Chapter 49: Chapter 49

CHAPTER 42

Across the street, there was a woman with plump but muscular physic. Her skin colour was like that of brown bread. She sat over a wooden mortar of cassava flour called amala lafu or amala funfun. With vim, she stirred the cassava solution with a long spatula. Back in Ibadan, mortars mothered pestles, not spatulas. And mortars contained pounded yams, not cassavaflour solution. She began to ladle a regular size of amala into small plastic wrappers and then wrapped them up. She lobbed each of the wrapped amala into a large cooler laid with a cloth.

There was another woman opposite the house. She was opening up her kiosk for the day. She brought out her wares and arranged them accordingly. One could tell it had become her routine for so many years now. She muttered prayers to herself or to whatever she worshipped for blockbusting sales perhaps, or to fend off evil spirits.

Teju was wondering where the men of Igbo-ora were when he saw an automobile repair workshop adjacent to him. It was tainted with years of accumulated resilient engine oil. The colour contrast between the workshop and the rest of the world was striking. Even when the rest of the world was lightened by the sun, it seemed the workshop had it glow permanently darkened. The metallic quality of the workshop gave it a dissimilar outlook, a pathetic one. There was a man in oil-stained rags rather than a workshop overall. He was bending over the opened engine of a red Volkswagen. The bonnet was suspended over him as though he was peeping into the opened mouth of a giant toothless crocodile.

He seemed to be unscrewing nuts and bolts with an engine-oiled spanner. There was another man lying quietly on a cloth under a black Toyota Camry, performing whatever surgery underneath. Teju wondered how difficult the man’s job would be since he did not have a sliding surface to lie on or an apprentice to hand him needed tools. Besides the automobile workshop, there was a cobbler’s workshop. The cobbler, a man in his late sixties, sat down on a stool with his back forming a little arch. On his lap was a brown shoe placed on a cloth, and he carefully drove in and out a protracted threaded needle.

In the adjoining street, groups of boys and girls gathered around a big-mouthed iron tap that came running directly from the ground with their little brightly coloured buckets and five-litre kegs. Unlike the usual taps, the tap did not have to be opened or closed by a three-sixty or one-eighty degree turning tap knob. One had to pull a lever up and down like someone trying to pump air with a bellow before the tap could steadily vomit little amount of water into the buckets. Motorcyclists zoomed into the street with an air of dust trailing them. They had two or three passengers clung to their backs, and they whooshed out after a while with one or no passenger.

It was a busy society bustling with different honourable endeavours, yet there was a muted and tardy quality to it that intrigued Teju. Its highest form of boisterousness was one which could boast without shame of a very rare backdrop of hush and friendliness. Even Ibadan- the unrushed society seemed to be in fast motion compared to Igbo-ora. Teju’s phone was dead and it had not crossed his mind that it was expedient for him to bring books to keep him busy. He had a copy of Nadine Gordimer'sMy Son’s Story and Chimamanda Adichie'sAmericanah at home and they were still unread. But Ajoke came about time to tell him his food– which was to be yam and fish stew– was ready, and that he should come and eat before it got cold.

In the evening, Igbo-ora was breezy and almost without humans. Partly, it could have been because a particular ritual, forbidden to the eyes of women called orowas to be performed that night. Even his uncle’s wives had returned before sunset to cordon themselves at home. Teju roamed the streets of Pako, with the intent of finding a charging centre to charge his phone and to also do a little sightseeing of the transformed Igbo-ora.

The children who have changed from their uniforms now roamed the streets. They fought or chased one another, making exciting shrieks or going playfully on an errand or playing games. They looked like a breed with a sense of oneness as opposed to how the school uniforms stroke a difference between them. You could hardly tell a child attending a government-owned school from a child attending a private-owned school. There was a unique blend among them that made basic distinction almost unattainable.

Since it was Christmas time, one could occasionally hear knockout bangers in the air. There were different rounds for these bangers, from two to six rounds, and the most common being the three-round bangers. Soon enough, night-time would have streets bursting with Christmas youth carnivals. There would be an outpour of loud local music and the sounds of bangers and rocket fireworks in an unbelievable rapid succession, all of which would only fill him with a wistful feeling for Ibadan.

Men sat at the frontage of their houses talking loudly, or playing or arguing over a game of ayo, or ‘draft’. The Okada riders passed the streets in successive twos and threes, raising dust which later settled on the thicket of bushes coating the edges of the streets. The women were mostly unseen, except for women swallowed in the shadows of their various kiosks, and women sitting on wooden benches with heads trapped between their laps, plaiting different styles of hair, from all-back to suku, to patewoand so on.

Cheap and old cars coasted along the major tarred but pot-holed roads. There were a lot of vehicles with an overabundance of uncovered space at their backs like trucks. They were locally called jalukere, and they were mostly used to transport heaps of sacks stacked with charcoal to other parts of the country. As they moved along, it seemed the jalukereswere carrying a small mountain of black rocks. Occasionally, he would see a jalukerecarrying heaps of unpeeled cassava tubers or cocoyam tubers.

