Jennifer Abraham
Ndili endured all she could and, one day, she joined a bus and set out with her belongings. She wasn’t sure of where she was headed, but she was just happy to get away. Oh the joy, the sense of mission. She was not going in search of another set of relatives to stay with. No, she was done with that. This time, she would create her own world, and make her own rules.
At that thought, a wry smile creased the corners of her lips. “Yes, my own world, where no one can shove me around. Where I don’t have to greet people I hate or run errands for dense people.” Though frightening, it held the promise of freedom which was well worth whatever-it-would-take.
“Where you dey go, Madam?” a gruffly voice asked.
She immediately stirred alert and took in all of him in one glance. With these conductors, you never know. You have to see their eyes, weigh how high they may be before saying a word to them.
He might be a thief from the look of him, she thought.
Her eyes travelled from his tattooed arms to the generous array of ring worms, the overnight smell of sweat and the dirty crumpled clothes. “He must be one of the homeless ones who sleep at the park. They’re usually part time thieves.”
She must not let him see her vulnerability or he would prey on her. So she apologised for bumping into him and walked off as if she was sure of where to go.
“Here I am, and I’m yet to make up my mind where to go.”
She remembered her original goal –to get away and be alone, like Tarzan in the wilds with the apes and the two lost kids who set up a world after they had survived a plane crash and found themselves alone in a deserted town. She kept processing as she wandered, then her mind slipped into the past.
When life was certain, or so she thought. That irretrievable world, where Dad, Mum, Nochieze and Nkene were alive. She remembered the day she had a slanging match with the oldest boy in school. Syracuse was 18 years old, and that sounded ancient to his fellow primary six pupils. They would never let him forget it.
His poorly shaved jaw, his pitch dark skin and his strange name ossified him the more. Some of the kids whispered that his father was a magician, hence the strange name. The younger pupils were not scared of him, and they dared to make fun of him. It didn’t occur to them that they had hurt him. At the time, life was still light and breezy, unbroken by pain.
It didn’t help that he was not smart either. Some claimed he had been recruited into the army when he was still very young and, now the war was over, he was back in school.
Each time they mocked him, he yelled back, “I’m not their age mates. I should have finished my secondary education but for the war.”
Yes, almost every adult around her had given their own gloomy version of the Biafran war at some point. It was a consuming pain that each generation handed to the next. She was too young to remember the throes of that war, but she felt every bit of the shared pain. The terrors, humiliation and loss it brought to her people was ever on their lips.
According to him, he had spent three years after the war helping his elder brother set up shop as a palm nuts trader. His elder brother, responsible for him since their parents died in the war, told him he had to take the Common Entrance Examination which every pupil must pass before admission into secondary school.
So he had to start from primary three, where he had stopped before the war, to prepare him for the qualifying exam which he would take in three years. But his brother had not been totally honest.
Syracuse could have started in Primary 5, and would have been on his way out of primary school by now, but his brother had spun that story to detain him in primary school.
He must have figured, If he’s in secondary school and becomes a boarder, who would help do all the work?
The longer Syracuse spent in primary school, the more he looked like an ancestor to his classmates.
The day he came to Ndili’s house to report her for insulting him at school, she had hidden herself. She knew her mum would give her a thorough beating for bringing trouble home from school.
Syracuse was not sure of her name, so he had asked some of the boys in the class who knew her well to take him to her house. They were happy to do so. The boys in her class always felt that their female classmates were silly and disrespectful of them as “men”. This was time for solidarity, and they jumped at the opportunity to make one of the girls pay for their cockiness.
“Which of them?” mum had queried.
“I’m not sure of the name, ma but she’s very troublesome.”
Ndili’s heart sank as she heard her mum declare, “That can’t be Nkene; it must be Ndili.”
“Ndili!” she yelled.
Silence.
“Did I not just call someone?” she growled. “If I have to fetch you by myself, it will be worse for you o.”
Ndili remained behind the door leading to the staircase, weighing her options. If she turned herself in, she already knew what would happen and if she didn’t? The answer was still the same. How like her mum to expect the lamb to bring itself to the butcher’s slab!
To be continued