by Chris Abani
As the band began to play, the bandleader motioned to Redemption and whispered something to him. Nodding, Redemption returned to Elvis and led him to the back of the club.
“Okay, you done get your first customer,” Redemption said, pointing to an Indian woman in her late twenties.
“Customer?”
“Yes. De band, and dis club, attracts rich patrons, mostly Indians and Lebanese, and de band has to find good, well-mannered men and women to dance with dem all night. You will be paid well, don’t worry.”
“To just dance?”
“Well, dat is up to you,” Redemption said with a short laugh.
Stopping before the young woman with beautiful long raven hair and black eyes flecked with the slightest hint of honey, he introduced them.
“Elvis, dis is Rohini. Rohini, Elvis.”
Her twin-dimpled smile was pearl white and excited Elvis. To her left stood her silent, towering golem, a eunuch her father employed to chaperone his daughter. He bared teeth in a snarl at Elvis’s approach.
“Relax, Prakash,” Redemption said.
Rohini was Upanishad Tagore’s eldest daughter. Upanishad, a shrewd businessman, had inherited a couple of medium-sized provision shops from his father, Davinder Singh Tagore. Tagore senior had come to Nigeria in 1912 to help build the railways, and stayed on. With an uncanny head for business, Upanishad had turned those two shops into fifteen huge department stores scattered all over the country. They sold everything from dry cell batteries, Swiss Army Knives, groceries and toys to cars and tractors.
“Hello,” Elvis said. “Would you care to dance?”
Prakash laid his big hand on Elvis’s shoulder in warning. Redemption picked it off and turned to him.
“If you lay your hand on my friend again, I go take you outside and give you de beating of your life, you bastard.”
Prakash hesitated. Redemption had a mean reputation, and this club did attract a lot of local gangsters—disgruntled, angry men who would jump at the chance to work over a much-hated Indian. Prakash backed off.
“Hello, Elvis,” Rohini replied, her voice like treacle. “Yes, I would love to dance.”
With a smile, he led her off and, holding her lightly, swung her through a waltz as the band played “This Is a Man’s World,” though the singer sounded nothing like James Brown with his high-pitched falsetto.
“So how are you, Rohini?” Elvis asked.
“I’m fine, although life is pretty boring for me at the moment.”
“Oh? Why?”
“I am fighting with my father.”
“I know all about that,” he said with a short laugh.
She smiled. “Really?”
“Yes. Tell me about your father. I mean, why do you fight?”
“You are getting awfully personal for a person hired to dance,” she said.
“I am sorry. This is my first time. I meant no offense.”
She looked at him in the dim light. He seemed genuine enough, so she told him about herself.
Rohini had been educated at Oxford and graduated at twenty with a first in classical studies. Returning to Lagos, she had spurned every suitor her father had lined up for marriage. Running short of men, he pressed her to return to India to be married off. She refused, defying him in a gentle but firm assertion of her independence. She turned down the offered post as company finance manager, opting instead to take a job teaching comparative philosophy at the University of Ibadan. In deference to her mother’s tearful pleas, she lived at home, even though that meant a two-hour commute each way. She also allowed her father to hire Prakash to protect her from the unbridled and scurrilous advances of the native blacks.
“My father is very disapproving, and cares only for money. As he says, ‘Vot else I can du? A cock crows; me? I make money.”
They both laughed, and Prakash looked on disapprovingly. Remembering the money Redemption had slipped him earlier, Elvis said: “Can I buy you a drink?”
“I think you have got it wrong,” Rohini said, leading him back to her table. “It is I who buy the drinks. What can I get you?”
“Beer, please,” he said.
She nodded and whispered to Prakash, who grabbed a passing waiter.
“Are you all right, Elvis?” she asked. “You look a little uncomfortable.”
“I’m fine.” Beaming, he turned to Prakash, taking in his sour countenance. “Don’t you ever smile?”
“Smiling is for prostitutes and fools,” Prakash said.
“Captain on deck!” Redemption shouted, getting up and snapping to mock attention as Elvis walked into the buka.
“Oh, shut up, you,” Elvis said, suddenly self-conscious.
“According to my watch”—Redemption began consulting it with a flourish—“it is now four a.m. Reliable sources—dat is, me—tell me dat de club closed at two a.m. So, Mr. Presley, where did you take Ms. Rohini, you hound dog? Beach motel? No, dat is too cheap, too visible. Eko Palace Hotel?”
“We went for a walk on Bar Beach.”
“Bar Beach? Walk?” Redemption sounded confused. Then his expression relaxed into a smile. “You dirty dog. De old beach fuck.”
“No, we just walked by the sea.”
Redemption shrugged. “Her choice, you know. But tell me how much you made.”
“One hundred and fifty naira,” Elvis said, counting it and handing Redemption a twenty.
“Ah, no now, Elvis. Not twenty—forty.”
With a sigh, Elvis handed over another twenty.
“Now, buy me breakfast and tell me all about it,” Redemption said, stuffing the notes into his back pocket and sitting down. Tired speakers leaning in the corner belted out Donna Summer’s “Spring Affair.”
“There is nothing to tell. She is a very nice girl, and we talked.”
