Green Eyes – A Short Story by 'Namdi Awa-Kalu
- By 'Namdi Awa-Kalu
- Published August 25, 2009
- Fiction
-
Rating:
'Namdi Awa-Kalu
I am a law student at the London School of Economics, but I grew up in Lagos and have missed Nigeria for every one of the six years I have been away. I try to communicate this sense of displacement and relocation in all my work at present. I write for a generation not unwelcome abroad but nonetheless missing parts of the spirit that are forever entangled with home.
Green Eyes
- By 'Namdi Awa-Kalu
How all the other passions fleet to air,
As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,
And shuddering fear, and green-eyed jealousy! O love,
Be moderate; allay thy ecstasy
- William Shakespeare’s Portia from ‘The Merchant of Venice’
Only the long-lost, the refugee, the prodigal or the returnee exile could gaze with such wonder at such an insignificant landscape as the tarmac that enveloped the aeroplane window through which Tokunbo stared for too long after his flight had taxied to a halt. He sat transfixed, spanning the runway and the field beyond it and the other planes, athletically poised for take-off or still cooling off from arrival. Most of the other fliers were already queuing to get off or else recovering their luggage from the overhead hold Some congratulated friends whom they ran into on the journey as if they had anything to do with its landing unscathed (“A very smooth flight, well done!”), others were speaking into shiny mobiles to loved ones with the calm assurance that follows several hours of long-haul travel anxiety. Tokunbo was not set to disembark just yet. He drank in Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport for the first time in his twenty-five years, enjoying the brazen glare of the sun on the cabin windows. The jabbering sound of genuine Nigerians, his people, bantering on genuine Nigerian soil filled his ears. After many years away from the country of his childhood, it was euphony.
Tokunbo was tired and still “eye popping”; at least that’s how his roommate Jay would have described it, this recoil from the many-smells of economy class, the heat steaming in through the now-open cabin doors, the crush of impatient Nigerians eager to clamber off the aircraft. Ah, Jay and Yale and all things American would have to be put behind him. Med School was over. He had left it all behind with little fuss to return home- few goodbyes, no hunt for souvenirs, he simply dumped America in a box marked “the past”, demonstrating a predilection for leaving things behind that was as instinctive as it was hereditary.
His bag was wedged tightly in a corner behind a bulging holdall as if it had been squashed in by many other pieces of luggage, and Tokunbo knew there had been a few. His Uncle Tunde had played surrogate father in the US, and warned him in his Going to Nigeria pep talk, between cigar puffs, that his people did not like to travel light. The more luggage one had on the way back, the easier to show to the welcoming troupe that one had not gone abroad “to suffer”. And everybody knew that the bringing of gifts was not taken lightly by relatives. Nobody could be forgotten if you did not want to risk imprecation. Uncle Tunde was always funny and extreme like that when he talked about the “people back home”. He had strongly questioned Tokunbo’s unshakable desire to go back to the gaddem mess straight after med school even though he had landed a couple of prestigious internships. Tokunbo laughed and warned his Uncle about lung cancer. Home is where the heart is.
It had been a crowded flight as was normal at this time of the year, full of Nigerians who endure the winter cold of America, then trot home obligingly in the summer months. What a paradox. He cursed not too discreetly, suddenly fighting dizziness as he gingerly slid his bag out from under the holdall. How the f*ck did a bag that large get through customs anyway without being checked in? His knee buckled at that moment, and the holdall came crashing down, its zip sliding open partway to reveal something black and ugly and formless peeking out at the lip. It was there and gone so quickly, like the flicker of a cigarette lighter, that Tokunbo told himself that he had imagined it, the image of a shrunken animal form, and waited for the dizziness to wash over.
“Abi o ti ya were? Are you mad? You have no home training?” The woman addressing him with rhetorical fury led with a slap, bringing all her force to bear on the pudgy right hand she threw at his face. She had hung on to the ‘m’ in ‘mad’ for an extra second as only a livid Yoruba woman can and Tokunbo found it vaguely familiar. The look on her face was an unmistakable thunderclap.
