Akin Smith: Chapter 2 - Part 1

Chapter 1, last part here

Today, breakfast is beans and pap, a combination of two of my most disliked foods. If it was Akara and pap, I will gladly do with the Akara alone. Now I have to skip breakfast. Fortunately, the midnight meal I had is yet to fully digest. And mum isn't going to notice, she is in her usual Sunday morning frenzy, hurrying us all to be ready for church on time. The only day she succeeded in getting us to church before time was a year ago, and that Sunday, unknowing to us, service had been shifted to evening because all the church leaders had gone for an emergency meeting at the national headquarters the day before. Though, we, for once, had gotten to church before start of service, we missed the entire service because my dad, out of annoyance, made us all go back home immediately. But that Sunday has been one of my best.
Today, I plan to stay at home. I really don't feel like going to that church. I am already forfeiting my breakfast and going to church will completely ruin my day. The issue is, our church is over 10 streets away and the service is five hours long. Even after we are lucky to reach the church 1 hour late, we still have four gruesome hours to spend there. I am forced to stay at the youth church, and treated like a six year old by the youth church leaders who keep referring to everyone as children and never stop telling us what not to do - do not steal, do not lie, do not fight, do not shout, do not look sideways... For the over five years I have been there, none of them has ever considered telling us what to do with our lives. The only silver lining is that all the leaders like me, they consider me to be the ideal child - not even a bit troublesome, intelligent and godly. So, I always get to represent the church at all youth inter-church quiz competitions. But, the truth is that I am not more godly that the ever troublesome Chuks or more intelligent than every other kid. I am just naturally quiet and extremely quiet when unhappy, which makes me an angel when compared with the other kids. Truly, I am intelligent, but Tinu is much more intelligent, the words that come out from her mouth never ceases to amaze me. She can recite memory verses after reading them once. If not that she ruins the whole effect by not knowing when to stop talking, it would have been obvious that I am less intelligent. Here, silence is truly golden. Tinu is always my partner at all the two-man team quiz competitions, and she always answer more questions than me. But I have developed a marvelous trick that makes everyone believe I actually tell her every answer she gives. At the very moment she cocks her head in readiness to give the answer, I nudge her and ask her if she's sure, than I nod my heard vigorously to assure her that it's the correct answer. But the effect I create on the audience, is that of me telling her the answer and nodding to assure her that I'm very sure of its correctness. And on more than one occasion, the compere awarding the prize shook my hand vigorously and patted my back with his left hand as a way of showing that he saw me give Tinu all those answers. But this fun times hardly come more than thrice a year.
I am not in a mood to walk to church this morning, in fact, up until last month I hated the fact that my parents chose a church that is more than ten streets away. It was what Mrs Helen said that changed my mind. I had come home at noon like every other Fridays, schools close much earlier on Fridays. But this Friday, I was surprised to meet my mum at home. The truth is I was initially surprised, and then became very sad, the rest of the day is now ruined as I wouldn't be able to get out of the house to visit my friends. She was not alone in the living room, there was Mrs Helen discussing with her. My mum and Mrs Helen had suddenly become friends three weeks ago, when Mrs Helen lost her father. She wanted my mum to supply the laced clothes she would sell to everyone attending the burial. That day my mum was showing her all the designs she had. As I walked in, she had just chosen the one she preferred and was discussing the price with my mum. Since her father died, she seemed to me to have never been happier. In fact, I was beginning to doubt it until I asked Mariam. Mariam's mum is infamously known as the community radio, the only radio that runs on blood and not batteries. She goes from house to house and dawn to dusk discussing the latest happenings in the neighbourhood. And the frightful truth is that her health depends on it. There was a time, some of her husband's friends in the neighbourhood complained bitterly to him about this full-time vocation of his wife, and one, actually, ridiculed him. He, in turn, threatened to withdraw his wife's daily stipend if she doesn't put an end to this infamous act of hers. Two days after, she fell critically ill. It was so bad the landlord was bothered, and begged all the other tenants to take turn in visiting her and telling her about the recent happenings in the neighbourhood. Then, she recuperated fully in two days. But Mariam knows much more than her mother. She debriefs her mum every night and gleans extra information from other children in the neighbourhood. So I had to ask Mariam for the inside story of Mrs Helen's new circumstance. But to my disappointment, Mariam confirmed that Mrs Helen recently lost her 67 years old father and that she is the fourth child by his third wife.
So, after I walked in and saw her, I decided to remain in the living room and eavesdrop on her conversation with my mum, perhaps, I will get the clue to unraveling the mystery behind her unusal happiness. She noticed I was still in the room as my mum was about to tell her the maximum discount she would give her, she interjected and changed the discussion to something entirely different.
"Mama Akin, I want to change my church. I hear your church is on John Martins street. Can you take me and my husband along on Sunday?"
"Really? But why?", asked my mum
Then she proceeded to narrate the story that changed my mind.
"You know the church at the end of this street, beside Mama Julie's house?" My mum nodded in the affirmative. "That's the church I go, and have been going since I moved into this neighbourhood eight months ago. The problem is, ever since the other church members found out that I sell notebooks, pens and other school materials, they have obtaining them from me, for their children, without honoring their promise to pay.
"Then stop giving them without payment first!", interjected, my mum.
"Exactly! That is what I have been doing for two months now. Well, as you know, schools just resumed a new academic term two weeks ago. This past Sunday, the Pastor called me aside after church service and told me that he wants me to supply the church 100 notebooks, 100 pens, 50 Mathematics textbook spanning all the primary school classes and 50 English textbooks spanning all the primary school classes. I asked him what the church needs Mathematics and English textbooks for, and he told me that it is to help the needy in the church. So, I summed the total cost and wrote it on a paper for him. He looked at it and said that I should go bring the books and pens today, and he is going to pay me next Sunday. Imagine that!"
"So did you give him the books?"
"Me?! God forbid! I thanked him and promised to bring them in the evening. There and then, I made up my mind to never come back to that church. Mama Akin, you are lucky that your church is not on the same street as your house. Or by now, you will be bankrupt. Never sell on credit to your fellow church member!"
So that day forward, I considered it a good thing that our church is far from our house and that our church members live too far off to consider buying anything from my mum. It was reinforced by the fact that Mrs Helen ended up reselling the clothes at more than double the price she got it from my mum and is yet to pay my mum for the clothes. Eventually, I found out the mystery of her sudden happiness, it was because of the huge gain she was going to make off the burial ceremony of her father. If only my mum had learned from her church story - never to sell on credit to your fellow (or aspiring) church member.

