by E. C. Osondu
“Ah, if I wasn’t stubborn, you would have killed me, you wicked man,” she said and they both laughed.
Soon the aroma of boiling chicken seasoned with garlic, basil, thyme, and curry and some African herbs that Mother usually bought from the African store on South Salina Street filled the apartment. I knew that the next day all the clothes in my closet would smell like curried chicken.
Highlife music was coming out of Father’s study, and Uncle Boateng’s laughter was booming. He and Father were talking and drinking and agreeing with everything the other said.
“Where is your son? He is almost a man now, and should be sitting here with us, drinking and picking up wisdom from sitting near his elders.”
“Ah, do you want me to end up in jail, or don’t you know that this is America?” Father said, and Uncle Boateng laughed again.
“Anyway, he can sit with us, can’t he, there is no harm in that. At least there is no law yet saying he cannot sit with elders while they are drinking, or is there such a thing as secondhand drink, like you have secondhand smoke?” Uncle Boateng said, and they both laughed again.
I came and sat with them and pretended to be enjoying it while thinking of the football game on television.
“You are already a man, and according to the customs of our people back in Africa, you should by now be preparing to go into the bush and catch an animal with your bare hands and return with it to show the entire clan that you have become a man. But we are in America, and killing a squirrel here is an offense. So your father and I have been putting our heads together, and we have come up with an equivalent test of manhood for you,” Uncle Boateng said.
Mother brought in the steaming bowls of pepper soup, and Uncle Boateng began to lick his lips. He grabbed a bowl from the tray, took a spoon, and began to drink the soup. I was worried the hot soup was going to scald his throat.
“Ah, you are looking at me with wonder—don’t you know I have an air-conditioning unit inside my throat?” he asked, laughing. “Back home, when I was about your age, my parents sent me to a boarding school. That was where I learned to bolt down hot food. If you did not bolt down your food as soon as it was served, the senior prefects would start their endless announcements, and you could not eat while a prefect was speaking. By the time the prefect finished speaking, lunchtime was over and the food had to be poured away.”
I too began to drink my bowl of soup, which had cooled somewhat since Uncle Boateng began telling his story.
WE ENTERED GALDI’S, the discount grocery store where Father preferred to do our grocery shopping. Buying groceries was a woman’s chore back in Nigeria, but it was one duty Father did not find demeaning or complain about. When Mother used to shop for groceries, it was a source of endless quarrels between them. He would ask her for the receipt from her purchases and, his glasses perched precariously on his nose, hold a pencil in one hand while going through the receipts like homework. He would ask Mother lots of questions on a voided purchase, his eyebrows raised as he posed the question. He would rise from the dining table, still holding the receipt. Finally one day, Mother had blurted out that it was about time he started doing the grocery shopping himself, and Father had jumped at the offer as if it were a long-awaited opportunity.
Father inserted a quarter into the shopping cart and gestured for me to push the cart into the store.
“Pick whatever you like,” he said to me. I could not believe my luck. Usually Father would frown when I asked if we could buy chocolates, yogurt, or breakfast cereals. His only concession was buying ninety-nine-cent bagels, nodding in my direction and saying, “I know you like bagels.”
Galdi’s was full today, and for some reason Father seemed to find this fact exciting. It was the typical Galdi’s crowd of Sudanese and Croatian immigrants and poor old people who rode the Centro bus and closely examined every item they picked up from the shelf, put the same item back on the shelf, and then picked the same item up again and dropped it on another shelf.
I picked up a tub of ice cream, a few bars of chocolate, some cookies, and a giant pack of Mike and Ike. Father looked at me and asked if that was all I wanted. I began to pick up items at random, a six-pack of fruit jugs and about half a dozen different kinds of candy, but Father did not even stare at me. He bought the usual items that we needed—jumbo chicken thighs, tomato puree, pasta, vegetable oil, rice, and trash bags. Our shopping cart was overflowing at this point, but Father urged me to add a pack of Twinkies to my haul just before checkout.
