A HERO'S THORN

 

Today, I graduate from the university, an orphan for most parts.

Today I miss my father. By God! I miss him. I miss his smiles, the way he pats my back whenever he heard that I did something well; like my laundry or the dishes or fail to fail in exams. He understood me. He did ask me if the pupils that took the first position had two heads. He did tell me too, in those days when I failed more often than I passed exams, that when he was my age, he was so good that “no one saw his back”. I wished that I could tell him that it would be impossible for him to disappear or even make his back disappear. He probably would have flogged me; my behind and my back would have been smarting from the kind of beating he would have given me, with wires of our old refrigerator no less. The refrigerator had little use for us while it was alive. It coughed and sputtered and its inside was always hotter than the outside. I had told him once that he could boil food inside the refrigerator. He smiled then. It was one of his good days. When he had not had too much to drink; when he was not grieving over what my mother had said or missing her.

He was the street joke and was the end of so many advices. People warned other people not to look like my father. They would say “Read your book, stay in school or else you will end up like Odegba.” Preachers in the early morning cried out against the early morning chill, wearing aprons that advertised heaven and hell in equal measure, defied the beckoning hands of early morning languor to cry into their megaphones “Repent for the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. Drunks will not enter the kingdom of heaven”. They did not mention my father’s name, at least most of them did not but the way the different preachers went on and on about alcoholism and the way they seemed to bring their annoying megaphones closer to the windows of our one bedroom apartment, one could guess that they were taunting him, taunting us. Yes they spoke of other sins, like the small matter of fornication and adultery which Madam Cool, the Barwoman had a specialty in. She had lain with so many men that her husband had gotten tired of it all and left for the great beyond. No one spoke against Madam Cool because she practically had the dirty linens of most of the preachers. Deacon Eli had tried once and had gotten his favorite boxers and wristwatch thrown at him by an unknown skimpily-clad lady who claimed to have snatched the boxers and the wristwatch as collateral for his inability to pay the going rates for an hour of sex and may have been one of Madam’s protégé. There was also the sin of armed robbery and murder which Atugani did so well that no preacher preached against it. The last preacher that tried lost teeth and could barely hand on to his life. There were sins of gossips and slander which all of them with their loud microphones and loose shirts and baggy trousers over wiry forms held together by a rope-like belt that threatened to squeeze the very life out of them most times.

Sometimes the preachers hung around until my father left for work and coincidentally, they often left too. Yes, My Father, Odegba drinks but he also takes his job seriously what he does not take seriously is what he does after work and his health and his children and his sense of self-worth. Sometimes, I watched them through our window, quickly summarizing their judgements and condemnations for the day and deciding just the number of people that would go to heaven, often they followed my father, singing behind him while he jauntily walked to work, in perpetual hangover, where he fixed people’s homes, chairs, tables, shelves but scatter his own at the end of the day. He was a brilliant carpenter and I had once gotten an advice from a concerned friend of my father when I was barely twelve after another show of shame from my father who he had picked up from a roadside gutter that night.

“You see your father eh?” He said squatting down to get to my height level so close that I could trace the lines in the jowls of his face and his fat cheeks.

“Your father is a very good man. Don’t listen to what these people say about him. You do not know what he knows about woods by being merely a lazy, drunk. He is intelligent and resourceful. I know it’s tough being his son but if you learn half the things he knows about woods and shapes; you are on your way to a very rich future.”

I listened with rapt attention to Samuel, his friend who had more hairs in his beefy arms than he had on his whole bald head. He was not just my father’s friend; he was his only friend. He was always around to pick literarily pick my father up from the doldrums of his drunkenness and his self-pity. He also paid off his drinking debts which left me in two minds about his ultimate endgame. His clearing of my father’s debts sounded good and charitable; totally what one would expect from a friend but it left my father with a fresh tab at any liquor store. It seemed to me like he was the one buying him the drinks and a part of me hated him for it. My father does not owe any other person but the bars. My school fees were always paid on time because he directed his customers to pay directly to the school. Thus, I had everything I needed while growing up. I had all the text books I wanted and my school uniforms were changed once it had shown any sign of tear.

He always found enough time to watch my socks and uniforms till I finished secondary school. He had asked to put me inside the boarding school.

“They get better education” he had said. I declined. I did not want to leave him. We were the only people both of us had. He knew it and I do and as he was as stubborn as I was. I was a chip of the old block.

That night, we fought and I lost. The television lost too, shattered by him when the refrigerator wire he normally used on me got caught in the Television antenna when he swirled it and his brute strength and impetus brought the whole thing down.