Tokunbo said he was sorry more in surprise that the pain in his cheek could come from a woman so much shorter than he was, than from any real remorse. He observed this thickset woman now wrestling furiously with her bag and zipping it back up with finality. She was swathed in wrappers of an ugly kente print in order to contend with her bulk, and her face was an oily yellow with dark marks around her eyes that suggested she had been ‘bleaching’. Black spots marched like tambolo across the bridge of her nose. Why are Nigerian women so angry all the time?
“Bone thug l’omo” She hissed as she waddled down the aisle and out of the plane, brushing aside a concerned- looking stewardess who was asking Tokunbo if he was alright. He nodded gratefully at her and picked up his own bag to leave, now the last person on board. As he walked past the attendants, plastic smiles fixed permanently and mouthing rehearsed farewells, Tokunbo fingered his dreadlocks, musing on the fact that despite the other insults he had just faced, all he could think about was that the lady had just compared him to the Bone Thugs, a surefire sign that he had been taken for riffraff. Clearly, Nigeria was not so different nine years on. He would have to lose the dreads.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“My son!” Tokunbo’s father’s smile was broad, each tooth a polished pearl. He hugged Tokunbo tightly, clasping nine-year long loneliness onto an embrace that roused emotion in both of them. Tokunbo could sense the slight sense of regret that had made his father hesitate at first when he got out of the taxi and shook out his dreadlocks in the boiling sun like the side-effect of a peculiarly American drug. An old man can only hold on to such things for so long, however, and he abandoned any rebukes to relish this moment he had been looking forward to ever since he tearfully dispatched his son to Ala bekee- the United States.
Tokunbo withdrew from his father’s grip and leaned back to let him survey his features- well-built, fresh- faced and handsome. “ Nnanna, you look more like your mother everyday” He beamed even harder “And now you are growing hair and breasts just like her, God rest her soul” He poked at Tokunbo’s chest playfully as he spoke and whatever tension there had been melted away instantly. Tokunbo smiled softly at the pet name that only his father used. Nnanna. My father’s father; his second name, his Igbo name- Ikenna- had been his grandfather’s. Even mention of his mother who had died shortly after his birth surrounded in mystery, could not spoil the tenderness between father and son as they tried to match the images before them with the memories they had held so dear for nearly a decade.
“You look well, Papa. Maybe tired, but still, well” Tokunbo looked at his father, light- complexioned in the dazzling way that some Igbo men sometimes were, with lovely eyes of a greenish hue that distinguished him in a country of the predominantly brown- eyed. It was how he had earned his nickname Nwamba, while growing up: Cat, because of his green eyes and his way of always landing on his feet, no matter what was thrown at him. He had suffered unpleasant prejudice from a superstitious people who often associated cats and anything uncommonly coloured- a white mouse, a black river, a green eye- with witchcraft. This even from kinfolk. One aunty, his dead father’s sister, tried to poison his food when he was living with her while he studied at the University of Lagos. She blamed him for a series of misfortunes that suddenly befell her family, including a son run mad who, blazing from a marathon session of pot-smoking with his Cultist friends, had come home to report that he had seen Emeka, Tokunbo’s father, in several places at once. He said that everywhere he turned was bright green. She sent him away when the same mad son ate the ill-begotten dish and died. Much earlier, another uncle, his dead mother’s cousin flogged him violently with a horsewhip when he saw a black stray cat washing itself in the darkness of his living room as he stumbled to the refrigerator to fetch himself another beer. Its eyes glowed green.
