The silence was beginning to grow again. So I asked him if his problem was the raising of the money for a plane ticket to Dubai. In my mouth, that question was as clumsy as a pencil in a left hand, because at that very moment, even the raising of the bus fare to Warri was a serious problem for me. He shook his head. He said it was the visa. That after his first trip to Dubai, they had found a little 'something' inside his shoe and stamped his passport so angrily that there was no point venturing near a real embassy again.

So I asked him why he kept deceiving Ikerre people that he was going to Dubai, only to charge them double for stupid T-Shirts that were probably made in a boys-quarters in Aba. I asked him why he couldn't be open about his source. - That was when he hissed: this boy that is even younger than my youngest son, Calamatus. He hissed and said to me that Ikerre people were fools who queued up and paid double for thrash, once they heard the word 'Dubai'. He said the profit margin of an Oshodi trader could not maintain his kind of lifestyle, and that anyway, he would rather die than become a local Oshodi trader. I scratched my head. Then I asked him what he was going to do, now that a disrespectful breeze had disclosed the anus under the fowl's beautiful feathers.

He didn't speak for a long time, then he told me that his own concern was that his parents must never find out what I had just told him. I assured him that if his parents ever heard about their disgrace, it would have been from another pair of lips. He said he was leaving that very night for his mother's village near Onitsha, where he would sell off his stock.

Then what? I asked him.

Then I'm going to Dubai. He said.

I looked at him very well. I was standing next to me and I could smell no burukutu in his breath. Without a visa? I asked him.

I'm going the caravan route. He said. I'll join a group who will cross the desert through Niger, Mali, Algeria and Tunisia. It's only two or three thousand miles.

I didn't say anything for a very long time, as I came to realise that a boy could graduate with the best result of his secondary school, without having any common sense of his own. One of my own classmates had been swallowed by the caravan route, twenty years ago. Yet, today if you ask for people who have sons in Italy, his mother will jump up, all the while explaining that her son was very lazy at writing letters. Twenty years lazy. I knew that my second-cousin Chemist was about to lose a strong-headed son. The particular idiot standing in front of me had decided on a grave either in the Sahara desert or the Mediterranean Sea. There was no keeping a firefly from the fire.

Then I remembered that my own sons were also in dire need of common sense. I wasn't there to advise them. Maybe if I advised this particular goat, some other good Samaritan would be there at the point of my sons? greatest idiocies. So I said to him: Leave Dubai for the Dubaians, Walai. Your father's chemist has made him rich, at least by the standard of this village. Join him. Become his assistant?

His face twisted in the kind of vex that I last saw on Isimpi's corpse on the expressway, after he was crushed by a lorry as he chased a chicken that escaped from his coop.

They were laughing at me! he said very, very bitterly, as though to laugh at Walai had replaced the sin of Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as the unforgivable sin.

Who? I asked him. When?

Ikerre people! He replied. He was shaking as he said that. Today, more than twenty times, they asked me about Dubai's weather! Can you imagine that? - And they knew I didn't travel! They let me talk and talk and they were laughing at me all the while... Look Uncle Jumai, I'm returning to that Dubai! I swear by my mother's future grave! And I'm going to become big. Very, very BIG. So big that when I fart from there, these Ikerre ants will smell it here!

His eyes became deep like a well: Then I'll ask them what the weather feels like, down here! Walai walked out as he finished speaking, slamming my door - as if I was one of those people who had been twitting him about Dubai's weather.

Better get yourself a camel, I told the closed door, sadly.

I wasn't going to see Walai, ever again, I knew that very well. Just what exactly was going on in this village?