I bled that night. I bled. My shirt which I used as a sport jersey in the day and as pyjamas at night taped to my skin by the caked blood on my back and smarted when I pulled at it in discomfort. That night and many nights after that, I could not lay on my back and I wept each night in pain, lying there on the cold mat on a hard floor, while he sat with his ubiquitous transistor radio on the single sofa that functioned also as his bed listening to the white noise when he was too drunk and to voices arguing about politics or religion or society; always arguing but never agreeing; in the few occasions when he was sober. He carried the transistor radio everywhere even when he drank his ‘ogogoro’ and even when he was wasted with it. However, I knew that he did not need the news; I did not need it but we needed the noise.

It distracted us. It saved us from that accusatory silence that would creep in and shout condemnations from its deathly stillness. It would condemn me for being my father’s son and being the harbinger of his distress. His life changed when I was born, I was told. It distracted him too from the thoughts of preachers’ morning condemnations, the thoughts of the jibes of the numerous passersby who derided him and called him names. It distracted him too, I was certain from the haunting mischief of the earth that always conspired to drag him down and drop him into the gutters. It distracted him from being able to look his only son and child in the eyes. His life had changed when he was born, he was told.

The last thing my mother said before journeying to the great beyond was my name “Owendi”. She had named me, my father had later told me, as soon as she had conceived after passing her menopause. Theirs was a love story to last an eternity but it could not outlast a bottle of alcohol. Their story was told by the bald, fat-cheeked Samuel who seemed to have been friends with my father when both of them were still in their mother’s wombs.

My mother and my father had being childhood friends and got married early because of family exigencies. They ran the dusty paths of the village together, swam the streams and went for firewood in the bushes together. The story told that my father had given many a man broken teeth on account of my mother and the story told that my mother returned the favour. My father was 21 while my mother was 18 years when they had gotten married but Samuel said that they were long married before that for marriage is nothing more than hearts in tune with each other, seeking out each other thoughts and hearing thoughts when words are superfluous and deciding to only be pleased and angered by just each other for the rest of their lives. It is when minds copulate, intertwined like wild snakes to lay the eggs of happy homes and rich lives.

My father was an only son and had married his heartthrob with the purpose of procreation but when the tables had turned after three years of marriage without issues, the tables had turned too but my father, Samuel had told me, stayed by my mother’s sides and refused to neither marry a second wife nor divorce my mother. Their marriage was tested for an additional fifteen years before she conceived and named me “Osondi Owendi” for she had said that my conception would please some and would anger some others.

She did not know that at the instance of that naming that my birth would for some reason anger my father. I believed that my father had not known then, until my mother had died from complications in childbirth. I was told by the bald-headed Samuel that my father had disappeared upon hearing the news and I was left in the hospital for more than a week while my father entered into the wilderness of grief. He emerged thereafter with a bottle which he said helped him to handle grief. He later told me in one of his scarce moments of lucidity that the only time he could forget Adimonyemma, my mother was whenever he was drunk.

It was true because at that moment, he was crying like I was at the many times when he had hit me in his drunken rage, he was looking at a scattering of pictures of my mother, their wedding pictures, my mother’s memorabilia: clothes and necklaces and scarves; stuffs that he had refused to sell or give away.

As long as he had them, he had my mother, he said.

To disremember the mother, he also had to disremember the son.

But for me who had no mother to remember, I cannot let go. Holding on to my father is holding on to my mother, who I had imagined was a kindhearted, teetotaler who only doled out ice-creams and never beatings.

My father would beat me, pay my school fees, hug me and throw up all over me in his torpor but I will be there with him because I will not run away from him like he had ran away from both my mother and me. For me, the true test of family is not in riding favourable tides but in staying the course and holding the vessels together when the gales strike the mast of brotherhood, fatherhood and even motherhood. It is holding on when it is easier to let go and trusting even when the loved one is beyond all trusts. It is retaining that sliver of hope that from amidst the clouds, the sun will shine forth.

My father left me when I was 21, of kidney failure. Yet he found enough strength to whisper into my ears before he closed his eyes never to open them again.

“Tear the sofa whenever you need anything.”

Today I graduate because of what I found under the sofa that marked my disappointments and sorrows. He had saved all he had in diamonds, golds and silvers.

In life he would seem a waste of fatherhood but he had proven to be more than most fathers in death. For family is not just about love, it is also about responsibility.

WHEN THE WALL STRIKES BACK.

Young wife, Nkechi does not like make-up; she is a member of one of the neo-pentecostal Christian denominations who considers make-ups as painting and relates to it as harlotry. She is also reserved, nay reclusive and could spend a whole day without saying more than fifty words. She smiles probably as twice as much as she talks at everyone and everything.

She smiles at the clothes of her three kids while she washes them, smiles at her fellow women when they are engaging in their rudimentary and routine quarrels to re-establish their womanhood,  she smiles at her customers while she softly and with intense miserliness of words explain why her red tomatoes are the best in the market and are in fact not overripe as was suggested by the customer; she smiles, I am certain, at the thick darkness while she balances her pan of tomatoes and pepper and vegetables on her and carefully try to thread a path amidst pitch blackness, sometimes furtively, as she steps into potholes, into murky stagnant pools and non-chalantly wades out of it, her rubber slippers flapping  behind her, splattering specks of mud and dirt on her calves and long skirts through the dirty paths that leads to her one room apartment she calls home after the day’s hustle.