These experiences were not infrequent and maybe born of the fact that he was an unwelcome orphan moving from home to home, rather than the latent suspicion with which his beautiful eyes were regarded. They would shatter the young Emeka Okorie’s faith in the received wisdoms of his youth. He studied medicine to remove far away from the myth and mistaken beliefs that had made him an easy target of ignorance. That was precisely what he stated in his application to Lagos University Teaching Hospital, coming out of the University of Lagos. I studied medicine to distance myself from the archaic and frankly anachronistic practices that hinder my people A statement heavily dosed with the scabrous arrogance of the young intellectual. Afterwards, he became a General Practitioner and set up a successful practice in Lagos. That was where he met his wife, Abby. She was the daughter of a multimillionaire businessman with political aspirations. It was this multimillionaire who first laughed soundly, the vicious yellow- toothed howl of a man who ate three different kinds of meat in his egusi soup everyday, when his daughter brought the promising but largely unconnected (hence unknown) Emeka home and told him that Emeka had proposed.
“Abby,” Her mother’s brow was as furrowed and stern as her husband’s was undulating with mirth. She looked powerfully into her daughter’s eyes “You have always been stupid.” She said it gently, touching her cheeks lightly. Abby was stung by the words. Her mother had never called her names. She was the last born, the only girl after four boys; the ‘bottom pot’ filled with all the sweetness that had escaped those who came before her. Her father was always carelessly affectionate with her and her mother treated her, in her own words, like a precious stone found amongst worthless shells on the seashore. So to see the look of disdain on her mother’s beautiful face was painful.
“Do you think Prince Kazeem has been coming here just to drink Fanta Lemon?” Her father’s chin was suddenly in the air, dangerous, daring her to counter him. “You better prepare yourself to get married to him once your degree is finished. Shebi you have two more years left or is it one?” he closed his eyes and bounced his right leg furiously as he dismissively cast his mind to several shipments coming in that weekend. Order, in his reasoning, had been restored. Her mother was more attuned to her daughter’s determined streak mostly because she had spent twenty years noticing it and sometimes nurturing it. She realized that Abby would not bend as easily to her father’s iron will as her brothers, whose unbending desire for his money bowed them almost involuntarily- like cattle grazing- to his many whims. She changed tack, her voice became more soothing.
“Do you want to know how you got your name omo eluwa bii?” She glanced quickly at her husband to make sure he was fast asleep and snoring. “I begged for you. I begged. Your father had finished with childbearing but I wanted a daughter, so I begged to have you. That is how I named you Abebi, my daughter. You are my only daughter. My only daughter. Do not do this thing you are trying to do. You, a beautiful Yoruba girl want to marry an Igbo man as if there are no other options. Olorun maje! Those pompous people. Why won’t you just marry this Kazeem? He is rich and he is a Lagos royal. OK, so he is not as handsome as that Okorie but at least he is well-connected and can make sure you are well-set for the rest of your life.” She finished with emphatic stress on the last syllable and her head which had been bobbing throughout the conversation finally came to a rest.
Abby would not be swayed, accustomed as she was to having her own way. She resisted her mother’s frenzied contractions, her squalling, for a protracted twenty-four hour labour session at childbirth that nearly killed her, a story that her mother used frequently when trying to persuade her to change her mind: You tried to kill me before you knew me and now you are at it again. It was an exaggeration not far from the truth. Abby would do everything that was taboo in the eyes of her very conservative mother, making her constantly nervous when Abby was around her friends. She wore trousers everywhere well into her teens when other girls her age were already getting married off in exquisite lace garments. She ran away to play football with her brothers whenever her mother called out to her to help in the kitchen, to the older woman’s chagrin. Eventually, her mother could not bear any more and informed her sourly that she would never attract a husband if her ways did not change, hoping to scare her into becoming a woman. Abby tossed her long, dark hair insouciantly and took to announcing that she would never get married, making sure she said it within earshot of her mother and whomever she had over for company. Why would she want to become a glorified maid like her dear mother, with an invisible chain around her ankle for her husband to pull on when he so much as spilled ewedu on his shirt? Now you begin to understand how often her mother felt she would die of a heart attack.
