Chemist's son, Walai, has returned from his trading trip to Dubai. Back in his secondary school days, we didn't know if the young Walai was going to end up an armed robber or a chartered accountant. He was that type of boy. His report card was the best in the school, but they called and called him to take his prize, only for the gatekeeper to drag him out of the bush surrounding the Headmaster's fishpond - with three stolen Tilapias wrapped in newspaper and stuffed into his school bag.

Anyway, he became an international businessman and Ikerre-Oti people raised their hands and thanked God.

Any time he returned from Dubai, Barika's shop could not sell clothes until Walai's huge suitcases were empty. He knew how to choose all those stupid Yankee T-shirts that Ikerre boys would steal to buy. Yet, this time around, Barika didn't looked bothered, despite the huge boxes off-loaded from the airport taxi that brought Walai home.

I could see that Barika had heard the rumours as well.

In the evening, several hours after Walai's boxes had come down from the airport taxi, the usual crowds were absent from the frontage of Chemist's house. To tell the very truth, there was nobody there at all. Finally, a worried Walai left his father's house and strolled around the Village Square, as if to show people that truly, he was back from Dubai. People noticed all right. They followed him around, asking him about Dubai: there were a lot of 'How was the weather there?' and, 'How was the plane journey this time?' And there was a lot of listening attentively and nodding - because like any young man, Walai liked to boast.

But not a single person asked whether he even had a handkerchief for sale.

The very truth is that there's no honesty in Ikerre people. That's the problem with them: they can kill a person and you won't even see a drop of blood. As for me, the reason why they don't like me, is that I don't chew my words. I spit them out the way they are. Walai knew that very well.

That evening, somebody knocked on my door. I covered my disgraceful yams with a sack and opened the door. It was Walai. He didn't look proud like a successful businessman who had just come back from a trip to Dubai. He looked miserable, like a chicken soaked by torrential rain. He entered the house, came very near me, and whispered - even though we were alone in the house: Uncle Jumai, what happened? Nobody came to look at my clothes today. Did Papa quarrel with the villagers? Did the Igwe ostracise my family?

Can't you see this useless generation of ill-bred idiots? Here's a boy who will pass me thirty times in the Village Square without greeting me once. Now that he wants something from me, I've become his 'Dearest Uncle Jumai'. Idiot. I told him that his father hadn't quarrelled with anyone, but that next time he travelled to Dubai he should make sure none of Barika's friends spotted him doing his shopping at the local Oshodi Market in Lagos.

He said he didn't know what I was talking about.

So I explained to him that somebody had recognised him shopping at Oshodi Main Market - which was just a bus trip from Ikerre - when he was supposed to be shopping at Dubai, and that his parents were probably the last two adults left in Ikerre who were not in the know.

He did not talk for many, many minutes.

I don't like silence in my house when visitors are around. Silence is what you do in the house of bereaved people. My goat may have died this morning; my wife may have left three days before; but I'm not bereaved. So I made conversation: I asked him how he got the baggage tags. He said, Which baggage tags? I told him, The 'Emirates' baggage tags on his boxes, which made it look as though he was just stepping off a plane. Again, many minutes passed before he told me about the small shop in Oshodi Main Market where one could even buy used boarding passes, customs stamps from sixty-six different countries, or shopping bags from hundreds of famous foreign stores like Sell Fridges and Marks and Denser.