‘You know,’ he continued, ‘when the white man first came, a lot of people thought he didn’t have any toes. They thought that his shoes were his actual feet.’
He laughed in a jolly, drowsy way that made her smile a drowsy, jolly smile. She also had heard all sorts of amusing stories about when the white man first turned up. Her grandmother had told her that the very first time she saw a white man, she and her friends had run away, thinking it was an evil spirit.
‘You have such beautiful hair,’ Engineer continued. ‘Have you gone to school?’
‘Yes, I’ve finished secondary school.’
‘What of university? Don’t you want to read further?’
‘I’m learning how to sew.’
‘Ah. Learning how to sew and going to university are not the same thing. Look at all these people you see going to the farm every day.’ With his right hand, he drew a slow semi-circle in the air. ‘Do you know what they could have been if they had gone to school?’
She did not.
‘Some of them could have been great inventors, great doctors or engineers. Some of them would have been known in other parts of the world. Have you ever heard of the nature/nurture controversy?’
She had not.
‘These people,’ he said, turning to face her, ‘if they were taken away from this environment and placed somewhere else for a while . . . just a little while . . . they would all be very different.’
He kept quiet to allow her to digest his words. Then she remembered the discussion of the other day.
‘Is it true that monkeys are our ancestors?’ she asked.
Engineer smiled with gladness.
‘Augustina, I like you. You’re a smart girl. I like the way you listen and ask questions.’
One of her father’s wives had complained that this was her main problem in life, that she asked too many questions for a girl.
‘They call it evolution,’ he said, and then told her how scientists said that men were once monkeys, that the monkeys had gradually turned into human beings. He said that Christians were angry about this because the Bible says God created man.
‘Why was the world originally without form and void? Could God have created it that way?’ He shook his head vehemently, as if he were resetting the bones in his skull. ‘I don’t think so. There must have been another earth that existed before Genesis, which was destroyed. Some parts of the Bible make mention of it. That old earth must have had another man who looked like a monkey. But when creating the new earth, God decided to make the new type of man in His own image.’
Augustina’s head swung from side to side like someone in a mini trance. He talked more about dinosaurs and other strange animals that must have existed in that old earth, about how scientists had even been finding their bones. Right there and then, Augustina fell in love with his brain. Throughout that night, his voice led a procession of his words all around her mind. She wondered how all this information could be contained in one head, how all this confidence could be exuding from one breath.
Afterwards, he came more and more often to see her. Eventually, he raised the issue again.
‘Augustina, why don’t you go to university?’
She smiled on one side of her face and kicked at a passing earthworm. Each time Augustina was tempted to consider the issue, she remembered her father. He would never approve. The sensible thing for a girl to focus on at this time of her life was getting married and building a home.
‘I don’t want to go back to school,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ve decided that I want to sew and that’s what I’m going to do. Please stop asking me.’
They sat in silence while she watched the earthworm wriggle away to a better life. This was the first time she had spoken to him sternly. She hoped he was not put off, and she was already composing a suitable apology in her mind when he uncrossed his legs and sat superintendent straight.
‘If you go to university,’ he said, ‘I will marry you.’
Augustina gaped like a trout.
‘Augustina, if you agree to go back to school, I’ll assist with your fees, and when you finish, I’ll marry you.’
That was how he proposed.
On the day that her admission letter to study Clothing and Textile at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, arrived, Engineer leapt over the moon and back.
‘Augustina,’ he said feverishly, ‘our children are going to be great. They’re going to have the best education. They’re going to be engineers and doctors and lawyers and scientists. They’re going to have English names and they’re going to speak English like the queen. And from now on, stop calling me Engineer. Call me Paulinus.’
Then he lost control of himself and did something that he had never done before. He ran his fingers through her hair and told her that he loved her.
Part 1
Okuko si na ya anaghi eti ka egbe ji ya haa
ya; kama na ya na-eti ka oha nuru olu ya.
The chicken carried away by a hawk says that it is crying not
so that the thing carrying it will let it go, but so that the
public will hear its voice and be witness.
One
My taste buds had been hearing the smell of my mother’s cooking and my stomach had started talking. Finally, she called out from the kitchen and my siblings rushed in to fetch their meals. Being the opara of the family, I was entitled to certain privileges. As first son, I sat at the dining table and waited. My mother soon appeared carrying a broad plastic tray with an enamel bowl of water, a flat aluminium plate of garri, and a dainty ceramic bowl of egusi soup.
I washed my hands and began to eat slowly. The soup should have been a thick concoction of ukazi leaves, chunks of dried fish and boiled meat, red palm oil, maggi cubes - all boiled together until they formed a juicy paste. But what I had in front me were a midget-sized piece of meat, bits of vegetable, and random specks of egusi, floating around in a thin fluid that looked like a polluted stream.
The piece of meat looked up at me and laughed. I would have laughed back but there was nothing funny about the situation at all. My mother was not a novice in the kitchen. This pitiful presentation was a reflection of the circumstances in our home. Life was hard. Times were bad. Things had not always been like this.