Unexpectedly, Abby shed this skin, this grubby layer of tomboyish rebelliousness, emerging as a social butterfly in her twenties. Her mother breathed several sighs of relief as the first little jots of grey dappled her full head of hair while she watched Abby sprout overnight, with beauty that was both fiery and enigmatic. Her mother knew she did not stand a chance, but still hoped she could direct her towards the right suitor. But Abby fell helplessly in love with Emeka; was overwhelmed by his convictions in the possibility of a new Nigeria, free of the old school prejudices and backwardness that had blighted him, moving past the nepotism that retarded its progress as a twentieth century giant- a beacon of modernity in Africa. She married Emeka quickly in a Yaba registry and ran away with him to the United States where he had gone to pursue a one- year fellowship as a visiting lecturer while completing his post-doctoral thesis. She turned away from her family wealth and reputation without looking back. It was there that they had their first child- Olatokunbo Ikenna Nwakaego Okorie. The child born abroad. The import.
Sadly, there will always be those who try to pour sand in your gari. This was what people said to Emeka’s face when he returned a year later with his newborn in tow but with his wife frail and very ill. Evil forces were at work. If not why couldn’t the big doctor, with his medicines, cure her? Emeka would touch his offending stethoscope much like his son fingering dreadlocks years later and smile wryly, his green eyes revealing little of his frustration at this, this failure of people to move past muddled traditional thinking. She would be well soon, they should not worry; she would be well very soon.
She died two weeks after they had settled into a new home in a quiet estate in Gbagada. These same people spat disgustedly and whispered behind his back that he had killed her with his eyes. One of Abby’s brothers sent a carful of thugs to Emeka’s house. They were supposed to murder him like one of their father’s political enemies. Luckily, Emeka the Cat o’ Nine Lives had stayed overnight shut up in his office at the hospital drinking himself into a hot misty stupor that cleared out his guts in the morning. The thugs vandalized the house and raped the wet nurse who stayed with the baby. One of them plastered a hard grimy fist open- handed across Tokunbo’s three month-old face to shut him up. He had been bawling uncontrollably. After that day, Tokunbo didn’t cry again only sniffling when he was hungry or screwing his beautiful face up into a tight knot when he got injured.
It was Abby’s mother who rescued Emeka from the chasm of despair he sank into after her death. Emeka had taken Tokunbo to their home on Victoria Island, not aware that it was his brothers-in-law who had tried to kill him. The house was a large, gaudy two storey affair barricaded by barbed wire sitting on ten-foot walls and an unwieldy automatic front gate with her father’s head carved into the centre. It stood just fifteen minutes from the crashing waves of Bar beach. Abby’s father, formidable in his rage, dashed for his hunting rifle immediately he saw Emeka and cursed him in the glorious full-pelt style of dramatic Yoruba that would be surpassed in turn by the choleric spit of his gun. His wife looked on with pity, pungent tears spooled in the corners of her eyes, watching Emeka run like a houseboy or a common thief. So it was that she made a series of clandestine visits to see the baby boy who looked so much like his mother, so much like her flower Abebi, her pretty petal who left without saying goodbye, just died, cut off in full bloom. Emeka, never too sure if he was drunk or sober, could not help thinking how like Nicodemus she looked dressed furtively in a headscarf.
They talked on his front porch in the moonlit dusk (his house being in no fit state to receive visitors) about her heartbreak and the fog of advancing psychosis that was blurring his mind. He asked for her help, wailing at her feet without dignity because her husband had used his influence to run down his infant practice. She did not want to promise much because she had been forbidden to go near him or her grandson, afterall her other children had full litters of children’s children all over Lagos and overseas that she could visit and play Grandma to. But she still had favours she could call in which would go unnoticed by her husband. She got him an underpaid job as a physician at UNILAG teaching hospital which would allow him to live and raise his child. She also sent an eighteen- year old Yoruba girl called Enitan who had just lost her own baby and was still full at the nipple, to look after Tokunbo. Emeka never heard from her again until years later, when she paid the balance of Tokunbo’s med school fees because scholarship funding and Emeka’s own meager contributions were not enough.
