...anyway the entire
ramble was a necessary digression from the story of my life.
It
is funny how different the same things look from another perspective. From where I am presently, I see things so differently. The veil has
been removed and all is crystal clear. My hearing is also quite acute.
Here, everything no matter
how originally colourful, is distilled
into black and white…..
The sounds of pestle on mortar that filled me
with feverish expectation many years ago were predictive of what was to come (check part 1). They were reminiscent
of the beats of native war drums
that are ignorantly mistaken for the call to a village party. The pounding was a premonition
of the battering I was
going to receive, the punches that were going to have me reeling, the blows that
would make me wish for death and the kicks on a tummy
swollen with my first son. But all was lost on me that fateful day. It
was ages ago but the memories are as fresh as the events of the past second. The softening of the yam was a tell tale of
how my emotions and self esteem were going to be pummeled into mush
until I became a human husk. An incomplete husk, having lost
a couple of teeth, suffered a broken arm and multiple
lacerations in a decade of hellish living.
The pepper that made my taste buds sing songs of rapturous delight were a
divination of the hurt I was going to go through. The spices were a foretelling of the kind of torment that made Dante’s seem like a day in a massage
parlour. I suffered, but the worst part of my agony was that I kept
mum. I could not let any one take a peek into my soul to see what was going on.
I was too embarrassed because I had been warned. Most people especially Amaka had told me not to touch my husband with a barge pole but mulish recalcitrance
was what I offered to their heartfelt pleas.
A wry
smile slits the thoughtful deadpan expression of my face when I remembered how my obduracy made me tell
everyone who cared to go take a wash in the nearest ocean because I had found “love”. How stupid I was to have thought that
Deberre was my destiny. The foolishness
of youth is a death trap like I know now but its too late to turn the hands of time. My father used to say that dry fish could never be bent.
My own fish is so dry that it has crumpled to dust akin to ancient papyrus scrolls found in a mummy’s tomb.
I lived in a vicious
circle that would not let up. He lost his job along the way and it gave me a
vindictive thrill to see him cut down to an even shorter size by the shock of
it all. There is something about losing a job that emasculates the male Homo
sapiens. But the downside of it was that the economic downturn affected me badly
too. He took out the loss on me like I was the witch that cast the evil spell. He
had made me quit my job after we got married since his ego could not stomach me
working. It was enjoyable initially. Being waited on hands and foot by a
retinue of house helps was fun coupled with not going to work. I eventually sent
them packing because they took up the extra work of being concubines too
especially during my pregnancies and post delivery. My husband usually laid
claim to any woman that crossed his territory like a strutting cock.
To make matters
worse, I stupidly got pregnant. I know the methods of child spacing were not as
rife then as they are now but common sense should have told me to keep my womb
locked to his fishy smelling, tadpole shaped bullets. But my in-laws harassed
me like angry hornets until I gave in. Why did they keep poking their noses
into the number of offspring we had? Is that not supposed to be solely the
business of my hubby and I? Why would anyone want to keep having kids who would
end up suffering? I would have thought the beautiful thing about having a child
is the companionship, the nurturing of the bond that persists after the
umbilical bond has been slashed. However, my people give birth and leave their
children with their parents until the little ones felt they (the real parents)
are visiting relatives. What is it about the African woman that makes her think
giving birth is attached to her pride? I knew someone who had four girls and
wanted a boy so she got pregnant again. She went about begging for help to pay
her antenatal fees. Since I was part of the brainless throng that did not look
before leaping, I commiserated with her, encouraged her that it was well and God
was going to provide. Religious Nigerian cliches, like God did not give us
brains to think. If you want to have a baby and cannot afford the basic tests
needed to see you and the baby through the delivery, how would you and your
progeny feed after parturition? How will the child receive an education? Why
would anyone have so many children that dispersing them like seeds being
scattered by explosive mechanism to kinsmen all over the globe would be the
only way they could school or feed? More often than not these children are not
treated well, which to me is another form of slave trade though with less
horrific consequences. This is one of the reasons the word reparation makes me
mad. Africa should deal with its issues before it starts pointing fingers. My
people have a saying that when you point a finger at someone, the other four
are pointing back at you. The statement is quite apt and I am so disgusted with
myself that I joined that free breeding train.
