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I would be lying to you if I told you that her mother had raised a family of girls, for that would be an understatement. A more accurate statement would be calling her a mother of models, for she would pride her homestead in having the highest number of beauties per family. The girls numbered about three or four , in a single parent family, with no brothers.
The family owned and ran a couple of popular salons, and she therefore grew up to be an expert in matters of the hair. This I had told you in another post, where I said that Mutheu was the only girl that knew how to look hot in weaves - those wig-like contraptions that Kenyan women have taken as a license to have pathetic hair days and get away with it. I still maintain the claim.
One peculiar thing with Mutheu, though, was that no matter how hot the weave looked like, you would rarely spot her in a completely done one. In jeans, mostly black ones and open sandals that showed the frayed ends of the jeans and her yellow-ish skin tone, you would catch the promising and luring tone again above her waist, exposed by those few inches that her top missed her waist by. Her head would have a weave on one half, and her old hairstyle on the other half.
The weave was usually done in a creative manner that showed an expert had not been through with her work. Probably she had to interrupt the work on her hair to work on another client, or to do the book entries before she closed the salon. The salon was located on a back alley, a place I frequented , not for the familiar image of rubbish that Kenyans love dumping and leaving at their doorstep, but for the even more familiar greeting and smile from Mutheu.
On an even better day, she would be manning the family owned hair accessory and beauty shop, on another of the five streets. The great thing was that an alley, no, two alleys joined the street the shop was on and the one the salon was on. You checked if she was in one, and if she wasn't you used the alley to get the other.
While others would call it stalking, I prefer to call the habit of passing by where she was coincidence. No? , OK, let's call it putting effort into our friendship. I mean, I knew a little bit more about her than the other lads who crowded the beauty shop at times. This was despite knowing her later in life, than the other lads who she had probably known earlier in primary school.
Other than her beauty, she happened to be one of the few ladies from our region to ever make it to the few competitive spaces in public university. So yes, she had the brains too.
I doubt if you are likely to spot her today with her signature half-weave, as that she reserved for our town, and ladies, please leave the weave to Mutheu, or at least have her do it for you.
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