Oshodi

TWICE IS NOT ENOUGH – pt. 3

~ Che ~ 8 Comments

Ada lifted her bag off the floor and lay it horizontally across her thighs, uncaged by her micro mini skirt. She extracted Tony’s poems now from the bag, which action had been earlier interrupted by the conductor, the look in whose eyes she was trying to push out of her mind.

They were six long sheets, on each one poem. If only he had a job or something, a steady, paying job, she would appreciate his poetry even more. She sighed. No, that wasn’t true. She appreciated and loved him and his anyway.

Her eyes, with part-reluctance, part-eagerness, settled on the first sheet of paper. She read the title and reflected on it… Dance Again. Then she was drawn again into the fluidity of Tony’s poetic philosophy. It had been a long time since she last read any of his poems, and deliberately so… but now she began to peruse:…

People, spoil
Very slowly change
For worse
Soil becomes hard,
Abandon tenderness
Childlike humility
Lose the ability to change
Remain
Where we stopped
Slide into oblivion, proudly
Anxiously
You and I, know it, lost it

Search again
Youth of today
Take it, purely purely
Dive not into pools of rot
Spoil not the young
Soil not the truth

When did we become rigid
Forget how to dance dance
Inner music?

Our world has played a nasty trick on us
Tenderly, self, dance again
That inner dance
Before rigidity
Forever stills us.

Ada smiled and sighed and saw again her brother’s heart and mind. Who he was. This was Tony. Forever still you. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she had just reunited with him after a long, much too long, separation. How could it have happened? When has they parted?

Then she lowered her eyes again, and read further, to know him all over again, her brother – Young.

Heaven-born come the young
Happy, simple, free, humble, strong
Hearts full of wisdom
Naïve, ready to establish some perfect kingdom

We were young
Never faltering, ever wandering with dream
With song

If the young shall rise anew
Then learn again to yearn, in deeds true.

She did not notice the woman sitting behind her, watching her intensely the whole time. Some people, they say, feel stares on the backs of the head. Ada was one such person, but not today. The poems had taken her away.

Behind her sat this woman, however, looking at her with a shocked question in her eyes, willing her to turn around. And when she didn’t, the strange woman put her face briefly in her hands and wondered what to do. Ada was the last person she expected to see on this bus. She knew Ada, but Ada did not know her. She took long deep breaths to steady herself, and wondered what to do…

Continued in Part Four.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

Part 2
Part 1

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Twice IS Not Enough

TWICE IS NOT ENOUGH – pt. 2

~ Che ~ 9 Comments

After the cool breeze had relaxed her somewhat, her anger receded and her mind slipped out of the bus and travelled to her brother, the university drop-out. Having been rid of one set of anxieties, she was now besieged by an other and quite different one.

Tony.

Why couldn’t he be like other people? Afterall he wasn’t the only poet ever born, nor would he be the last, would he?

Thinking about Tony brought pain always to Ada’s heart. If it wasn’t the pain of disappointment, sorrow or worry, it was the pain of incomprehension and yearning.

She slipped her hand into her shopping bag by her feet and brought out the sheets of paper he had given her, a look of hope in his eyes, early that morning before she left for the market.

The Molue bus ambled and roared on. And what a roar. By now they had gone past the Air Force Barracks and were fast closing in on Ikeja Bus-stop, the outer. Because it was the middle of the day, there were not too many people at the intermediary bus-stops who were going their way.

Like a fruit ripening out of the skies, an ADC plane bore down, above and to the left of them, but fast and loud sinking, into the domestic airport behind the National Petrol Station on the other side of the road. One of the bus-conductors was already leaning out of one of the perpetually open doors of this Lagos road-monster, preparing to shout out his route and stops to the pedestrians waiting at the bus-stop.

Another conductor was guardedly, swiftly, unsmilingly moving from one seat to the other, collecting his fare.

He was soon by her seat. His rough hand quivered, open palm face-up, before the faces of the three women sitted there.