But like they say,
hindsight is 20/20 vision especially in this place but useless. However, I
digress once again as I am wont to these days, but back to my story………
Deberre finally got a
break! A new contract that fetched him some good dough and brought some sanity
into the insanity that had besieged my home. But more fool me If I thought that
was going to last. Before the good feelings of the relief package could die
down, it was time to commemorate the memorial service of his father who had
died fifteen years earlier. What a fan fare it was, enough pomp to have
ridiculed Solomon’s reception of the Queen of Sheba. Of course that wrecked our
blooming finances especially since the contract was not renewed. In retrospect
again, I wonder about my people, why do we not leave the dead to bury the dead?
Why is it that we celebrate the dead at the expense of the living? Why is there
such ostentatious display of opulence during burials when the living has no
food to eat? Why do we borrow and steal to prove a point? Why can we not just
be content with what we have? What is wrong with us?
Our state got worse
than it used to be. I did not even have enough to register for antenatal care. To
make it worse I was still in my clam mode and refused to let anyone in to what
I was going through. The kind of show I put up when they came around was
usually enough to win me an Oscar. They suspected things were bad but never
knew how terrible.
I finally had to
register with a roadside maternity home which I was just barely able to afford
(most of the government hospitals were more licensed to kill than James Bond
anyway). I wonder now why the Government allowed such to thrive like poisonous
mushrooms in the country.
When labour finally
came it was obstructed and there was no one to help. The Power holding Company of
Nigeria is paradoxically a custodian of perpetual darkness (I am still amazed
their offices are not subterranean, considering the implacable hatred they have
for illumination). The power holders chose the inopportune time of my labour to
strike. The inadequate illumination from the 40W bulb serving the whole room
was snuffed out and there was also a dearth of fuel in the whole country. The birth attendant who kept murmuring
impotent platitudes only had the help of a kerosene lamp as raging pain tore
through me. I was a dart board that had poisoned projectiles piercing it on
every side. It was a storm of agony that made me wish for death. The contractions
stretched me on a torture rack of anguish. I sobbed, cried, wept, until my
tears dried up like an ancient well. My mouth became a desert and I could not
even cry out for water. My blood swelled and flowed like the Nile at high tide.
I felt something finally give within me and heard his faint cry. By then, my
strength had ebbed into nothingness and I fell off the precipice I had been
holding on to with the tenacity of a bulldog. Stygian darkness swallowed me
whole…….
Now as I look down on
everything, my children growing without me, my husband in the embrace of other
wives who maltreat my kids, I feel so stupid. On the other hand, fortune finally
favoured Theo. He is now involved in a union that is the “happily ever after”
kind. His wife should have been me! Unfortunately I can’t do anything about
that anymore. The hands of the clock cannot be turned because now I exist
beyond time. The pain of my wrong choices still wounds me so deeply even though
I am beyond living. My decision determined my destiny. It haunts so badly that
I can never sleep. Intentionally, I chose the wrong side of Fates’ coin and no
superhero can save me now. The flames of my consequences scorch my soul, the
grief is more than words can capture. What I keep seeing are all the wonderful
ways life would have turned out if my flipped coin had turned up the other way,
instead I used it to pay the canoe-man who ferried me across the river of
death. The sadness that engulfs me in the gloomy cell of my doom, the thoughts
of what might have been if I had taken another road, the fact that like Esau I
exchanged my destiny because of an untamed appetite…This is my hell ….
There is a way that seems
right unto a man but the end thereof is the way of death.
THE END.
© 2013 Ekpo Ezechinyere
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