“About?”
“About her father and how hard he is making it for her to be her own woman.”
Redemption took a sip from the lukewarm tea in front of him. He began to speak but thought better of it when the waiter brought over a plate of eggs, fried meat, fried plantains and bread. Yanking off a piece of bread and digging a pocket in it, Redemption filled it with eggs and fried meat. He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. When he looked at Elvis, the concern was clear on his face.
“Listen, tell me what you think dis thing you are doing is?”
“What thing?”
“Dis gig I got for you at Sonny’s? Listen, dese women are way out of your reach. You are dere to keep dem entertained, no more, no less. You have to move from woman to woman. You are disposable and dey will never care about you. Dey will go on to marry rich foreigners like demselves. And if for any reason she liked you, and you hurt her, well, I think you saw Prakash? De best you can hope for is to make a decent living while things last and maybe get in a good fuck or two—for which you must charge extra.”
Elvis put down his cup of tea.
“Where is all this coming from? I just took her for a walk along the beach. I know how to play this game, okay?”
“If you say so.”
“I do. But listen, Redemption, I need more work, though. This escort work does not seem like regular work to me.”
“Hah, Elvis, you are a true Igbo man.”
“I need this, Redemption.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll look into things.”
“Elvis!”
Standing in front of the buka was the King of the Beggars, Caesar.
“Who is dat bastard?” Redemption asked, clearly irritated.
“My friend Caesar,” Elvis replied, motioning for Caesar to join them.
“You have strange friends,” Redemption said, finishing off his tea and standing up. Stuffing a piece of meat in his mouth, he made to leave. “Me, I like only regular guys like me. See you later.”
Caesar and Redemption inspected each other as they passed at the door. Caesar nodded; Redemption spat and looked away.
“Your friend is not very nice,” Caesar said, sitt
ing down.
“We all have our faults. I’ll talk to him later,” Elvis replied. “Breakfast?”
“What is bothering you?” Caesar asked Elvis.
“What makes you think anything is bothering me?”
“Because.”
“Because?”
“Mmhmm.”
“I have a bit of an ethical dilemma.”
“Easy now, Elvis. Not so much big words, eh?”
Elvis laughed, and as the King of the Beggars finished the breakfast Redemption had left over, Elvis filled him in on his new gig and the reasons why he needed to earn money fast, ending with his conflict over the right thing to do.
“Listen to dis story,” Caesar began.
“Oh, please, not another story. Why can’t anyone in this place just give it to you straight?”
“Because de straight road is a liar. Now listen. My broder built a birdcage when I was small. One week, he is building de cage, every day, eh? Den he take two whole days of careful stalking with bait and weaver trap to catch de bird for de cage. I remember dat bird, yellow like dis, eh? Every day I watch dat cage, dat bird, eh? Every day.
“Den one day, rain just fall finish and de air dey heavy with de smell of fresh wet earth and spilled kerosene. I sit dey watch. My spirit move me. My head just begin wild. What would happen if … ? Why should de bird be trapped? Could it speak?
“It’s like my broder know something is up, because he come dere and watch me as I watch de bird. Den my mother’s call my broder away. ‘Don’t touch de cage,’ he warn. I nodded.
“But as soon as he go, my hand was on de cage and suddenly de weaver was in de air. It beat its wings against my face and was gone. I was surprise to hear myself laughing. I was free and I stood in de small rain dat began to fall again. I was powerful, aaah.”
“Then what?” Elvis asked impatiently.
“De slap caught me square across de lips, drawing blood, and I start to cry in de rain. ‘I told you not to touch de cage!’ my broder shout.”
“So what is the moral?”
“Why must you mock, eh? It is simple. Choose whether you are me, de bird or my broder. Only you can choose.”
OIL BEAN SEED SALAD
(Igbo: Ugba)
INGREDIENTS
Ugba (sliced oil bean seeds)
Akanwu
Palm oil
Salt
Fresh chilies, chopped
Smoked fish
Stockfish
Eggplant
PREPARATION
Boil the oil bean seed slices until tender (or buy already boiled in a bag). Using a big wooden bowl (wood helps seal in the flavor), mix the ahanwu and palm oil until you have a smooth paste. Add a couple of dessert spoons of water. Next, put in the oil bean seeds, a pinch of salt and the chopped fresh chilies. It is best to use one’s fingers to achieve the best mix. Fresh chopped onions are an option for some people. Add strips of smoked fish and stochfish and chopped eggplant. Serve the dish cold (or lukewarm) with cold beer, wine, palm wine or soda.
TEN
There is danger here. These people can go mad easily. The muse that inspires can, when turned counter, become madness. These people are griots, truth talkers.
Numbers, for the Igbo, had several applications, not entirely limited to mathematical inquiry, one such use being to differentiate people by energy configurations composed of numerical, quantifiable vibratory frequencies. These provide the key to decoding individual personalities, abilities and the vocation best suited for the petitioner. The Igbo believe that if one does not follow the life pattern determined by their energy grouping, they are living outside the dictates of their chi, or personal god.
Afikpo, 1977
“Are you sure we won’t get into trouble?” Efua asked.