She smiles too, at her husband, a thin, sallow man with balding, graying hair of about forty-three. She smiles even when he shouts and swears at her and call her names.

“Ashawo…” Nkechi would smile.

“You are a good-for-nothing woman” Nkechi would smile.

“You have been giving me several STDs.” Nkechi would smile

Even those nights when he had beaten her, Nkechi would take some minutes; powder her face and smile, baring her broken incisor; that same incisor that was broken by her thin sallow husband; at the world and the unfairness of it all.

What befuddles me most about her long-running agony is not just about her messianic resignation to an abusive relationship that would seem to be heading to an inevitable martyrdom is the glaring mismatch between Nkechi and Ndubuaku, her husband. Nkechi is four-inches taller than her husband and weighs at least 15kg more. She would have been considered a rotund woman if she had not been carrying those ample kilograms on a six-foot plus frame. Simply put, Nkechi is a giant and would easily destroy her husband if she fell on him with any sort of intent.

But Nkechi, a mother of three considers raising her voice at her drunken, abusive husband a transgression with the capacity to land her into the bottomless pit of fire and brimstone. She wants to go to heaven, an escape from the travails of poor motherhood and abusive husband and would gladly suffer hell on earth.

I heard her say once, quoting from her favorite book which she clutches time and again with a wan, weak smile or at times pores over with a squint; that the sufferings of this world is nothing compared to the bliss that awaits in the world thereafter. This I surmised would be the reason that she has not slapped the wimp silly.

Like I pointed out earlier, Nkechi is as sizable a woman as she was beautiful and would certainly not do badly in the second-hand marital marketplace where the divorced, the abused and the bored women shelve their wares.  Mama Risika her heavier, darker neighbour had often remonstrated heavily that her own display of decorum would send her to an early grave, orphaning her three kids none of whom were above twelve. Mama Risika had because of Nkechi’s quiet resignation to abuse nicknamed her “The Wall”.

Mama Risika for her own part was not nicknamed “Action Lady” in vain. She gave as good as she got from her husband and thus while she intermittently sports a black eye, her husband has had his two front teeth removed by Action Lady’s massive, fufu-pounding fists.

“Ejoor…Mama Chibuzor.” She said one day, cupping her face is her massive fists and drawing her head back while inspecting her bruised, swollen nearly-shut eye. I watched from the tinted, sliding windows of my apartment, that same window from where I watched the pummeling of the previous night.

“Even this Bible wey you dey read don talk am say The Kingdom of God don suffer violence tey tey and na wives like us dey break people teeth take am by force.” She concluded emphatically while I watched from my vantage point. She drew up a stool and began to clean her Nkechi’s face with a towel and warm water.

“You fit kill your husband if you just think am. You know sometimes I even dey fear say breeze don carry am those times when he dey go drink come back late.”

“Aiyiii…” She jerked as Mama Risika rubbed at a very sore spot. She frantically removed the elder woman’s hand before she spoke.

“My Pastor don tell me say My Husband dey suffer from demonic attack. Na only prayers go save am.”

“Dey there now make shoe dey wear you.” Mama Risika reprimanded her gently. “You dey wait make he kill you go marry another young girl wey him breast still dey stand?”

“My God still dey alive.” She replied batting away her hand and warm towel that was coming closer to her bruised, swollen eyes.

“Your God fit dey alive but you fit die. This man fit kill you. You no be God.” Mama Risika scoffed before she forcibly dabbed at her swollen eyes.

“Aiisshhh” Nkechi winced and furtively tried to avoid the warm compress by batting away Mama Risika’s hands. But Mama Risika has those kind of hands that no one could bat away without her consent. Nkechi is a formidable looking woman but Mama Risika is the definition of the word itself. Take her arms as an instance, it looks as if it had been cut off from elephant’s calf and were adorned with hairs possibly skinned from the lion’s mane. When she waves her greetings or gesticulates during some of her animated conversations, the fold of flesh that constituted her arms sways rhythmically from side to side as if they were engaged in a royal dance that advised luxurious movements. Her laps quakes the earth and shakes with it and she accentuates all these features with a humongous backside that would have been construed as a blessing in her firmer, youthful years but was now nothing more than a burden, a burden which could only be supported by a custom-made metal seat, the like of which she sat with while she played distress nurse for Nkechi.

If Mama Risika should come to one’s house, offering her a fancy seat is a subtle acceptance that one is planning to buy another one, however being a sensible woman, Mama Risika drags her own metal seat along with her when she plans to seat down more out of fear of damaging a seat and landing her heavy backside on the floor than any sympathy of the host and the seat owner.