- By 'Namdi Awa-Kalu
How all the other passions fleet to air,
As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,
And shuddering fear, and green-eyed jealousy! O love,
Be moderate; allay thy ecstasy
- William Shakespeare’s Portia from ‘The Merchant of Venice’
Only the long-lost, the refugee, the prodigal or the returnee exile could gaze with such wonder at such an insignificant landscape as the tarmac that enveloped the aeroplane window through which Tokunbo stared for too long after his flight had taxied to a halt. He sat transfixed, spanning the runway and the field beyond it and the other planes, athletically poised for take-off or still cooling off from arrival. Most of the other fliers were already queuing to get off or else recovering their luggage from the overhead hold Some congratulated friends whom they ran into on the journey as if they had anything to do with its landing unscathed (“A very smooth flight, well done!”), others were speaking into shiny mobiles to loved ones with the calm assurance that follows several hours of long-haul travel anxiety. Tokunbo was not set to disembark just yet. He drank in Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport for the first time in his twenty-five years, enjoying the brazen glare of the sun on the cabin windows. The jabbering sound of genuine Nigerians, his people, bantering on genuine Nigerian soil filled his ears. After many years away from the country of his childhood, it was euphony.
Tokunbo was tired and still “eye popping”; at least that’s how his roommate Jay would have described it, this recoil from the many-smells of economy class, the heat steaming in through the now-open cabin doors, the crush of impatient Nigerians eager to clamber off the aircraft. Ah, Jay and Yale and all things American would have to be put behind him. Med School was over. He had left it all behind with little fuss to return home- few goodbyes, no hunt for souvenirs, he simply dumped America in a box marked “the past”, demonstrating a predilection for leaving things behind that was as instinctive as it was hereditary.
His bag was wedged tightly in a corner behind a bulging holdall as if it had been squashed in by many other pieces of luggage, and Tokunbo knew there had been a few. His Uncle Tunde had played surrogate father in the US, and warned him in his Going to Nigeria pep talk, between cigar puffs, that his people did not like to travel light. The more luggage one had on the way back, the easier to show to the welcoming troupe that one had not gone abroad “to suffer”. And everybody knew that the bringing of gifts was not taken lightly by relatives. Nobody could be forgotten if you did not want to risk imprecation. Uncle Tunde was always funny and extreme like that when he talked about the “people back home”. He had strongly questioned Tokunbo’s unshakable desire to go back to the gaddem mess straight after med school even though he had landed a couple of prestigious internships. Tokunbo laughed and warned his Uncle about lung cancer. Home is where the heart is.
It had been a crowded flight as was normal at this time of the year, full of Nigerians who endure the winter cold of America, then trot home obligingly in the summer months. What a paradox. He cursed not too discreetly, suddenly fighting dizziness as he gingerly slid his bag out from under the holdall. How the f*ck did a bag that large get through customs anyway without being checked in? His knee buckled at that moment, and the holdall came crashing down, its zip sliding open partway to reveal something black and ugly and formless peeking out at the lip. It was there and gone so quickly, like the flicker of a cigarette lighter, that Tokunbo told himself that he had imagined it, the image of a shrunken animal form, and waited for the dizziness to wash over.
“Abi o ti ya were? Are you mad? You have no home training?” The woman addressing him with rhetorical fury led with a slap, bringing all her force to bear on the pudgy right hand she threw at his face. She had hung on to the ‘m’ in ‘mad’ for an extra second as only a livid Yoruba woman can and Tokunbo found it vaguely familiar. The look on her face was an unmistakable thunderclap.
