Dad was criminally stingy. I didn't know how he happened to be so. But I knew mum had always stared at him, dusted up all the courage she had and sputtered harsh words on dad because he did one stingy thing or the other. Like that day. Mum had sent Peter, my brother, to tell dad to give him money so that Peter could buy tin tomato for the afternoon jollof rice. Dad squinted his eyes at first, then squeezed his face, purred his lips (I think he was smelling beer) and told Peter to tell mum that he didn't have enough money; and that, in any case, tomato would make the rice extravagant. Only onion could. Mum turned pink in confusion and then red in anger.

'How could you say such a thing, stingy man?'

Already he was immune to that kind of venom from mum. He merely stared at her, somewhat amused. I didn't know if mum saw some sarcasm in the indistinct smile pushing forth from his shamed eyes. She blew her top. And because she had a thunder of voice, peals of harsh words revved out like a screeching tyre on a tarred road. She unloaded many insults on dad who sprang up suddenly, stung mum with a slap and our small parlor turned to a wrestling ring.

Mum was infernally strong. You could see how she planted her legs so defensively around her and dad pushed with all his strength and it was in vain. Mum had her head buried below dad's chest. He had his arms round her body. Entangled and breathing fast, they theatricalized their aggression round the center table

I kept yelling, 'Leave her alone, dad! Leave her alone, dad! Dad!'

Peter had hidden his body in the inner room, his face stuck out, giggling stupidly. He was laughing at dad, I guessed. Yet there wasn't anything to laugh about. Dad became victorious, after all, because he hit mum so hard on her nose that blood came; he left the house without giving the money for tomato and Mum nursed her nose instead of cooking for us. I managed my hunger with unsugared, soaked gari. But Peter, never having appetite for cheap food (maybe he'd taken after mum) wallowed in punishing hunger in sleepless night. Judith, our last born, ate gari with me.

Next day, our small family woke into confusion. Dad left for work, unwashed; mum withered away in anger at the privacy of her curtained bed; Peter huddled himself in a wobbly armchair, not a single trace of his usual stupid smile in his sunken stare; Judith, a plate in hand, nagged, insistently demanding for food from mum or me which she couldn't get. I simply stretched myself on our worn out sofa, up-faced, counting the holes on our ceiling so as to keep my attention warm and focused.

Afternoon of that day, dad came home with a kind of dramatic irony in his voice and eyes. He was suddenly trumpeting, 'I've made it! I've made it! Shame has shamed the devil! I've made it! I've got the fortune of my life!'

I was wondering what this fortune of his life was. Dad had always sucked in despair that he'd never been born with anything like luck or fortune. Passionately, he'd told Peter and I one day, in a heavily sermonic tone, that life was a bundle of opposites and all those talks about formula for success and formula for failure were a whole lump of consolatory balm and we should be careful about life. Then, Peter was about moving from class four to five in secondary school and he was reading very hard. He was spending more than half of the night or all of the night reading. Dad had started by cautioning peter to hold his peace.

He said, 'My son, hearken to the voice of your father,' (dad, when in a humorous mood, could lift phrases, sentences or lines from the bible in a funny way). 'You don't need to read as hard as you're doing. Stop wasting your brain! If you read too much, you'll become insignificant to this world!'

Peter stared in utter surprise; I burst out, 'Dad, that's not true. People read to become great.'

'Nonsense, Ruth.' His eyeballs rolled round and stood riveted on me. 'Let me tell you, and after I've told you this, you can check it out for yourselves. When I was in primary school, the best pupils in my class then are now village primary school headmasters. All of them! In my secondary school class, a girl and two boys were hot in their brains. Now the two boys teach English in different secondary schools and the girl teaches Christian Religious Studies in secondary school, too. C. R. S! Not even a better subject.' Peter and I had our stares rapt on dad. He was utterly engrossed in what he was saying. 'At the university – anyway it was one tiny state university that our governor established on the edge of his pride – I pulled myself together, handwork here and manipulation there, I added everything energetically and surprisingly graduated as one of the best students. But what am I today? A police ASP, unpromoted, maybe unpromotable, not able to survive on anything, not even on the so-called Obasanjo package, but on twenty naira bribes on the roads. The day Nigerians stop giving bribes on the roads, you'll,' he swept us round with his large eyeballs, 'stop eating fine food. And yet your mother calls me a stingy man. Am I really stingy?

I told dad, 'Well, dad I want to be better than you; so I must read harder than you.'

Dad just guffawed. 'Your Sunday school teacher or C.R.S. mistress must have taught you that, not so? Cheap philosophy, my children, very cheap philosophy: sons are better than their fathers and daughters, than their mothers. Peter and Ruth obey the voice of your father; this world doesn't operate on such cheap philosophy. Today, in our world, children are more miserable than their parents. When I was like you, I used to eat chicken almost everyday. But now in a month you've not eaten chicken. Things are so hard. And yet she calls me a stingy man.'