Therefore, Mama Risika is often at risk of falling upon her lanky, wiry husband and crushing him than the man was at hurting a hair of her head. Papa Risika often out of a misconstrued sort of manly pride that is often another word for chauvinism has often managed to receive a crushing from Mama Risika and often in the full view of the neighbors who often beg her not to kill her husband.

Nkechi could do the same to her husband, but she was less formidable. The only thing that had always held her back was her faith in God and her belief in the tenets of the Bible both of which advised submission to God through an unreserved compliance to patriarchy.

This gores Mama Risika’s gears.

But what infuriates her the most was not Nkechi’s blind obedience to what a man said from the pulpit while citing a sympathetic verse and obfuscating the rest of the verses that has the potential to nullify those patriarchal lines, it was the fact that her own set up, the family which she manages is not even patriarchal, not in the very least.

Nkechi was the literal breadwinner, the bills payer, the fees sorter and the rents clearer. Ndubuaku on the other hand is a chronic alcoholic with rubbery will and a down-on-the-luck gambler who has never even won a bet.

Sometimes, Mama Risika wishes that she could sit on the frail sallow man for just fifteen seconds just to make a point.

Having dabbed at her friend’s eyes, she leaned back to observe the battered face and using the tip of the wet warm towel, she dabbed at the specks of blood on her split lips.

“Mama Chinua, ekpa mi ooo. I no sure say you go reach next year o”

“God Forbid…My God is alive.”

“Una Pentecost prayers no go save you when this idiot go put knife for your throat.”

“Abeg no call my husband idiot.” She retorted and stood up bristling with indignation.

“Na this thing you go dey do now until you collapse for here one day.”

“My Redeemer liveth…and I sure say I go dey alive see my husband become Christian.” He started heading towards her door leaving Mama Risika and her hundreds of pounds of flesh on her iron seat. However, she did not stop talking, her voice as weighty as her personality.

“I go know wetin you go dey talk when he go make your children motherless come go marry all these woman wey dem body still fresh replace you.”

“My husband no be that kind person.” She said pausing in front of her door and turning to face Mama Risika.

“I don dey talk am before say dem tie you for back come this town…Hei!” She exclaimed before she stood up from the iron seat, her fold of flesh oscillating in its intimidating glory. With five steps or less, she covered up the space between her seat and the front of the door where Nkechi stood. She felt Nkechi’s temperature and pulse sarcastically.

“I been dey talk am say you no well. I no go surprise if dem tell me say this man seal you for one bottle inside this your one room apartment.”

It surely looks that way. Ndubuaku would curse Nkechi at every turn, insisting that she was his biggest mistake whereas commonsense would clearly see he was hers. Sometimes a look at them brings Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to mind with the caveat that Ndubuaku is a very small beast, perhaps a monkey at a stretch whereas Nkechi is a very beautiful woman, tall, for she was taller than most women and bestowed with an ebony skin that glistens against the sun. Her face was shaped like a mango with her cheeks as pointed as her nose and her almond-shaped eyes cast in the alluring dark shade of a half-burnt charcoal. Neighbors had often gossiped that Ndubuaku is a very wicked genie who had hoodwinked Nkechi into marriage. That sort of thing is obtainable these days and had once happened to Jacob of the Biblical fame where Leah was offered instead of Rachael. If it could happen then, this technology-driven age where individuals wield dual and sometimes triple personalities in their assorted social media pages, it is even easier to imagine several scenarios within which Nkechi would have been deceived that the monstrosity he had gotten married to was indeed the epitome of masculine handsomeness. In a world where ‘orange is the new black’, utterly ugly may be the new handsomeness. 

However, Nkechi does not look the part of a social media savvy woman.

“There is no incantation against Zion and no divination against Israel…” Said Nkechi protesting that she cannot be locked down in a bottle by her husband.

“Well...If you no dey bottle because you be prayer warrior, at least I sure say your husband dey bottle. That woman wey yellow like paw paw don dey take all the money wey he dey win for gambling”

Well, a woman can bear anything but jealousy occasioned by unfaithfulness. That is why Shakespeare had stated that hell hath no fury than a woman scorned and Nkechi was feeling scorned when she heard that her husband was cheating.

It hurt more than the beatings which she submissively received as if they were part of the Ten Commandments administered by God through Moses. It hurts more than the broken nose, and the split lips and Nkechi was having none of it.

“Which woman?” She queried

“Oh? Na you be the only stranger in Jerusalem?”

“You no know Madam Durable?”

“You mean that bleaching Madam wey kill him husband?”

“Yes na…That woman wey own that Bar where your husband dey drink dey play pool with my husband?”

“So na my husband that woman dey wear knicker for?”

“Ehen now…She dey marry all the men wey win money for every weekend here.”