Tokunbo said he was sorry more in surprise that the pain in his cheek could come from a woman so much shorter than he was, than from any real remorse. He observed this thickset woman now wrestling furiously with her bag and zipping it back up with finality. She was swathed in wrappers of an ugly kente print in order to contend with her bulk, and her face was an oily yellow with dark marks around her eyes that suggested she had been ‘bleaching’. Black spots marched like tambolo across the bridge of her nose. Why are Nigerian women so angry all the time?
“Bone thug l’omo” She hissed as she waddled down the aisle and out of the plane, brushing aside a concerned- looking stewardess who was asking Tokunbo if he was alright. He nodded gratefully at her and picked up his own bag to leave, now the last person on board. As he walked past the attendants, plastic smiles fixed permanently and mouthing rehearsed farewells, Tokunbo fingered his dreadlocks, musing on the fact that despite the other insults he had just faced, all he could think about was that the lady had just compared him to the Bone Thugs, a surefire sign that he had been taken for riffraff. Clearly, Nigeria was not so different nine years on. He would have to lose the dreads.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“My son!” Tokunbo’s father’s smile was broad, each tooth a polished pearl. He hugged Tokunbo tightly, clasping nine-year long loneliness onto an embrace that roused emotion in both of them. Tokunbo could sense the slight sense of regret that had made his father hesitate at first when he got out of the taxi and shook out his dreadlocks in the boiling sun like the side-effect of a peculiarly American drug. An old man can only hold on to such things for so long, however, and he abandoned any rebukes to relish this moment he had been looking forward to ever since he tearfully dispatched his son to Ala bekee- the United States.
Tokunbo withdrew from his father’s grip and leaned back to let him survey his features- well-built, fresh- faced and handsome. “ Nnanna, you look more like your mother everyday” He beamed even harder “And now you are growing hair and breasts just like her, God rest her soul” He poked at Tokunbo’s chest playfully as he spoke and whatever tension there had been melted away instantly. Tokunbo smiled softly at the pet name that only his father used. Nnanna. My father’s father; his second name, his Igbo name- Ikenna- had been his grandfather’s. Even mention of his mother who had died shortly after his birth surrounded in mystery, could not spoil the tenderness between father and son as they tried to match the images before them with the memories they had held so dear for nearly a decade.
“You look well, Papa. Maybe tired, but still, well” Tokunbo looked at his father, light- complexioned in the dazzling way that some Igbo men sometimes were, with lovely eyes of a greenish hue that distinguished him in a country of the predominantly brown- eyed. It was how he had earned his nickname Nwamba, while growing up: Cat, because of his green eyes and his way of always landing on his feet, no matter what was thrown at him. He had suffered unpleasant prejudice from a superstitious people who often associated cats and anything uncommonly coloured- a white mouse, a black river, a green eye- with witchcraft. This even from kinfolk. One aunty, his dead father’s sister, tried to poison his food when he was living with her while he studied at the University of Lagos. She blamed him for a series of misfortunes that suddenly befell her family, including a son run mad who, blazing from a marathon session of pot-smoking with his Cultist friends, had come home to report that he had seen Emeka, Tokunbo’s father, in several places at once. He said that everywhere he turned was bright green. She sent him away when the same mad son ate the ill-begotten dish and died. Much earlier, another uncle, his dead mother’s cousin flogged him violently with a horsewhip when he saw a black stray cat washing itself in the darkness of his living room as he stumbled to the refrigerator to fetch himself another beer. Its eyes glowed green.