There were four checkout lines, but Father picked carefully before we joined a line. He was sweating slightly, like someone at the verge of something, but I could not quite place whatever it was he had in mind. We began to off-load all our stuff onto the conveyor belt, with father smiling apologetically at a matronly white woman behind us. The cashier flashed us a false smile and began to tally our purchases. It came to a little over a hundred dollars. Father seemed genuinely surprised and pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill and ten-dollar bill from his back pocket, all the while smiling at the woman behind us.
“I did not realize things have become this expensive, eh, I thought it was only the price of gas that has gone up,” he said out loud and smiled at the cashier, but she did not return his smile.
“We have no choice, we cannot pay for your items, you have to return them.” He began returning the items I had picked to the cashier, who asked, “You don’t want these?” And without waiting for a response, she began to return the items to a cart near her. But the lady behind us on the line pulled Father aside and began to talk to him. I could hear her.
“I noticed you had to drop off a lot of stuff. See, I can help, and you don’t have to pay me. I’m sure you would do it for someone else. I will pay the difference.” She handed her debit card to the cashier and asked her to add the charge to her bill. Father seemed genuinely surprised and kept saying, “Thank you, thank you,” in a voice that seemed not to be coming from him.
“It’s not a problem at all, I’m sure you’ll do it for somebody else, I used to have kids myself,” the lady said and smiled, showing only her teeth.
We walked out of Galdi’s loaded down like hunters with their kill. The traffic on Erie Boulevard pounded like African talking drums, and Father kept smiling and patting me on the back.
A Simple Case
Your case is simple, you will soon be released,” the sergeant said to Paiko. Paiko had been arrested earlier that evening during a police raid on Jolly Hotel, a brothel that harbored more than thirty female prostitutes.
In the late evening, Paiko was still sitting on a worn brown wooden seat behind the counter. He was beginning to get worried. His arrest was likely to stop him from going to his stall at the Alade Market, where he sold “Okrika Wake Up,” imported secondhand clothes and bags. Since after his arrest, his girlfriend, Sweet, for whom he had been waiting to finish having sex with her last client so that they could go home together, had not yet come to visit him at the police station. He recalled a conversation he had had with Sweet a long time ago, when he first told her he wanted her to become his “special woman.” She had smiled and told him that any man who wanted to keep an ashewo, a prostitute, as his woman must be prepared to catch the clap and should be ready to spend some time at the police station. He had been lucky until last night. Usually he would bribe the police whenever they came on a raid of the Jolly Hotel, but last night was different. The people who had arrested him were members of the newly formed SARS, Special Anti-Robbery Squad.
A new sergeant was taking over from the one who had been at the desk when Paiko was arrested. Paiko watched the new sergeant’s face closely and smiled. He liked what he saw. The new sergeant had an overflowing belly, which was a good sign; he was likely to be a bribe taker.
“Don’t worry, you’ll soon be released—I am sure my colleague who is taking over from me will be the one to release you,” the departing sergeant said to Paiko.
Paiko smiled nervously and said nothing. He was not too w
orried; this was a police post and not a fully fledged station. He suspected that no hardened criminals were in the cell, and the only smell that came from the cell was a faint odor of old urine. He was happy, however, that he was not in the cell.
The new sergeant cleared his throat, spat into a dusty corner of the room, and turned to Paiko.
“What is your offense, my friend?” Without pausing, he asked the same question in a different way. “What offense did you commit, mister?”
Paiko became worried; he thought the departed sergeant had briefed the new one on his case. He had seen them put their heads together while looking in his direction. Paiko summoned up some courage and smiled at the sergeant.
“I did not commit any offense, sir. I was arrested in a raid on Jolly Hotel,” Paiko said.
