a ravenous hyena. Would I be a gentleman enough to house her until she found a more tenable solution? Of course, I would. She was a respectable colleague after all.

But that was only one aspect of the reason for my magnanimity. This is Jenny we’re talking about. Just through this brief phone call, we’d exchanged more personal information than all the three years she and I had worked together.

“I’m taking an Uber back to my place from the airport,” I said. “If you want I could—”

“I’ll be outside when you get here,” she said quickly, almost as if afraid I might change my mind.

All sorts of scenarios played in my head on the ride to her hotel. Beautiful scenarios between me and beautiful Jenny. She killed all that with one statement after she got into the car.

“I guess times like these is why people have life partners, eh?”