After her Clothing and Textile degree, my mother had travelled to the United Kingdom with my father. They returned armed with Masters degrees. He was posted to the Ministry of Works and Transport in Umuahia; she acquired a sizeable tailoring shop that still stood at the exact same spot where it had been founded all those years ago. My father’s earnings alone had been more than enough, but years of rising inflation without any corresponding increase in civil servant wages had gradually rendered the amount insignificant.
Then came my father’s diagnosis. For a poorly paid civil servant to dabble in an affliction like diabetes was the very height of ambitious misfortune. The expenditure on his tablets and insulin alone was enough for the upkeep of another grown child. And since his special diet banned him from large quantities of the high-carbohydrate staple foods in our part of the world, he was now constrained to healthier, less affordable alternatives. The little income from the tailoring shop plus my father’s pension were what we were now surviving on.
My mother reappeared at the dining table, laden with another tray, which had my father’s melancholic lunch on it. The front of her dress was stained with the sticky, black fluid from the unripe plantains that she had used to make her husband’s porridge. She arranged the tray at the head of the table and sat in her place next to his.
‘Paulinus, come and eat,’ she called out.
My father stood up from his favourite armchair. He shuffled to the dining table, bringing with him the combined odour of medication and illness and age. My siblings joined us. Charity sat between me and my mother on my right; Godfrey and Eugene sat to my left. The noise of tongues sucking, teeth chomping, and throats swallowing soon floated about in the air like ghosts. My father’s voi
ce joined in.
‘Augustina, I need a little bit more salt.’
My mother considered his request for a while. Because he also suffered from high blood pressure, every day she reduced the quantity of salt she added to his food, hoping that he would not notice. Reluctantly, she succumbed.
‘Odinkemmelu,’ she called out.
There was no reply.
Odinkemmelu!’
Silence was the answer.
‘Odinkemmelu! Odinkemmelu!’
‘Yes, Ma!’ a voice responded from the kitchen.
The air in the room was suddenly invaded by the feral stench of pubescent sweat. Odinkemmelu entered wearing a rusty white T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts that had jagged holes in several inappropriate places. He and the other girl, Chikaodinaka, had come from the village to live with us. Neither of them was allowed to sit at the dining table.
‘How come it took you so long to answer?’ my mother asked.
‘Mama Kingsley, sorry, Ma. I am put off the fire for the kerosene stove by the time you call and I doesn’t heard you.’
My mother ran her eyes up and down Odinkemmelu’s body in a way that must have tied knots in his spinal cord. But the boy was not telling a lie; the fumes floated in right on time. We had stopped using the gas cooker because cooking gas was too expensive, and had switched to the kerosene stove that contaminated the air in the house with thick, toxic clouds whenever it was quenched with either a sprinkling of water or the blasts of someone’s breath.
‘Bring me some salt,’ my mother said.
Odinkemmelu took his body odour away to the kitchen and returned with a teaspoon of salt.
‘Godfrey, I don’t want to hear that you forgot to bring the university entrance forms back from school tomorrow,’ my father said to my brother.
Godfrey grunted quietly.
‘For almost a week now, I’ve been reminding you,’ my father continued. ‘You don’t always have to wait till the last minute.’
When it was my turn about seven years ago, I had brought my forms home promptly. My father had sat down with me and we filled them out together. We divided the task equally: he decided that I should study Chemical Engineering, he decided that I should attend the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and he decided that I must not take the exams more than once. My own part was to fill in his instructions with biro and ink, study for the exams, and make one of the highest Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board exam scores into the university’s Chemical Engineering Department. Godfrey did not appear too keen on any such joint venture.
‘And I hope you’ve been studying,’ my father added. ‘Because any child of mine who decides to be useless and not go to university has his own self to blame for however his life turns out.’
A sudden bout of coughing forced an early conclusion to a speech that could easily have lasted the duration of our meal. To my parents, education was everything. She was the recipe for wealth, the pass to respectability, the ticket to eternal life.
Once, while in primary school, I had ventured to exercise my talents in the football field during break time and returned home with my school shirt badly ripped and stained. When my mother saw me, she stared as if I had huge pus-filled boils all over my body. Then she used a long koboko whip to express herself more vividly on my buttocks. Later that evening, my father called me into his bedroom. He sat on the bed, held my shoulders, and adjusted my posture until I was standing directly in front of him. He stared into my eyes forever. Then in a deep, sententious tone, he changed my life.
‘Kingsley, do you want to be useful to yourself in this world?’ he asked.
I answered in the affirmative.
‘Do you want to make me and your mummy proud?’
Again, my answer was the same.
‘Do you want people to know you and respect you wherever you go?’
I did.
‘Do you want to end up selling pepper and tomatoes in Nkwoegwu market?’