“Where she dey?” Nkechi asked before darting into her house and emerging with a scarf which she hurriedly tied around her waist over the wrapper which she had tied upon her silky blue blouse.

“Na now you come…Please make we gather go. I wan sit on my husband again today.” Mama Risika rushed into her room and emerged with her own scarf which she tied around her waist too.

As both of them left, from the vantage point of my kitchen window, I could see Ndubuaku’s teeth flying all over the place as he spat blood. There is no way this would end well for him.

However the street told tales of how Nkechi placed her husband and his girlfriend in a mortar and pounded him to pulp. They said some parts of his teeth and body are still left in Madam Durable’s Bar.

The next time I saw Ndubuaku was at a hospital where he was wrapped in a cocoon, like a spider’s imminent feast. He looked like he had been hit by a moving train. His beautiful wife sat near him commiserating soberly.

He could not talk because of a broken jaw and as such I could not get his side of the story.

However, I can confirm that he will not be hitting his wife Nkechi or any other woman anytime soon. Nkechi on her own part went for evening service the next day to worship Jehova and pray for the quick recovery of her husband who had escaped a very fatal encounter.

HIDDEN TEARS.

Tears in the Diamond.

Sometimes I wish to kill myself, thankfully the thought is as fleeting as the cold breeze that blows into our two bedroom apartment which is usually hot. The Power Authority had disconnected us two weeks ago making the hope of reprieve as distant as the shore to a shipwrecked captain stuck in the middle the deep blue sea.  There are times when a deep seated melancholy grips at me from the depth of my soul threatening to drown me in the pool of my own sorrows, thankfully, I have managed to keep my head above water but I just managed to, by grasping at straws and flapping wildly in the storms that has become my life. If I had sunk in, I would have left my three beautiful children motherless and my sweet husband, a widower.

My husband Ejindu, My tall, handsome Ejindu with his hair cut to the skin and a boisterous laughter which seemed to often empty his soul.

I could remember the first time I met him, I was nineteen and had just finished my West African Secondary School certificate Examination when he came with his father, a very good friend of my father who is also his business partner in the palm oil trade. Over a keg of palm wine, they decided our life and thought that we matched. In my father’s words, he had been waiting a long time for Mazi Nduka to bring his son Ejindu to his compound. The next day, my traditional wedding was fixed and later, my father being a catechist insisted upon and later got us married in the Church by Rev. Fr. Neil O’gilvy. I did not really protest the marriage; Ejindu was tall, broad-chested, fair and handsome. My friends, especially the overly mischievous Chinyeaka had once said that if there was ever a case of “maburu tupu” , the local word for ‘rape’,  against her and she opens her eyes to see Ejindu hulking over her, she will drag him deeper into the bushes and tear her wrappers if he could not get it off faster. We all laughed at her joke because looking at Ejindu who had just come back from the city, one would really question if he could hurt a fly. He observed us whenever he passed with a sneer, obviously, we are village simpletons who had nothing that could interest him. This is not to say that we were ugly, myself, I am a very gifted dancer with firm breasts and a body which often had the boys whistling. In fact, Uwadiegwu had broken through the ranks to inform me that if I ever gave him a chance, that he would worship the ground that I walk on. However, I can only smile at Uwadiegwu. He was not man enough. In the contemporary parlance, he is what Chibuike, my twenty-two year old son would call “Woman wrapper”. Furthermore, the heartbreak he claimed when I got married to Ejindu was not my fault. As at my twelfth year, My Father, Nwoye Mma had told me that it is his duty to choose my husband for me. “maka ime mkpuke” He did well to add after the sermons. In those times after the seventies, contraceptives are not as ubiquitous as they are now and the result of any sexual activity was more often than not a protruded stomach and a nine month assignment for the girl and peremptory fatherhood for the culpable male.

In those times, the two families would meet to discuss marriage terms to avoid gossips and scandal. It is a far cry from these times when I cannot even tell if my twenty year old daughter was still a virgin. My doubts were informed by the frequent calls she made amidst languorousness and was accentuated by my fortuitous discovery of condoms in her purse when she lent me the purse for a ceremony I needed to attend.

Those times were better, they were idyllic and bucolic times spent at the homesteads, telling tales by the moonlight and dancing and watching Uwadiegwu admiring me surreptitiously from behind the Udara tree which stands to the left of the Oji tree situated at the middle of the village square whenever the maidens came to rehearse their dances. The times before my marriage were the time of innocence, I lost my innocence a day after my marriage.

My mother, Nwanyimma spent time to talk to me about my duties as a wife to my husband. The duties she concentrated on were not my culinary duties or home-keeping duties, I learnt those watching my mother in our home. The duties she focused on were the ones she performed for my father which I was not obliged to see but which oddly I was excited about.

“Obiageli Nwa m”

“Eh Nne” I answered in a barely concealed anticipation.  A day to my traditional marriage, I was already excited about what I could possibly be doing with Ejindu in behind the closed doors of a dark room.

