THE DAGESTANI DIVA
I knew very little about Dagestan before meeting Safia and to be honest I don’t know a great deal more now, except that the majority of notable figures who have emerged from the country to achieve global fame and prominence have tended to be fighters of some kind - boxers, wrestlers, UFC combatants and so on.
The foremost of these is a gentleman named Khabib Nurmagomedov, a superstar who was the UFC lightweight champion for the longest time, from April 2018 to March 2021, when he retired. 29 wins and zero losses! Imagine that - an undefeated record! Moreover, Nurmagomedov is the first Muslim to have won a UFC title. Not the kind of chap you’d care to look at in the wrong way if you happened to encounter him in the street.
Interestingly, a report on USA Sports Today from 2019 reveals that Nurmagomedov is also something of a moralist. The article, entitled ‘Know what really offends Khabib Nurmagomedov? Sexy plays and a lack of government censorship’ describes how the champ railed on social media against a play called Hunting For Men, in which ‘a woman in lingerie could be seen crawling across the stage’. “Why is the leadership in Dagestan keeping quiet?” he asked, encouraging his government to investigate, punish the play’s organisers and then apologise to the people.
According to Wikipedia, a 2012 survey revealed that 83% of the Dagestani population adhered to Islam, so this somewhat conservative attitude to art is perhaps unsurprising. What is curious, though, is how I wound up getting involved with a Safia in the first place. Given that my tastes tend more towards the degenerate, why would a woman from such a background gravitate towards me in the first place?
I first met Safia at an outdoor nightclub in Sochi, Russia in July 2021. Ah, attraction - eternally recurring, entirely predictable in terms of pattern and yet always so surprising. The music was loud and boisterous. House mainly, but they dropped a souped-up version of Rasputin (which the mainly Russian crowd loved). Safia was on the dancefloor with a couple of friends, dancing slowly, almost contemplatively, as though there was something else on her mind. She wore a short summer dress and her dark hair ran down her back to just above her waist. I watched her dance. There was an innocence about her that appealed to me, but at the same time her beauty and something about the way in which she moved ignited a more visceral desire in me.
I walked over and spoke with her directly - I’d seen her dancing, found her attractive and wanted to get to know her. Unlike in an English nightclub, where her friends would likely have shooed me away, or possibly called the authorities, the friends were respectful - albeit not overjoyed at my intervention - and they moved away slightly to allow us time to talk.
The conversation was not extensive. Safia did not understand much English, and my Russian remains pitiful. But she got the idea that I was hitting on her and we exchanged numbers. In a situation like this you are battling on a couple of levels simultaneously. For one thing, there is the aforementioned language barrier. For another there is the ear-splitting music and the general hubbub of the dancefloor. Best, in many such cases, to get the lady’s contact details and follow up later over WhatsApp, where you will be at leisure to render your bon mots in her native language by way of Google Translate.
I wasn’t expecting much to come of this brief meeting, however. Ideally you will spend a decent amount of time talking to your new acquaintance in order to (hopefully) ignite some attraction and to see whether that elusive ‘spark’ is present or not. And one problem with dating in a foregin country is that a lot of the time you are flying blind - you just have to assume that she likes you and proceed as though she does, even though any tangible evidence of this is yet to be revealed.
Safia left Sochi for Moscow, where she now lives, the next day and I travelled to Ekaterinberg shortly after that. But against all odds we remained in contact over WhatsApp and Instagram. And some time later, when I returned to Moscow, I hit her up and we arranged to meet.
The Hookah Lounge once more - Timeless off Tverskaya Street. Well, it has become my favourite date venue. These girls all love ‘kalyan’ after all, and apparently the tradition for smoking it is alive and well in Dagestan in particular.
That hookah paradise! The golden glow of the room! The low leather couches! The grave and respectful Russian waiting staff! The incongruent Union Jack cushions! The cool electronic lounge music! The beautiful girls and snappily-dressed men on secret assignations together! The mirrors and the secret passages, the discreet cubby-holes where you can sit and smoke, each decorated in a discrete and anomalous style - faux coal fireplaces, huge screens where SEGA games play, bearskin rugs, antlers protruding from walls, and rugs inscribed with dizzyingly complex patterns.
She arrived, beautiful in a dark magenta trouser suit, her long dark hair carefully straightened and parted. Now we would get to know one another!
‘Hello, how are you?’ I ventured.
She screwed up her face in puzzlement.
‘What?’ she responded.
OK, plainly this was going to take a little more work.
‘Google Translate is our friend,’ I said, gesturing with my iPhone.
Soon - with a hookah procured and a California Love cocktail for Safia plus a sparkling water for me - we were sitting together happily volleying banterous conversational gambits between the two of us, translated on my phone. It may seem strange to operate a date entirely via a digital translation medium, but I can assure you from personal experience that it is not only possible, but that it can be enjoyable too. The key thing is that your partner is happy to play along, which Safia definitely was. Pretty soon I’d found out that she was a tourist rep for Dagestan, selling it as a destination to prospective holiday-makers, and that she’d had a particularly busy time over the summer as the pandemic and travel restrictions had compelled Russians to holiday within the republic for the most part, rather than venturing overseas.
Safia was passionately proud of her homeland, describing as she frequently did the stunning natural beauty of its mountains, lakes, forests and beaches. This was a trait I found admirable and touching in equal measure.
Perhaps to demonstrate my admiration I placed my hand on her thigh. ‘We should go and listen to some traditional Dagestani music together,’ I said.
‘Where?’ she asked.
‘I’m staying just over the road. We can walk there in just a few minutes.’
She paused momentarily and then agreed. But if I’d hoped that the evening was to end with intimacy of the erotic kind I was to be sorely disappointed. As we neared my hotel she wrote on Google translate.
‘I like you Troy, but I don’t want to sleep with you yet. We hardly know one another at all.’
‘There really isn’t very much to know’, I said to her in English. ‘I am exceptionally shallow. You’ve probably got the jist of it already.’
She looked at me confusedly.
‘No problem,’ I translated into Russian on my phone. ‘Let’s just go and relax’.
She nodded, and I led her into the hotel.
I have noticed that there is little rhyme or reason to the sorts of women who are attracted to me. On paper there was no way that Safia and I had any business hanging out together, but it was clear that she liked me, and I was certainly drawn to her. As I was to discover, she was a woman actively rebelling against the traditionalism of her culture and upbringing, which I suppose is why I was now becoming a bit player in her story. But that didn’t mean she was ready to embrace good old Western sexual degeneracy on the first night. There were many more scenes to be played before we might finally merge together in the act of passion.
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