“Then why do you say that you have committed no offense? Your being caught in a raid on a brothel is an offense—or do you want to lawyer me?” the sergeant asked, peering at Paiko through restless, bloodshot eyes. From where Paiko sat, he could smell the ogogoro vapors emitted by the sergeant.
“Oh, no, not at all, sir, I’m not trying to lawyer you at all, sir,” Paiko said.
“Anyway, your case is a small matter; you will soon be released,” the sergeant said, and began to read a sheaf of dogeared soccer pools betting coupons.
Just then, the station radio came alive. The sergeant threw the frayed sheaf of coupons aside and snatched the radio. He saluted smartly, his huge belly jiggling like a water gourd.
“All correct, sah. I am the sergeant on duty, sah. What do you say? … An armed robbery along Ikorodu Road, a commissioner’s official car snatched? Ah, that is very serious, sah.”
Paiko watched as the sergeant began to twitch nervously, all the time scratching his large buttocks through his torn uniform, patched in three places.
“No problem, sah, we have enough of them here, you can come and pick them up with the Land Rover, there is no vehicle in our post. It is a small post, but we can provide you the men you need for the parade, no problem at all, sah.”
The sergeant was suddenly transformed into a shouting, barking, wild-eyed creature.
“All of you criminals in the cell, form a line and start coming out of the cell with your hands raised in the air. If you try any monkey tricks with me, I will shoot you right away, and your family can come and collect your body in the mortuary.”
He opened the door of the cell with a bunch of keys he picked up from a wooden board nailed to the wall. The men shambled out; there were six of them, all looking confused and bewildered. All the while Paiko had been sitting behind the counter,he had had no suspicion that the cell held such tough-looking men. The sergeant turned to Paiko and barked, “What are you doing there? Join the line—in fact you should be the first person in the line—and raise your hands in the air, or you will chop bullet right now.”
“Ah, sir, I am not a criminal—you told me my case is simple, I told you I was arrested at Jolly Hotel,” Paiko stammered.
The sergeant walked toward Paiko and gave him a slap across the face. Paiko blinked and blinked again, trying to dispel flashing stars.
“Now fall into the line before I waste you,” the sergeant said. Paiko stumbled, his feet unsteady and his hands raised in the air like the other men.
An old police Land Rover arrived, and the sergeant led the men outside. An inspector with three broad tribal marks across both sides of his face jumped out, and the sergeant saluted him smartly.
“Are these the robbers?” he asked.
“Yes, sah, they are the armed robbers I told you about, sah.”
“Why are they wearing all these clothes?”
“Sir, they were dressed like this when we arrested them at the scene of the crime, sah.”
“You all, take off your trousers and your shirts, all of you, take them off quickly,” the inspector said to Paiko and the rest of the men. Paiko was of a mind to tell the inspector that he was not an armed robber, but he changed his mind and decided to bide his time. The men removed their clothes and stood in their underwear, which was in various colors, sizes, and different states of disrepair. The sergeant commanded them to jump into the back of the Land Rover. He sensed some hesitation on their part. Pulling out a pistol, he raised it and shot into the air. Paiko threw himself into the back of the Land Rover, banging his head against the hard metal. As the smell of petrol filled his nose in the pitch-blackness of the vehicle, he began to cry like a baby. The vehicle pulled out of the station, and they were on their way to Area F, the state headquarters of the police command.
The men in the vehicle soon found their voices and began to talk in whispers.
“Where are they taking us to, sef?” a voice in the darkness asked.
“To Area F, now, their headquarters.”
“Ah, Area F, is a bad place I tell you, that is one place I do not want to go to again. That is where they have the worst torture chamber in the whole of this country.”
“But why are they taking us there?” another voice asked.
Paiko cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. He was listening to his own voice as the words came out, almost as if the words were not his; his mouth felt like an instrument that was separate from the rest of him.
“I heard the sergeant on the radio; he said some armed robbers snatched the official vehicle of a commissioner and that they needed to make a quick arrest. It was not long after he spoke on the radio that the inspector came.”
