Chapter 52: Chapter 52
CHAPTER 45
Teju could not wait to get back to Ibadan, despite his poor health. Though he could not return to Ibadan with Lara that day, he had made up his mind to travel back the next day. It would have been completely impertinent for him to leave without saying ‘goodbye’ to his relatives who had taken him in and taken care of his illness in their own way despite all economic odds. He was a little bit strong enough to go on the journey even though the malaria was still very much healthy in him.
Within the twinkle of an eye, he had found himself in one of the half-empty streets of Ibadan. It was one of those days when vehicles were as scarce as the fuel that powered them. There was fuel scarcity across the nation, even though ironically, the nation happened to be an OPEC giant. Teju’s travelling fee from Igbo-ora to Ibadan was half a flight ticket to Abuja from Lagos. When the agberotold him the price of his fee to Ibadan, some hair had fallen off his body, including his pubic hairs. When Teju asked why,the agbero said it was fuel scarcity. Then he went on and told the adventure of how he got up 4 A.M and went to a filling station where they had fuel to sell. He had gotten up early so as to avoid the extremely long queue at the filling station, but he was the tenth person who arrived early. Though he got to the filling station some minutes past four in the morning, it was not until twenty minutes past eight that he left with his keg full of fuel.
Teju never had the chance to look into the mirror and see the reflection of the body that housed his damned soul. When he got to Ibadan, he saw his emaciated self in one of the reflective glass doors of barber’s shops. His appearance was as if he had been small-boned by a large boa constrictor. He wondered if one’s body was the true reflection of one’s soul. He wondered if his soul was also a shrunken entity like the entity that stared at him from the door.
Teju had become a runaway yet again. He had disappeared from Igbo-ora as mysteriously as he had appeared in it. His uncle came back from the market the previous day and devoured a bowl of eba and efo; he washed it down with some of the diluted palm wine he had bought in the market to treat his fever. They sat outside and drank the palm wine together. Teju used the opportunity to tell him about Lara’s strange and unheralded visit. He lied about the reasons for her visit though, and he shored up his cock-and-bull story with his office. His uncle refused to be hugged into fraudulence. He did not grant Teju the permission to go back to Ibadan and attend to the lethal problem that had developed in his office in his poor health.
He would not encourageTeju in murdering himself with juvenile restlessness in his lifetime and under his very nose. He said one should not put one’s hand in a work that would kill one, and prevent one from eating the fruit of one’s labour.
“Where was your office when you were bed-ridden with illness?” His uncle had asked with more of a rhetorical tone.
“But that’s not the point, an office is a place of work, not a doctor or a pharmacy” Teju wanted to respond. His aunts also came rushing under the moonlight where he sat with his uncle. They took side with his uncle. They kneeled and begged him to have mercy on his relatives if not himself. They begged him not to kill himself as if the intention of committing suicide was written on his forehead. He had to finish the herbs to complete his treatment, they said. His office could look after itself, they said, as if they could smell his lies as a shark could smell blood.
They hyped the graveness of the sickness. They insinuated that it might be the handiwork of ‘awoniya aye’- a euphemistic phrase for witches. He might have to undergo some necessary sacrifice and purification to escape untimed death. In Nollywood movies, there were scenes where men and women deliver a calabash of an odd combination of food as a sacrifice at where three roads met with only a white cloth around their waists. He had never thought the televised reality of those movies could come so close to his reality. As each of his aunts together with his uncle took turns in boring him with their superstitious fantasies, his mind could not find a tangible solace to rest. It was as if he had been wholly robbed of his internal peace to the extent that he felt like a poverty-stricken man of peace. He realized he was not going to convince them to let him go, and he was not ready to bear the excruciating emotional consequence of compromising his original decision either.
He laughed to himself as they pleaded and compelled him to stay. It was like compelling him not to go to heaven because he was going to die first, and he laughed to himself some more. So he decided to be like the Abiku who would always call for the first and repeated time despite all the rituals of palm oil and the sprinkled ash to keep him back. He ran away to Ibadan once again, despite all the pleadings.
Teju precisely woke up from a strange dream that made him feel fleetingly unsure of the situations that surrounded him. In the dream, he had a sight of a verdant field under a setting sun with a golden radiance. It seemed Teju was on a loggia of a two storey building, watching the way the mild breeze percolated through the elephant grasses and blooming sunflowers. In the middle of the field, there was a mother hen with her four chicks, picking the green grasses and making the coo-coo sound. Suddenly, the chicks scampered under their mother, and in the skyline, he could see a hawk hovering predatorily over the fowls. Then the hawk descended, not with a sudden dash, but decidedly, like a helicopter trying to land carefully on a helipad. It walked cautiously towards the mother hen.