“Your body is for your husband and for him alone. Whatever he asks of you, You are expected as a matter of duty to oblige him.” She said clasping her coarse hands into mine. I was not expected to talk during these injunctions. It was assumed that I have no experience with the intricacies of male-female sexual intercourse and I was loath to reveal that I have had my sex education from Chinyeaka who called every boy ‘Udara Mmicha’ and compared the sizes of their penis before her chagrined but thrilled friends which included me.

She once told us that Ezeji’s manhood was as big as a branch of oji tree and that Akubuilo’s was only as small as that of a broomstick.

“Denying your husband sex is a sin against nature and it is also your duty to keep him satisfied in bed.” Right there and then, I could not shake off the mental picture of my much younger mother trysting with my father just before I was conceived, both of them sweating as they made an enjoyment of my conception.

On that night, my mother seemed to be reading from the two tablets of stone handed down from Mount Sinai and all she ever said were what a woman owes to her husband. Her injunctions were scarier than the Decalogue and it was then that I discovered how scared the Israelites must have been when Moses brought down the two tablets of stone.

Her voice brought me back from my reverie.

“The place of a woman is under her husband both in the family affairs and in the bedroom affairs.”

It was a curious night. I learnt that marriage is not easy for women. In a discussion that lasted for more than an hour, my mother did not talk about what I may want from my impending union with Ejindu or what the husband owes his wife.

 What if I want to stay on the top during our lovemaking or during family issues? Is it not proper that my opinion as a part of the family should be respected?

“Thank you Nne.” I stood up to leave scared that if I stayed a little longer, another of my responsibility to Ejindu would fall off my mother’s mouth.

I was already at the door when another commandment fell out.

“You should always understand your husband. You should know that men are polygamous in nature. All your father’s friends have two or three wives. Your father is a catechist that is why you do not have a stepmother.”

I turned to look at my mother by a sheer force of will. It is considered rude to look away when an elder is addressing someone.

“Your father is the exception rather than the rule. Ejindu’s father married three wives.”

My travails in marriage did not take too long to start. The night after our wedding, having gone back to the city; true to my mother’s pieces of advice, I had my bath and loosely tied a wrapper around my waist. In bed, I was already moist in anticipation with my fear forming sweats all over my body.

 I was scared. I was a virgin but I was driven by the idea of pleasing Ejindu and making him mine. My mother had told me about the searing pain I should expect when his member breaches my maidenhead. I can endure the pain. My worst fear is somehow failing to satisfy my husband. My mother without stating why had warned me that it is a sort of crime often punishable by divorce or an introduction of a co-wife.

However, that night he came home and did not come to bed. I stayed up in bed lonely, quietly slipping to sleep and expecting a weight to settle beside me later in the night. The weight of a man did not settle beside me.

In the morning, he gave me some money to prepare his favorite Okazi soup and left. It was long after dark when he came home. It was so dark that the crickets were chirping in the garden close to our house. It was so dark that I could not bother to check the time. I ran his bath for him, expecting him to come to bed when he is through. That night again, he did not come to bed.

I took time to look after myself. I had my bath regular and even started using cosmetics. I started doubting my beauty and began to lose confidence. On a rare night when he returned early, I served him his favorite Okazi soup and even with my meager savings, bought him a keg of palm wine. After his dinner, I broached the topic that has been eating away at me for four days.

“My husband. Why haven’t you come to our marriage bed for once?”

He scowled at me but did not say a word.

“Am I not attractive to you?”

For an answer, he just poured the palmwine into his cup and started sipping.

“My husband. I am ready to be a wife to you and please you as much as I can.”

At that sentence, he flipped. I did not know why even up till date.

“Is that what you do whenever I leave for work? Please people?” he shouted at me in rage, his deep bass voice causing tremors in my body.

“No My Husband.” At an attempt to prove my innocence, a slap singed my cheeks causing whirring noises in my ears. Instinctively, tears rolled down my cheeks.

“Is that how you were trained at home? Pleasing strangers and talking back at your husband? You better be a virgin when I have time for you.”

He stood and stormed out of the house. That night, I cried myself to sleep all the while contemplating if Uwadiegwu who once fought a masquerade for flogging me during the New Yam festival would have treated me differently. 

He did not come to bed that night and since then, I stopped caring.

I remained a virgin four weeks after my wedding but in an ironical twist, at the start of the fifth week, I was raped.

Raped by my husband.

He came home drunk and clutching a bottle of Double Crown Lager beer under her armpits. He walked into the kitchen and threw the bottle of drink down at my feet, breaking it. The shards of the bottle pierced some parts of my leg. I cried out in pain.

He slapped me.

“Why are you not waiting for me in bed like a good wife?” His breath reeked of alcohol.