Electricity generator hummed to the blustery night at charging centres and barber’s shops, with the latter often hushing out the humming of the generators with medleys of apalamusic. Haruna Ishola and Musiliu Babatunde, the apala veterans blasted their Yoruba, wisdom-laced and eulogistic lyrics from the tatty infirm-sounding speakers. Children and adolescents gathered nearby and moved their feet and bodies to the rhythm, momentarily forgetting their sorrows. It was such a pleasant society, distinguished as though they were on another planet of their own. The music of its silent night had a rhythm of peace which contradicted his troubled mind.

The electricity generators also whizzed at home video shops where VCDs and DVDs were sold. The walls around the shops were decorated with movie trailer posters in a slapdash fashion. Teju could recognise some of the Yoruba Nollywood stars captured in their different dramatic postures and costumes. Odun Adekola was in his action-studded pose, his face expressing some thespian exasperation which does not fail to strike bystanders. Sanyeri in his mirthful pose, wearing some conflicting and unfitting set of English wears which also does not deter lookers-on from sniggering; and others, Femi Adebayo, Funke Akindele, Peju Ogunmola, Yomi Fash-Lanso, Muyiwa Ademola, Fathia Balogun and so on.

There were swarms of children gathered at the foyer of the shops. They were engrossed in the movie displaying on a TV screen which was probably set for the purpose of test-running CDs for whoever wanted to buy. From the large speakers stationed outside the shops, one could hear the gusts of dialogues in crude, shallow Yoruba language, only to see Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone or Shahrukh Khan with other characters on the TV screen, rendering their dialogues in hushed tones. Teju felt that the imposed Yoruba dialogues which ought to be a translation of the original dialogues were not only inadequate but also a destructive force for these movies.

That night, after a meal of eba and okra soup, Teju lay on his bed and listened to the crickets singing their A cappella to the silence of the night. As he listened, he thought of Simi. Instead of imagining her strapped to a hospital bed, he rather went into the memory wallet of his most exciting, cherished and romantic days with her. Among them, he picked the night he deflowered Simi, and she deflowered him. It was on their wedding night. Before then, Teju used to insist that he was a virgin much as Simi was, but she had always rebutted him.

The idea was centred on the fact that the female hymen was the veil that preserved the dignity of virginity and the proof of carnal innocence. There was nothing as such in the male. Therefore, there was no dignity or honour attached to the virginity of males. There were also no risks in males losing their virginity as obtainable in females. And it was an injustice for a male virgin to attribute to himself the same accolade as that accredited to a female virgin, as though male virgins have fewer temptations than female virgins, but that was the argument of Simi.

However, she had failed to see that behavioural innocence of which they shared as they deflowered each other that night. She had failed to notice the hesitation, the dilemma, the shuddering and the anxiety as he tried to make his way through into her for the first time. They were the actual moments of carnal innocence that had been overlooked for the breaking of the hymen and the spilling of blood. He might not have a hymen to prove he was a virgin, but at heart and in mind, he was a virgin, and no one could take that away from him.

In ancient Yoruba society, when a lady was married off to her husband, and she was found not to have known any man until her wedding night, her husband’s family would send a full keg or gourd of palm wine as an appraising gesture for bringing up a full and guiltless lady in an honourable manner. But if otherwise, a half-full keg or gourd of palm wine would be sent, a derogatory message for being a failure in bringing up a good and praiseworthy lady.

Teju remembered how he undressed Simi from behind after they had lodged into the room for their honeymoon vacation. He played Nina Simone on his newly acquired MP3 player. He did not listen to her songs per se, but Sam had recommended her songs for his wedding night. He unzipped her wedding gown from behind. He was so close that his crotch glued lightly to her bulbous buttocks. He caressed her earlobe with his tongue before he found her neck and shoulder in building momentum, like slow poison. He unhooked her brassiere and unhurriedly cupped her moderately sized breasts in his hands, smooching her earlobe and neck.

Simi moaned a low moan and juddered with building passion. She rubbed her buttocks against his crotch. Teju used his forefingers to knead her big-sized nipples, and she wobbled on her feet, her moaning accelerating through the musical air of sweet romance. Slowly, Simi took over. She turned on him and seized his lips with hers, throwing her arms around his high shoulders. He put his hands around her waist which she wiggled to the slow cadence of Nina Simone. After some minutes of kissing, Teju carried her with her legs around his limps and his hands heaving her up from her buttocks.

He carried her to the bed like an expensive trophy, and he started to explore her body with his tongue and hands. By the time he took off her pant, she was dripping wet. She whispered with an unflinching obsession to his ear, “Enter me, please”. Teju tried to remember the mixed quality of the feeling he had as he pushed himself through into her that night. He wanted to recall the pain from her claws as she held him in a tight grip, but a soprano voice barged into his tranquil recollection.

The voice was from a loudspeaker. It was singing a Yoruba worship song, and it dawned on him that it was deep into the night already. It must be a vigil service at the nearby CAC church, he thought unenthusiastically. Suddenly, he considered it sinful to bear such erotic thoughts while he listened to the woman singing praises to God. He reached for his phone, plugged his ears with earphones and listened with the volume turned high to his previously compiled playlist, and with Asa making his playlist this time around. He was contented as he once again shut himself away from the realities of his new world.