These experiences were not infrequent and maybe born of the fact that he was an unwelcome orphan moving from home to home, rather than the latent suspicion with which his beautiful eyes were regarded. They would shatter the young Emeka Okorie’s faith in the received wisdoms of his youth. He studied medicine to remove far away from the myth and mistaken beliefs that had made him an easy target of ignorance. That was precisely what he stated in his application to Lagos University Teaching Hospital, coming out of the University of Lagos. I studied medicine to distance myself from the archaic and frankly anachronistic practices that hinder my people A statement heavily dosed with the scabrous arrogance of the young intellectual. Afterwards, he became a General Practitioner and set up a successful practice in Lagos. That was where he met his wife, Abby. She was the daughter of a multimillionaire businessman with political aspirations. It was this multimillionaire who first laughed soundly, the vicious yellow- toothed howl of a man who ate three different kinds of meat in his egusi soup everyday, when his daughter brought the promising but largely unconnected (hence unknown) Emeka home and told him that Emeka had proposed.
“Abby,” Her mother’s brow was as furrowed and stern as her husband’s was undulating with mirth. She looked powerfully into her daughter’s eyes “You have always been stupid.” She said it gently, touching her cheeks lightly. Abby was stung by the words. Her mother had never called her names. She was the last born, the only girl after four boys; the ‘bottom pot’ filled with all the sweetness that had escaped those who came before her. Her father was always carelessly affectionate with her and her mother treated her, in her own words, like a precious stone found amongst worthless shells on the seashore. So to see the look of disdain on her mother’s beautiful face was painful.
“Do you think Prince Kazeem has been coming here just to drink Fanta Lemon?” Her father’s chin was suddenly in the air, dangerous, daring her to counter him. “You better prepare yourself to get married to him once your degree is finished. Shebi you have two more years left or is it one?” he closed his eyes and bounced his right leg furiously as he dismissively cast his mind to several shipments coming in that weekend. Order, in his reasoning, had been restored. Her mother was more attuned to her daughter’s determined streak mostly because she had spent twenty years noticing it and sometimes nurturing it. She realized that Abby would not bend as easily to her father’s iron will as her brothers, whose unbending desire for his money bowed them almost involuntarily- like cattle grazing- to his many whims. She changed tack, her voice became more soothing.
“Do you want to know how you got your name omo eluwa bii?” She glanced quickly at her husband to make sure he was fast asleep and snoring. “I begged for you. I begged. Your father had finished with childbearing but I wanted a daughter, so I begged to have you. That is how I named you Abebi, my daughter. You are my only daughter. My only daughter. Do not do this thing you are trying to do. You, a beautiful Yoruba girl want to marry an Igbo man as if there are no other options. Olorun maje! Those pompous people. Why won’t you just marry this Kazeem? He is rich and he is a Lagos royal. OK, so he is not as handsome as that Okorie but at least he is well-connected and can make sure you are well-set for the rest of your life.” She finished with emphatic stress on the last syllable and her head which had been bobbing throughout the conversation finally came to a rest.
Abby would not be swayed, accustomed as she was to having her own way. She resisted her mother’s frenzied contractions, her squalling, for a protracted twenty-four hour labour session at childbirth that nearly killed her, a story that her mother used frequently when trying to persuade her to change her mind: You tried to kill me before you knew me and now you are at it again. It was an exaggeration not far from the truth. Abby would do everything that was taboo in the eyes of her very conservative mother, making her constantly nervous when Abby was around her friends. She wore trousers everywhere well into her teens when other girls her age were already getting married off in exquisite lace garments. She ran away to play football with her brothers whenever her mother called out to her to help in the kitchen, to the older woman’s chagrin. Eventually, her mother could not bear any more and informed her sourly that she would never attract a husband if her ways did not change, hoping to scare her into becoming a woman. Abby tossed her long, dark hair insouciantly and took to announcing that she would never get married, making sure she said it within earshot of her mother and whomever she had over for company. Why would she want to become a glorified maid like her dear mother, with an invisible chain around her ankle for her husband to pull on when he so much as spilled ewedu on his shirt? Now you begin to understand how often her mother felt she would die of a heart attack.