I shuddered. My soul was horrified at the thought of joining the sellers who transported food items from different villages to one of the local markets. Hardly any of them understood what was being said if you did not speak Igbo. Most of them looked wretched.
My father amplified his voice.
‘Do you?’
No, I did not.
‘Then you must stop wasting your time on silly things. You must read your books . . . focus on your studies and on the future you have ahead of you. A good education is what you need to survive in this world. Do you hear me?’
I heard him too loud and very clear. Still, he continued.
He explained that without education, man is as though in a closed room; with education, he finds himself in a room with all its windows open towards the outside world. He said that education makes a man a right thinker; it tells him how to make decisions. He said that finishing school and finishing well was an asset that opened up a thousand more opportunities for people.
My tender triceps started grumbling. He continued.
He said that education is the only way of putting one’s potential to maximum use, that you could safely say that a human being is not in his correct senses until he is educated.
‘Even the Bible says it,’ he concluded. ‘ “Wisdom is better than gold, understanding better than choice silver.” Do you hear me?’
Not only did I hear him, I believed him completely. I was brainwashed. I became an instant disciple. Thereafter, as I watched other little boys squandering their time and energy in football fields, I simply believed that they did not know what I knew. Like the Spiderman, I was privy to some esoteric experience that made me superhuman. And the more my scores skyrocketed in the classroom, the more I kept away from my friend Alozie, who could still not tell the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’, and our neighbour’s son Kachi, who was finding it difficult to learn the seven-times table. I continued to outdistance my classmates in academic performance. I had never once looked behind.
My mother reached out and patted her husband’s back softly until his coughing ceased. Then she changed the topic.
‘Kingsley, when is the next interview?’ she asked.
‘The letter just said I passed. They’ll send another one to let me know. It’s going to be a one-on-one meeting with one of the big bosses in their head office. This time, each person’s date is different.’
‘You’re going to Port Harcourt again?’ Eugene asked.
‘It’s probably just a formality,’ my father said. ‘The first three interviews were the most important.’
‘So if you go and work in Shell now,’ Charity asked, ‘will you move to Port Harcourt?’
There was panic in her voice. I smiled fondly at her.
‘It doesn’t matter where I live,’ I replied. ‘I’ll come home often and you can also come and be visiting me.’
She did not look comforted. My father must have noticed.
‘Charity, bring your plate,’ he said.
Charity pushed her enamel bowl of soup across the table, past my mother, and towards him. My father stuck his fork into the piece of meat in his plate and put it into his mouth. He bit some off with his incisors and deposited the remaining half into my sister’s bowl. Unlike mine, his was a veritable chunk of cow.
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ she said, while dragging the bowl back.
I remembered when Charity was born about eight weeks before my mother’s expected date of delivery. Though we were all pleased that it was a girl at last, she looked like a withered skeleton, tiny enough to make seasoned doctors squirm. Going to hospital almost every day and watching her suffer must have been when each of us developed a special fondness for her. All of us except Eugene, who was a year younger than Godfrey and a year older than Charity. He was a thorn in her flesh and made her a regular target for his silly jokes.
‘Ah!’ Eugene exclaimed now. ‘Look at your armpit! It looks like a gorilla’s thighs!’
Everybody turned towards Charity. She
clutched her arms close to her sides and looked about to press the control buttons of a time machine and disappear. My mother’s eyes swelled with shock.
‘Why can’t you shave your armpits regularly?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you know you’re now a big girl?’
A cloud fell upon Charity’s face. At fifteen and a half, she was still very much a baby. She had wept when Princess Diana died, sobbed when we watched a documentary about people whose body parts were enlarged because of elephantiasis. While other Nigerians poured into the streets and celebrated General Sani Abacha’s sudden death, Charity stayed indoors and shed tears.
‘Is there any law that says she must shave?’ Godfrey intervened. ‘Even if there is, who makes all those laws? Whose business is it if she decides to grow a forest under her arms?’
Charity rubbed her eyes.
‘It looks dirty,’ my mother said. ‘People will think she’s untidy.’
‘Why can’t people mind their own business?’ Godfrey replied. ‘Why should they go about inspecting other people’s armpits? After all, those hairs must have been put there for a reason.’
Charity sniffed.
‘Actually, you’re right,’ I added. Not that I agreed that any girl should go about with a timberland under her arms, but for the sole purpose of coming to my darling sister’s aid in this her hour of need. ‘Scientists say that the hairs there are meant to transmit pheromones.’
‘What are pheromones?’ Eugene asked.
‘They are secretions that men and women have without being aware of it,’ my father explained. ‘They play a part in the attraction between men and women.’
That was one thing that sickness and poverty had not been able to snatch from him. My father was a walking encyclopedia, and he flipped his pages with the zeal and precision of a magician. He knew every theory of science and every city in the atlas; he knew every word in the dictionary and every scripture in the Holy Bible. It was such a pity that all the things he knew were not able to put money in his pocket.
I Do Not Come to You by Chance Page 2