I was enjoying a plate of jollof rice, moimoi and salad, and watching Ada and her husband dance to the excellent akwunechenyi music with people throwing money all over them, when I heard Nnaemeka’s voice from behind me, “Look, you won’t believe who I have here.”   I turned round and, true to his words, I could not believe my eyes.

“Ikenna!” I exclaimed.  “Where did you come from?” I asked a little foolishly.  I was really surprised to see him.  

“Happy New Year,” he said smiling.

“When did you come back?  Don’t tell me you have been around and you have not come to see us?” I asked.

“Please ask him,” my brother said.

“I only came back to the village yesterday.  I came into the country on the thirty-first,” he told us.

Ikenna was a childhood friend.  We had all grown up together.    When we were younger, we all played together at our house. We were not related by blood but we acted as if we were.  Later on, he and I attended the same university, where we looked out for each other.  After our national service, he won the US lottery visa.  He had been living in New York for the past five years.    He was doing well and he frequently sent money home to his parents, who were now retired from the civil service and had moved back to the village.

We had kept in touch very infrequently since he left for the US and I wanted to know what he was doing at home. As it turned out, he had come home to get married.   He was going to pay the bride price of his wife, who was also from our village.  I wondered if his parents had found her for him.

“So, you are home for Christmas,” he said to me.  “When are you heading back to Canada?” he asked me.

Why did he assume I was going back to Canada?

“I came back some time ago,” I told him.  “I work in Lagos now.”

“You do?” he sounded very surprised.  “You did not like it in Canada?” he asked.  “I know it is too cold, but a tough Naija babe like you should be able to rough it out.”

“Well, I wanted to come home,” I said.  I did not really want to go into any long explanations. 

“Lucky girl,” he said to me, but his tone implied something else.  “I don’t know how you can stand it here, already the power outages are getting on my nerves.  We had to buy fuel on the black market yesterday for the generator.  Nothing seems to work in this country.” 

I said nothing to that.  Five years was not long enough to forget what the country was like.

“So where do you work?” he asked.

I told him.

“Lucky girl” he said again.

“How so?” I asked him.

“Well, I thought that you would be making money in a bank like your brother Nnaemeka or working in a consulting firm or something.  But clearly, you don’t need the money.  Or NGOs must be paying a lot more these days.”

“How do you mean I don’t need the money?”  I asked him, cautioning myself not to get heated.  “I have bills and things to do with money too.”

“But, you don’t have the responsibilities that I do.  You know my parents are retired now and two of my sisters are still in the university.  As the first child, I have to put up the money for their fees, as well as take care of my parents.  Also, now I have to think of building a good house in our compound.”

I had not noticed anything wrong with the modest bungalow his parents had built, I thought.

“You are lucky,” he continued. You are the last child.  Moreover, you are a woman.  You don’t have any problem at all.  Soon, a well-to-do man will come and marry you and you will live in comfort the rest of your life.  Just look at Ada,” he said motioning towards the couple that was now seated for the next stage of the ceremonies.  “Her husband has just engaged in the most expensive venture of his life.” 

The last statement was more a joke than anything else; Ada was definitely an expensive woman to maintain.  I had heard that he had bought her a brand new Kia car.  He could afford it of course; he was known to be doing well in the 419 fraud business.

“Really?  Is that what your wife will do? Live in comfort the rest of her life?” I asked him mildly.  It was interesting that five years in the US had not changed Ikenna’s view of life and of women, I thought.  Nor the fact that his mother had worked hard as a secondary school teacher, helping his father put them through school.

“Well, we will live in the US.  Everybody has to work there, you know, plenty of bills to pay,” he said.

I looked closely at him, he sounded serious.  How many women in Nigeria did he know who were full-time housewives I wanted to ask him.  Most Nigerian women worked and kept house at the same time.  I did not really want to get into an argument with him.

Before I could speak however, he said, “Perhaps, you could start your own NGO.  You will make more money that way.  You know, collect money from all those international aid agencies.”

“That is not the reason why NGOs work,” I said.

He said nothing to that, but his expression said that he knew better. 

In an apparent effort to change the subject, he said, “You still look as pretty as I remember.”

“Don’t let your wife hear that,” I bantered back.

“Please don’t tell her,” he replied, smiling.

“I haven’t eaten,” he said.

“Let me see if I can get you some food.  Sit here,” I said giving him my seat and carrying my half-eaten plate of rice with me to the cooking area behind the house.

                                                            ********

Lord, let me land safely again.   I still have plenty to live and see in the world, I prayed with my eyes shut tight.  My stomach turned queasy as the plane climbed upwards towards the skies, the roaring noise of the takeoff hurting my ears slightly.   

This time I had the window seat and I could look out and think.   And I thought how good it was to spend time at home with my parents.  How good it was to spend Christmas with my siblings, different as we had all turned out.  I had enjoyed myself, enjoyed being with my family.  But, I was not able to change any views or anything. If anything, I only succeeded in making them question what I was doing with my life.  With no husband, no children and little money, it was no wonder that they thought I needed a different life compass from the one I was using.   Recalling the loneliness of Lagos, the busyness of everyday life, the jumping off and on moving buses, the dirtiness of the streets, with gutters filled with bad, smelly water, constant power outages, and the seeming hopelessness of the job I did with street children, I knew that my family had good reason to consider me crazy for leaving an organized, easy to predict life in Canada.

My encounter with Ikenna had also given me the most food for thought.  Did I really want to live permanently in my country, with its unpredictability, the corruption which drew almost everybody in its vortex- witness my having to pay a tout to get my ticket at the airport?  Had my coming back home to Nigeria been an act of self-indulgence and selfishness?  Was I moving towards failure in life, as an okamma n’ilo, a person good only on the outside, having nothing good to offer those on the inside?  Was I working for others and not seeing those who needed my contribution right under my nose?   I could not, after all, save the world single-handedly, but I could certainly better the lives of my parents, if not my own.   My parents, however, seemed more interested in my settling down to marry than in what to them seemed my idiosyncratic search for a meaningful life and had told me before I left to keep my eyes open.  I shook my head to clear it.  This introspection was making things no clearer.

With my thoughts, the fifty-minute flight seemed shorter; I was surprised to hear that we were about to land in Lagos.  There was hardly any green vegetation to see as we flew over Lagos.   The landscape was dotted with houses so close to each other that one wondered how people could possibly breathe.  The landing this time was smooth.  There was no one to pick me up at the airport.  Instead, I had to wave off the expensive cab drivers inside the airport and head out to the road leading out of the airport where I could catch the cheaper yellow taxis.  

“Aunty, let me carry your bags,” one of the men told me.

“I won’t charge you too much,” the other said, pulling on my bag.

I snatched the bag from him, keeping my eyes straight ahead.

“Where are you going?” yet another asked walking close behind me.

“Don’t mind him; his cab is too old for a fine girl like you.  Come and enter my car.”

I held onto my bag tightly as I hailed yellow taxis.  I waited in the scorching sun, sweating.  Harmattan is almost non-existent in Lagos.  I bargained until I got the right price. I put my bag in the backseat and jumped into the taxi.  I was back to my real life.   A gush of excitement went through me.  It was good to be back.  Tomorrow, I would go to work and do my bit in “saving the world” and living in a land where life amidst chaos was nevertheless enjoyed like a plate of pounded yam and ora soup, and continue this seeming life of okamma n’ilo that I appeared to have chosen.