“Am sorry my husband. Am fixing your dinner?” I was shaking in terror

“As at this time?” He stole a glance at his wristwatch “6:30 PM?”

“Am sorry my Husband.”

“What have you being doing since morning? You have playing with your boyfriends? Are you still a virgin?” He said reaching towards me, his hands slithering into my wrapper and trying to feel for my womanhood. I whimpered as rivulets of tears streaked down from my eyes.

His tried to force his hands into me. I winced in pain and struggled in futility to remove his hands from my body. He was taller and stronger than I am and my resistance seemed to spur him on. He removed his hand from under my wrapper and tore it away from him. I tried to cover my full breasts with one hand and cover my womanhood with the other. I have never felt more ashamed in my life. I felt dirty and abused.

He slapped me again and forcibly carried me into the bedroom with the hot water boiling on the kerosene stove and my body smelling as if I had bathed with Ogiri. I felt dirty and smelled dirty.

In the bedroom, I switched off, feeling his body on top of me.

I woke up in the hospital a week later and was told that I lost a lot of blood. A nurse told me that I had a profuse vaginal bleeding and should stay off sex for a while. I felt sore all over.

However, I was raped a day after my discharge from the hospital.

My misfortune did not start on that fateful night, it started when I was born as a girl.

THE GIFT OF DEATH.

“Do not be afraid, Our Fate cannot be taken away from us, It is a gift” – Dante Alighieri (THE INFERNO)

 Death is a stranger to the living; Disaster however is its second cousin. While I lived, I considered death far from me, its process was an unknown and the destination afterwards remains a total mystery.

I toyed at times with the thoughts of how I would die; old and gray with creaking bones, my children, children’s children and great grand-children surrounding my bed or perhaps I would disappear like the two hundred and something girls from the distant town of Chibok, meshing with the unfortunate statistics while my family keep restless and relentless vigil over my skeleton and politicians feast like flies on the disaster pornography.

I wondered too sometimes if I would die on the road ran down by another forlorn and frustrated commuter, fatigued by the hardships and weighed down by the arduousness of breathing itself while every instinct advise him to give up and run into the wall, into another vehicle or simply the next unfortunate guy crossing the highway.

My name is Ikemefuna Ndulue and I died on my 26th Birthday. I died in the worst way imaginable: Alive.

It all started and ended in a farm, my father’s farm and the only property he bequeathed to me when he died in Maidugiri, a victim of the Boko Haram insurgency. He was a Police Officer bent on doing his duty to his fatherland but paid the ultimate price.

The farm was the only thing I got from him. They kept promising me his pensions. The Police wrote me long letters but the papers they sent was not the one I needed; it was not the one my mother and two twin sisters needed.

The papers promised pensions and gratuities but my efforts to recover these promises were in the negative. I spent the little money I had saved up from my NYSC chasing what I was told was my father’s entitlements. However, the police had glowing words for my father, flowery words.

His superiors told me while patting my back patronizingly as they led me out of the station, that he was the bravest person they had ever met. His colleagues had less glowing words but were perversely flattering.

“Your Popsy shaa…The guy like egunje pass woman.” Abdulrazak had said. He was my father’s colleague with a heavily pock-marked face and brown teeth; a face as heavy as his accent.

“Trigger sabi handle that AK47 shaa…If you see how many criminal the man don waste eh” Tunde who they had nicknamed Thunder told me in one of my countless visits to the station in a bid to recover my father’s pension, gratuities and emoluments.

“Na your Papa?” He asked, with his brows raised in surprised askance.

I had merely nodded; too weak to respond to such trivialities while my sisters have both quit school and my mother seized and upended by the long arms of anguish dangles precariously at the edges of insanity. I had no time for trifles and thus I left the Police with their cupboard of skeletons.

That left me with the land that was more like a forest when it came to me; the land from where I fended for sustenance; the land where I lived life itself and the land where I died.

The land itself was nothing special, a 50 by 50 plot, in a valley sandwiched by two mountains thrown together by convergence and often seemed to be holding hands when viewed from a distance. In the dark however, the two mountains hug each other, swallowing up the land in its intimate embrace. Sometimes I felt that the two mountains were conspiring to bury me, at those times, I would look up at the two giant trees, an Oha tree and an Oji tree, there branches extended towards each other like in the start of a handshake and I would know; there is a lot for me between those mountains

I settled into the land after graduating, tilling to survive. My attempts in the labour market were more or less exploratory. I had been a Nigerian for twenty-four years then and had little hope of favour or fairness. I had two sisters, beautiful twins to send to school when I could barely keep them fed. I had my sweet mother who is clinging onto me as she would her last breath. There was also our two bedroom bungalow, its aluminum roof so leaky and worn that my mother collected full buckets of water under it whenever it rained and it passed discomforting slivers of light from the rays of the sun like lasers when the sun is high above the skies.