They were standing in line to get tickets for the matinee showing of the latest Bollywood release. Though at thirteen she was three years older than Elvis, in this situation he felt as if he were the older one.
“Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”
“But Oye will find out dat you are using your dancing money to come to de cinema with me.”
“She won’t.”
It was a real dilemma; balancing the cost of the dancing lessons with their increasingly frequent visits to the cinema. There was the cost of the ticket, sweets and the obligatory bottle of cold, sweating orange Fanta—doubled; since he nearly always had to pay for Efua, it came to a significant amount. He was convinced that his dancing was improving more from studying the moves in the movies than from anything Mr. Aggrey taught him. The films also had soundtracks that ranged from the full orchestral grandstanding of the 1939 Technicolor hit Gone With the Wind through to the Bangra pop of Bollywood flicks. This music contrasted with the soul, jazz and highlife that filled his days, blaring from loudspeakers outside record stores or from neighbors playing their sound systems too loud.
He was getting really good as a dancer, and even the cynical Oye whooped with delight the night he staged an impromptu concert for her and Aunt Felicia on the front veranda. He could not afford to stop now, yet he could not afford to continue. The plan to get more money, when he hit on it, was so simple he didn’t know why he had never thought of it. Of course its execution required subtlety and time if it had any chance of succeeding, but he felt good about it.
First he offered to collect Oye’s letters from the post office on his way home from school. She hesitated initially, because waiting for the postman brought a special feeling to the day. But both Elvis and his father managed to convince her of the danger of waiting near that bend around which the lorries came barreling. It also made sense since he took her replies to the post office.
When she got used to the new system and began to let him open the envelopes for her, he moved on to the next stage of his plan. He stopped mailing her replies, using the postage money instead to pay for his movie adventures. He never failed to feel the pang of guilt, but the candy and Fanta assuaged that and he was soon lost in the movie, hardly aware of Efua breathing gently beside him. He was no longer strictly seeing movies that helped his dancing, although he did learn a few moves from the Bollywood flicks. But he was hooked, and the cheap, jerky silent movies of the motor park had lost their appeal.
The one hitch to his plan was that Oye would be expecting detailed replies from her pen pals from all over the world, a problem compounded by the fact that she received between one and five letters a week. To cover up, he would have to write the replies she so looked forward to. It proved harder than he had thought, and the need to keep varying the voices and contents soon exhausted him. Desperate, he began using scenes from the films he watched to make up the letters.
Oye’s Argentinean pen pal moved from the city to the pampas and began to ranch cattle as a pampas cowboy. He was a tough customer who kept the rustlers at bay with mild threats.
“‘Don’t make me shoot you, pilgrim’?” Oye asked, alarmed. “What does tha’ mean? When did José buy a gun and become a cowboy?” she continued. “He was a priest a few weeks ago.”
Elvis swallowed hard and kept his head down. And so the lies rolled off his pen. Scenes from Casablanca, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gone With the Wind were rewritten to fit his letters. Oye’s suspicions seemed to him to have been allayed too easily and quickly, though, and he couldn’t shake his unease, convinced that she was setting him up. It niggled at him all the time.
And the stories he could cook up from the movies were finite, and with the constant reruns, Elvis was fast running out of material. When he started his scam, the plan was to still mail off a few letters so that Oye would receive some genuine replies and wouldn’t grow suspicious at the change in tone of the forged ones. He then meant to build up slowly until he wasn’t posting any of the letters from her. Things got out of control too quickly, and he stopped posting all her letters too soon. He would still go to the post office, stand in line so that he would be seen by any neighbors or relatives that might just happen to be
around on their own business; then he ducked around the corner and out the back door. Hidden by the rampant bush that grew almost up to the back door, he shoved the letters into his schoolbag. Then, in the shade of a leafy tree branch right there behind the post office, he would begin forging the replies. He needed more input. Television was out of the question, as Oye might catch him out. There were all the books he read, like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and the Hardy Boys adventures, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to plagiarize an actual book.
He finally turned to his own imagination. And what a colorful place that turned out to be! A dog that spoke to its owners and saved them from every mishap resigned and bought shares in a beachfront bar called Sharky’s, run by a dolphin. A Sri Lankan pen pal was abducted by aliens in the middle of some secret ceremony performed by Arthur C. Clarke. A Catholic priest performed an exorcism on a home in Poland overrun by goose-stepping, machine-gun-toting goblins. A Cuban Santería priestess regularly turned into an invincible tiger to rout Castro’s secret police. An American pen pal, tiring of her job in the Department of Motor Vehicles, retrained as an astronaut and took a rocket to Mars, where she found out that the locals were blacks with a penchant for playing jazz on moon-rock saxophones.
The more elaborate the story, the more Oye enjoyed it and the more his conscience nibbled at him endlessly. At first he tried to deny the prods, masking them as a stomach ulcer. But then he began to have sudden and inexplicable vomiting attacks. Owning up to the truth, he decided to turn himself in. The next time Oye settled down with her tankard of sweet tea to listen to him read, he decided to test the waters.
“Gran, you don’t believe the stories these people have been writing to you, do you?” he asked.