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.