“Ah, that means they are going to parade us as the armed robbers that snatched the commissioner’s car. They told us to remove our clothes, so we’ll look like the real robbers. We are even lucky that they did not shoot some of us in the leg—sometimes they do that to convince the public that the robbers were trying to escape or that it was a serious gun battle,” a voice filled with experience said in the darkness.
“Area F torture chamber is the worst except for the Alag-bon Close torture chamber at Force CID.” The voice saying this seemed to be getting a lot of satisfaction from telling his tale.
“In Area F, they have large hooks in the ceiling. They tie the hands and legs of suspects like roast chickens. They hang them upside down and use heavy batons and koboko whips to wallop them all over their bodies and convince them to confess. If a person is proving stubborn and does not want to confess, they invite a popular sergeant there, his name is Sergeant Torture, and by the time he’s done with you, you’ll confess both the crimes you committed and the one you didn’t,” the same man said, chuckling to himself.
Paiko began to wonder why the man was doing this. He felt a warm trickle of sweat running down the crack to his anus. The same man cleared his throat and continued.
“Sergeant Torture will hold a suspect’s penis in his hand and insert a rusty sharp bicycle spoke into it; sometimes if he does not want you to suffer too much he will use a sharp broomstick, ah, that place na waya,” the speaker concluded.
The police Land Rover pulled into Area F. Before the vehicle could come to a proper stop, the inspector jumped out, and as the vehicle stopped, it was surrounded by men holding guns raised into the air. Some of them were wearing khaki shorts and black singlets and berets; others wore no shirts at all and were carelessly swinging their guns from side to side.
Area F had a peeling milky fence around it. Outside the fence hawkers held dripping plastic bags of sachet water for sale; a few hawked dead-looking loaves of bread and fried buns. After the vehicle stopped in the compound, Paiko and the other detainees were marched into the police station.
“You can take their statements later; these are dangerous criminals. They robbed the commissioner of his car. I am taking them straight into the cell,” the inspector who brought Paiko and the others said to the corporal at the desk. He ordered Paiko and the other men to form a single line. With their arms raised they were marched into the cell.
The cell was a small room with a single lightbulb hanging very far away on the cement-decked ceiling; the
floor was dark and grimy from urine, tears, sweat, and feces. Paiko could not see his way as he walked into the cell and stepped on someone lying on the floor.
“Who goes there, human beings or animals?” a raucous voice barked.
Paiko stepped gingerly away. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the cell, he began to see that at least three rings of men had formed circles. A tiny window on the far reaches of the wall, covered with three dark, rusty iron bars, was the only means through which air came into the cell. The heat was like that which emanated from the oven of a bakery. In one corner of the cell was a small pit latrine out of which thick vapors and a horrible stench emanated. The space around the pit latrine was cleared for the newcomers. The man who Paiko had stepped on was bleeding from a bullet wound; another man knelt beside him and was massaging a strong-smelling Chinese balm into the still fresh wound.
The same voice that had asked the question when the newcomers came in asked again, in a tone that was getting angrier, “Who goes there, human beings or animals?”
“Animals,” answered the man who had been talking about the torture chambers on the ride down to Area F. The other voices answered, “Humans.”
The man cleared his throat and laughed out loud. His laughter was clearly without humor, and as he laughed, the other people in the cell laughed along with him, except for the newcomers.
“I am the president of this cell, and I am known as Presido. This is Jungle Republic. There are no human beings here in Jungle Republic, we are all animals. The only people who are human beings are those living in the outside world—those of us in this inside world are all animals, abi my people no be true I talk?” he asked.
“True talk, Presido,” the voices chorused.
“Just as you have your president and commander in chief in the outside world, I am the president and commander in chief in this Jungle Republic, even, sef, I have more powers than the president of this country, because if I want any one of you to die this very minute it will happen, no trial, no judge, fiam, like that you are dead.”