Chapter 44: Chapter 44
CHAPTER 40
He grew up in Igbo-ora as a kid. It was the time when the town was given ‘the home of twins’ title by the British Broadcasting Council (BBC), though he would not understand why he was not born a twin. There was a particular joke cracked by Igbo-ora indigenes to depict the prevalence of twins in Igbo-ora. They say if you stand in the middle of a street and shout ‘Taye’ or ‘Kehinde’, over ten children, including adolescents and adults would rush at you in a bid to answer the call. It might be an exaggeration, but the commonness of Taiwos and Kehindes in Igbo-ora was not short of reality. Twins were made, not born.
Teju at first could not believe he was going back to his childhood town. He had always seen himself as a runaway indigene of Igbo-ora. He left Igbo-ora after graduating from primary school. He had been admitted to the elite and prestigious Government College, Ibadan, and it seemed he was eloping to Ibadan. Though he had waved his emotional and passionate mother who would have chosen his presence in Igbo-ora over his education if she could- goodbye, he had thought he had never told his parents he was leaving. He loved to believe he was just a missing boy in Ibadan.
He was like the common ‘someone’ who was lucky to win a visa lottery to travel abroad and spend thirty days but had refused to come back to his ‘loving’ and open-armed country even after his legal stay had lapsed. Travelling to Ibadan back then was like travelling abroad. It was a sort of live changing immigration or a change of environment he would never forget even in his grave.
It was around twenty-five minutes past eleven when he got to Igbo-ora. Things had changed greatly as he had been told. It had been over eight years that he had been home. And that was when he came for his Dad’s funeral. He did not spend a night. He had put up an excuse that his presence at work was almost indispensable and had left just like he had been doing. He could not remember the last time he had called his uncle on phone after his father’s funeral, even though he remembered his uncle had a phone, and his contact number was scribbled somewhere in his phone book.
He wondered what sort of reception he was going to be given. Though he was nothing near a prodigal son, he was a fugitive. He had so much difficulty in locating the house, though it was his father’s and he had lived there as a boy. Nothing seemed familiar in the land of his birth. The roads and paths which ought to be surrounded by bushes were now tarred. Modern houses had sprouted up like mushrooms in places which years ago were mini-forests. It was as if he was just coming back to Igbo-ora after a lifetime. Even the faint memories of eight years ago could not salvage him from getting a little bit lost. He had to ask his way out from his ‘destinational’ confusion. He had to be misled, un-led and re-led several times over.
Even though he had arrived at Igbo-ora some minutes past eleven in the morning, it was twenty minutes to the hour of twelve when he got home. The house was quiet and almost lifeless. He could see a tiny cloud of smoke sailing upward from the backyard. He entered and passed through the passage to the backyard. The distinctly antique scent of the rooms confronted his nose. The scent was familiar. It was a scent that reminded him that the pieces of the ancients were still in the modern and the pieces of the past were still in the present.
As he approached the backyard he could hear faint feminine voices that seemed to be speaking in whispers. Getting to the backyard, he saw three women in wrappers, topless. They were busy with something on the fire. The women were under a large shed erected with sticks and roofed with palm fronds. There were three mudded fireplaces in the shape of an almost enclosed arc for cooking. The firewoods obtruded out of the vacuum of the arc and tamed red fires were blistering from them.
One of them which seemed the oldest was dry-frying garri in a large pot with a shallow depth. The other one was stirring a bulk of fufu in a big, deep pot. And the last one who was the youngest and who was quite unfamiliar to Teju had a little-covered pot on a small fire, steaming. At the right corner outside the shed was a well. Not far from the well were drums of fermented cassavas and sacks for draining the moisture in the cassavas. There was also a little-enclosed shed where the sounds of bleating sheep were coming from. At the left corner was an open space where lumps of fibre-free cassavas were dried on a large plastic sheet. The cassavas would later be grounded into powder and would be made into amala lafu.