“Yes? Owo da!” His voice permitted of no negotiations. His eyes were fixed, heavy-laden, on Ada’s exposed dark brown thighs. As she paid him, his eyes lifted a trifle and hers caught them. They stared at one another coolly for one moment, then he turned, his money in hand, to go.

“Ah-ah! Changi mi da?” the heavy-set woman on Ada’s left called loudly at him.

“Ma fun ẹ change, jọọ, durooo,” he replied without turning back.

“Give me my change now! Ole! Thief!” she ejaculated poisonously at him.

Ada shifted a little to the side and stole a glance at her from under the corner of her eye. The woman had a fleshy face that pinched in her eyes and weighed down the corners of her lips.

The conductor turned around and thrust a twenty naira note into her outstretched claws. As he turned to give her the money and then turned back again to continue with his fare-collection, his yellow-brown eyes slid back and forth again up and down and across Ada’s full, exposed thighs, and there was a look in those eyes.

Instinctively, Ada locked her knees tightly together and haunched forward over her upper thighs. The woman to her left saw everything and, with an amused smile, turned her face away and pointed her eyes out of the open window. Now that she had collected her change, she could afford to be thus entertained even by the offshoots of the things the eyes of the same conductor now did, and in the back of the woman’s throat Ada again heard the little dirty laugh. Why was Lagos so dirty?

… to be continued.

PART 1

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

TWICE IS NOT ENOUGH – pt. 1

~ Che ~ 8 Comments

Whisperings
…
Whisperings of a new return of harmattan…
Is it hazy? Was it foggy? Dark, bright?
Feels, like Dawn, Sounds, like Dawn
Looks, like new Dawn –

An early breath of Harmattan serenaded
My heart –
Birds accompany, airy prose
Crickets nonstop chirping
Yet night is gone ~
Deeply I love the boundary between
Rains and thirsty Harmattan…

Nature has said yes,
Why say no?
…

For some reason, that poem had been going round and round in her head all morning. It had been with her when she arose and saw the haze through the window. It had been with her when she thought of her destination. But she had lost it now, in the middle, on the path between her beautiful beginning and the end of her journey. Now she was walking past the toughest, roughest, most chaotic, dirtiest market in her world and it had torn her out of her reverie. She would have much preferred not to come this way, but she had to, to get to the bus she needed.

The beautiful woman continued calmly down her path, ignoring the lusty cat-calls being pelted without restrain at her by the Oshodi traders. Rough young men with coarse voices and bad intentions. Given half a chance, they would make her regret not only her manner of dressing today, but that she even came this way at all, to this dirty, colourless, overpopulated market, to do her shopping.

Yet she walked with her head high, as though she were not burning with shame as she heard the phrases they were directing at her.

“Na me and you o! If I finish you, you no go want leave me lai-lai!”

“Baby you carry o! Me sef I carry. Come see am!”

Loud peals of dirty male laughter rolled after her. Her? Other people were following the scene with amusement. She walked as fast as she could without seeming to be in any hurry. There were other women, she knew, who would have returned insult for insult, thrown dirt for dirt, traded bad tongue for bad tongue, claimed an eye for an eye, verily, and a tooth for a tooth…. But she couldn’t. She was above that, above them. So she silently breathed her humiliation, in and out, in and out, in and out.

Soon she was out of range of the insults. She was in the thick of the crowd now, marching with the faceless rhythm of those who work a lot and earn a little. The masses. Nobody paid any attention to her now. Everybody was walking fast, as though propelled by a common will. Now she relaxed, and as she let out that one big outflow of breath, for some reason a few tears accompanied it and blurred her vision. Surreptitiously her left hand came up to her eyes and, in one quick little motion, her thumb and forefinger, stroking inwards from the outer corners of both eyes, met at the top of the bridge of her nose, and her vision was restored. Yet she was angry.

She boarded the Molue and settled back uncomfortably between two market women on a seat that would surely have seated only two people conveniently, if convenience could ever be spoken of at all in connection with a Molue bus. But a fresh breeze sighed softly through the window as the bus gathered speed and left the hell-hole of a market behind.

… to be continued-

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

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