Unexpectedly, Abby shed this skin, this grubby layer of tomboyish rebelliousness, emerging as a social butterfly in her twenties. Her mother breathed several sighs of relief as the first little jots of grey dappled her full head of hair while she watched Abby sprout overnight, with beauty that was both fiery and enigmatic. Her mother knew she did not stand a chance, but still hoped she could direct her towards the right suitor. But Abby fell helplessly in love with Emeka; was overwhelmed by his convictions in the possibility of a new Nigeria, free of the old school prejudices and backwardness that had blighted him, moving past the nepotism that retarded its progress as a twentieth century giant- a beacon of modernity in Africa. She married Emeka quickly in a Yaba registry and ran away with him to the United States where he had gone to pursue a one- year fellowship as a visiting lecturer while completing his post-doctoral thesis. She turned away from her family wealth and reputation without looking back. It was there that they had their first child- Olatokunbo Ikenna Nwakaego Okorie. The child born abroad. The import.
Sadly, there will always be those who try to pour sand in your gari. This was what people said to Emeka’s face when he returned a year later with his newborn in tow but with his wife frail and very ill. Evil forces were at work. If not why couldn’t the big doctor, with his medicines, cure her? Emeka would touch his offending stethoscope much like his son fingering dreadlocks years later and smile wryly, his green eyes revealing little of his frustration at this, this failure of people to move past muddled traditional thinking. She would be well soon, they should not worry; she would be well very soon.
She died two weeks after they had settled into a new home in a quiet estate in Gbagada. These same people spat disgustedly and whispered behind his back that he had killed her with his eyes. One of Abby’s brothers sent a carful of thugs to Emeka’s house. They were supposed to murder him like one of their father’s political enemies. Luckily, Emeka the Cat o’ Nine Lives had stayed overnight shut up in his office at the hospital drinking himself into a hot misty stupor that cleared out his guts in the morning. The thugs vandalized the house and raped the wet nurse who stayed with the baby. One of them plastered a hard grimy fist open- handed across Tokunbo’s three month-old face to shut him up. He had been bawling uncontrollably. After that day, Tokunbo didn’t cry again only sniffling when he was hungry or screwing his beautiful face up into a tight knot when he got injured.
It was Abby’s mother who rescued Emeka from the chasm of despair he sank into after her death. Emeka had taken Tokunbo to their home on Victoria Island, not aware that it was his brothers-in-law who had tried to kill him. The house was a large, gaudy two storey affair barricaded by barbed wire sitting on ten-foot walls and an unwieldy automatic front gate with her father’s head carved into the centre. It stood just fifteen minutes from the crashing waves of Bar beach. Abby’s father, formidable in his rage, dashed for his hunting rifle immediately he saw Emeka and cursed him in the glorious full-pelt style of dramatic Yoruba that would be surpassed in turn by the choleric spit of his gun. His wife looked on with pity, pungent tears spooled in the corners of her eyes, watching Emeka run like a houseboy or a common thief. So it was that she made a series of clandestine visits to see the baby boy who looked so much like his mother, so much like her flower Abebi, her pretty petal who left without saying goodbye, just died, cut off in full bloom. Emeka, never too sure if he was drunk or sober, could not help thinking how like Nicodemus she looked dressed furtively in a headscarf.
They talked on his front porch in the moonlit dusk (his house being in no fit state to receive visitors) about her heartbreak and the fog of advancing psychosis that was blurring his mind. He asked for her help, wailing at her feet without dignity because her husband had used his influence to run down his infant practice. She did not want to promise much because she had been forbidden to go near him or her grandson, afterall her other children had full litters of children’s children all over Lagos and overseas that she could visit and play Grandma to. But she still had favours she could call in which would go unnoticed by her husband. She got him an underpaid job as a physician at UNILAG teaching hospital which would allow him to live and raise his child. She also sent an eighteen- year old Yoruba girl called Enitan who had just lost her own baby and was still full at the nipple, to look after Tokunbo. Emeka never heard from her again until years later, when she paid the balance of Tokunbo’s med school fees because scholarship funding and Emeka’s own meager contributions were not enough.