“Good afternoon ma” Teju greeted in Yoruba with half-prostration.
“Ah...Ah...Ah...” exclaimed the oldest and the second oldest of the women.
“The father of my husband has arrived! Welcome, e kuirin, how was the journey....”
The welcome was warm than he had expected though the youngest of the women kept mute with a bewildered face before he was introduced to her. She was the third wife of his uncle. He married her four years ago, the oldest wife had told him. He was very hungry. He was served with a meal of amalalafu, egusi soup and ejasawa. The youngest of the women had prepared the meal and he ate with the first-classappetite. After the meal, he went to sleep off the stressful journey in one of the empty rooms set aside for unused loads.
He was woken up in the evening to eat his dinner. It was fufu, and he could only eat a minute amount. He wondered what sort of diet was to eat cassava ‘swallow’ food for lunch and another cassava ‘swallow’ food for dinner. It was an unthinkably heavy and ‘carbohydrated’ diet taken in less than twenty-four hours.
His uncle came back from his day's toils. He had to apologise to Teju when he noticed his loss of appetite. He explained that grains of rice and beans had been economically banned from his household since the day the price of the grains had been doubled overnight. After the meal, Teju sat with his uncle under the glistening falcate moon, with the lively company of crickets, greenish fireflies and bats.
The harmattan was heavier and denser in that part of the country. The harmattan miasma had started appearing in heavy films. The dryness cracked the lips quicker. The coldness beat into the skin deeper. It seemed Igbo-ora was a next-door neighbour to the Sahara. Teju sat, hooded in his sweater with a handkerchief tied around his jaws so that both his mouth and nose were shielded. Whenever he spoke, his voice was thicker, like the voice of an anonymous vigilante. He wore thick socks also, not only to repel the cold but to give the proboscises of the mosquitoes a hard time.
His uncle, unlike him, was topless. He was in his Ankara sokoto. One could see his paunch dancing as he moved in his chair. His sagging breasts were old and tired. His uncle took his time to reprimand him for neglecting his family and his roots. And after a rigorous session of apology, they had a long talk. They talked about the privation the economy had caused for those with the wooden spoon.
His uncle made it clear that he and his wives had to work all round the clock to fend for themselves and their children. Yet, most of the times, they had to manipulate their diets to suit the economy rather than to suit their health. It was then it occurred to Teju quite plainly that the majority of the nation's population were starving. The economy made several people in their millions feed on hunger. The popular binary formula of three-square meals which was normally 111 had either changed to 101 or changed from 101 to 001. The economy was a fervent apostle of the adage which says, cut your cloth according to your clothing.
It was said that the standard poverty line was earning less than a dollar per day. Now that dollar had swollen condescendingly over naira, it might imply the percentage of poverty had made a rapid and enormous increase. Who knows if the statistics of poverty in the nation were worse than perceived, who really knows? Or probably we should say- who really cares?
“In most cases, quality of food takes the backseat while the quantity is the main thing” his uncle had said. His uncle was a farmer who had a large cassava and vegetable farm within the Oyo State College of Agriculture and Technology, Igbo-ora. He had a menial job in Obasanjo Farm, and he was rearing a herd of sheep. His wives were industrious. The oldest of his wife made garri. The second made fufu and amalalafu, and the youngest was into the making of Adire.
He also sought after the reason behind Teju’s sudden appearance in his deserted hometown. He was particular about why Teju had not brought his car. Teju could not understand what the old man wanted with his car. Probably to boast, to make his neighbours jealous. Teju coming home without his car was like blending into the world of poverty. As far as the natives were concerned, there were no shreds of evidence that Teju had made it in Ibadan. He was like someone deported from abroad.
Teju had to manufacture an even-handed reason to kill his uncle’s curiosity. Somehow, he perceived that his uncle could smell the fragrance of trouble all over him. But the reason he gave was logical enough to keep him from wanting to find out the truth.