The mother roared at the approaching hawk to scare it away, but the hawk did not budge. Teju discovered he was no more on the loggia he had earlier been, he was now in the field, barely five feet to the hawk and the mother hen. For some time, the hawk stood at a safe distance away from the mother hen and her chicks. The hawk seemed friendly and was earnestly trying to gain the trust of the mother hen who still hid her chicks safely under her feathers. Teju could not have understood what the hawk was saying to the mother hen, and if he could, he could not have given the mother hen a bit of advice either. So he looked on still the hawk got nearer to the mother hen. She let out her chicks to play with the grasses and the wind. Probably, the mother hen was way too busy adoring the charm the hawk was flaunting that she did not see three other hawks appear in the azure above. Before she had a chance, the three hawks dived for three of the chicks and flew away with them, only the echoes of their tiny and helpless cries remained for a flashing tick.
For a moment, Teju thought the befriending hawk would come to her rescue by chasing down the unruly and carnivorous hawks and save her chicks. But it turned out that just when the mother hen was trying to save her poor chicks, the hawk made way for her last chick. And while the mother hen cried passionately for her four abducted chicks, it occurred to Teju that an hour was way too much for a mother hen to return to being an ordinary hen. It took only a flashing moment for a happy mother hen with four bright chicks to have nothing to show for being fertile or having a reason to live.
Suddenly, an old man with a tight stainless undershirt and a loose-fitting pair of trousers appeared from God knows where, and cast a very vile look at the hen. All of a sudden, he made for the hen and caught hold of her by her wings. After muttering a curse at the hen for being unable to raise at least a chick successfully, each time losing her chicks to hawks or wild cats, he pronounced a sentence on her, that that undeniably would be the last time the hen would see the rising sun. Teju woke up from his dream and wondered what the dream meant. Since he was just a bystander in the dream, he could not qualify it as a nightmare but he was scared. He looked at the time, and he discovered that he had incidentally woken up before his uncle who was the official early riser of the house.
There was no time to mull over the dream. If his uncle woke up while he was still in the house, he was done travelling already. He packed his little things and took the first bus to Ibadan when the whitish harmattan particles were still opaque. It would surely be said that they had all woken up, and never found Teju. Though he knew their sixth senses would tell them he was not missing, that he had gone off to Ibadan as he had proposed to do the night before.
He got to Ibadan around twenty minutes to twelve in the morning. The passengers in the bus he boarded had a heated argument on the recent killings in the northern part of the country. He had been totally off the news recently, so he was mostly an observer, a listener and a lips-tied passenger. As he alighted, he tried to keep his mind away from the conjured images of butchered people and focus on how to set Simi free.
He wondered what Simi could have been thinking when she was giving herself up on behalf of her disappearing husband, the murderer. He had not asked details about the proceedings of the court, or if Tiwa’s father was willing to press charges against her, or if it was now a government’s case. Perhaps, Simi was doing all she was doing because she felt a prick of guilt, that she had somewhat intrigued the death of Tiwa in some way. He knew she was deeply sorry for ditching him on their first wedding anniversary date which was also the death day of her false-hearted friend. He knew she regretted her actions as much as she regretted trusting Tiwa as a friend.
It pained him that he had not earlier thought it best to accept the responsibility for Tiwa’s death and allow the law to take its course on him. It pained him that he never regained his manliness until Simi stepped up to man his own responsibility. What a coward he was to have run away like someone who had absolutely no guts. Simi had told the police that she had coerced him into killing Tiwa. It was fair enough to sentence her to countless years in prison with hard labour provided her husband Teju would be immune from prosecution. But he wanted people to believe the opposite of Simi’s story so badly.
He read through the Punch, and the Vanguard, and the Nigerian Tribune, and the Guardian at newspapers stands. He read the fabricated story of Simi about the whole incident. But he wanted to tell everyone with a megaphone which could make a racket throughout the country that he had killed Tiwa at his own discretion, and not at his wife’s. He was finally ready to look the law in the face without a flinch. He felt there was more dignity to that than conceding to have killed her because he was pushed to do it by his wife.
Teju asked one of the people who read the news at newspaper stands what he thought about the story. And the man, unsuspicious of Teju’s identity, called him a henpecked man who was barely able to do something of his own will. Though Teju was really offended by the man’s innocent comment, he did not take it on him. He rather headed for Agodi, where the prisons were. After writing a detailed statement about the whole episode, he surrendered on the condition that his wife who, according to the statement, was absolutely innocent would be freed. After he had made the necessary statements and confessions and had followed all other protocols, he was due for lockup. But he fainted.