I did not expect magic from the state that has so failed its citizens. Thus, I did not bother to write my resume. I ran into the embrace of the two mountains and allowed the leaves falling off the giant oha and oji trees to caress my bare sweaty back while I struck the earth under me with hoes and cutlasses like Moses did the rock, every strike begging nay demanding for sustenance. And the land obliged, it did oblige and for a long time the land fed us, clothed us, patched the leaking stubborn roof over our heads and sent one of the twins, Nkechi to school.

Nkiru stayed behind and helped in the farm, sometimes Mama joined whenever her fragile mentality allowed it, which was a few times. She could see, she claimed, my father’s mangled corpse in the mounds and ridges and his bullet-riddled body on the stems of the farm trees.

The day I died was different and unique, 29th April 2016. On that the first rain of the year was pummeling the earth to my immense relief, wet earth meant softer earth, meant richer earth and meant increased productivity of the crops I had planted, of the seeds I had sown. The day was also unique because for the first time since the death of my father, the entire family was together in the farm, our only link to his memories. Nkechi, Nkiru and Mama were there eating a bowl of mangoes in a little hut I had made of mud and thatch and polythene.

On that momentous day, Mama told us a story of how she met my father who was a young police officer than and how he had threatened to arrest her if she does not accept his marriage proposal.

“He does not need to arrest me then. He really does not,” She paused to wash a mango in the bowl before she spoke “By the time he was making those threats,I was already in love with his uniform  and what I saw when he was having a swim in Oma river”

That day, my mother was inordinately vivacious, a pleasant departure from the sullenness that pervaded her day whenever the subject of my father was mentioned or whenever she saw a tree, a squirrel or even the brown earth which she would always relate to my father. I did not want the brilliance of the day to end.

We were like a family again and with the farm providing us with a livelihood, I had something to live with and it would seem, just for that day that my mother had found something to live for

Yet there was a palpable poignancy about that fateful day, I could almost taste it on the tip of my tongue. The rain smelled like dusty clay and potash.

It was nirvana.

It was utopia.

It was paradise.

But it soon turned to hell.

The hooves of over a score of cows rose above the rumble of the rain. They mowed in the distance while a fair boy of about eighteen clad in jalabiya hit them into the path leading to my farm. His curly hair was matted by the rain and he strolled with an unfamiliar abandon

intermittently shouting unintelligible words at the cows who seemed wired to hear the language for they responded each time by turning to a specific direction. However they turned, left or right, they seemed on course to me, to my livelihood and my loved ones.

I was not strong. I was only a frail guy, as fair as the fair boy in a jalabiya that spoke to the cows but I replaced his curly hair with a kinky hair and I have more pronounced forehead. We have contrasting features, I was rugged and weather-beaten while he was as delicate as a blossoming sunflower. The only thing that looked fierce about him was the long huge stick he wielded with a threatening familiarity and ease. I fancied my chances against the boy with the cows and with the confidence that is expected of an Igbo landowner, I left the makeshift shed and started towards him.

No sooner had I left the shed that some group of men, as many as the grazing and trampling cows rushed towards me, wielding not just sticks but also matchets and assault rifles. They made fierce noises in hausa.

“Wannan asar tamu” I could hear them repeat time and again as they rushed towards me. I was transfixed and stupefied by fear and my bravery dissipated like the early morning mist that gathered atop the Twin Mountains.

I could not fight, I started to run back towards my family but they were already there, tearing my mother’s clothes. The twins were already naked on the ground while a dozen other men brandishing weapons surrounded them.

I picked my cutlass, stained with earth and partly washed by the rain and ran. I was not spurred by bravery but by a humongous fear that was as tall as the oha and oji tree atop the mountain. I matched down my own crops and with clenched teeth I went towards the devils fully intent to commit multiple murders if that was what it would take to have my family safe from these devils in jalabiyas.

Then I was struck from behind. The pain went through my skull to my entire nerve endings.

I blacked  out.

I woke up hours later drenched. I could hear wailings of different pitch and tone coming from different homesteads. Before me, houses burned; men, women and kids ran helter skelter.

I looked closer at the makeshift hut, the place where I had last seen my family. The three of them lay there, disemboweled like cows; their body carved open from their stomach down to their pubis region. Flies hovered above them as their blood mixed with the mud and the rain to form a strange paste.

I have no father. He died serving his country.

I have no family. Some inhuman pigs took them away.

I retched and threw up, thoroughly weakened by the tragedy, I fell down to my own vomit.

But I did not die then.

I died two days later when some big-bellied men, clad in danshiki and agbada started arguing on the radio whether the deadly cattle-rearing marauders were from a particular ethnic group or if they had come from Mars.

I died when no one wanted to talk about Mama, Nwaforaku Ndulue.

I died when no one wanted to talk about my twin sisters, raped, dehumanized and disemboweled.

I died alive. This here is just a shell.