Akin Smith: Chapter 1 - Part 3

Part 2 here

Oh no! Not again!! I look through the window again and see nothing. Everywhere, outside the window and within the room I share with my siblings, is of thick embraceable darkness. Fortunately, I always keep a torch under my pillow, so, I pull it out and shift the control slider to the ON position. Then, I beam its light at the wall clock, it's two pointers indicate 01:37. Suddenly, a sick feeling creeps into my stomach, very much like the one I felt at nearly this same hour 7 months ago.

It was a Monday and rather than go to school in the morning, I was lying on my bed shivering and sweating at the same time. My mum was very worried and kept trying to feed me my breakfast which I involuntarily threw up. After a short argument, she finally prevailed on my dad to get Nurse Ijeoma, the owner of the drugstore two streets away. Twenty minutes later, my dad not only arrived with Nurse Ijeoma, but also with Mrs Alabi and Mary (her daughter and my self-proclaimed heartthrob). Nurse Ijeoma, despite Mary's sudden torrent of tears, looked at me with piercing indifference, like there was a TV screen between us and I was playing perfectly to some director's script. Then, she pulled my dad aside and spoke with him for some minutes, and left. 

Mary clinched her mum and continued sobbing aloud. My mum has now stopped trying to feed me my breakfast, and my dad is looking extremely worried - more from the fact that he would arrive work very late. Then after what seemed like an eternity of silence mingled with Mary's sobs, Nurse Ijeoma came in. She brought with her, two IV drip bags, some bottles of injections, four tourniquets, a funny-looking needle with wings and one very long tubing with adjustable clamp. She tied the two IV drip bags side by side at the top of the window beside my bed, fixed the long tubing to one of the bags, made a hole in that bag with a needle and syringe, left the needle in the bag, inserted the winged needle into a vein in my left arm and connected the other end to the long tubing. I felt a sharp pain shoot from my left arm through my entire body as she put the needle into my arm. Then she shook 3 injection bottles one after the other, and injected their contents into the bag. Finally, she adjusted the clamp in the long tubing till the fluid in the bag was trickling slowly down the long tubing into my arm.

Then, she placed her right hand on my forehead and left it there for about 5 minutes. She faced my mum and told her to not worry as it was a mild case of malaria and that she'd be leaving. She showed my mum how to close the clamp and instructed her to close it when the bag is fully emptied, and she should send Mary (thinking she's my sister) to call her. I glanced at my dad and noticed him shifting uncomfortably in his chair, and when our eyes locked, he stood up, thanked the Nurse and followed her out of the house.

At about 2:00pm, the bag was done emptying its injection laden fluid into my body. My mum closed the clamp, woke Mary, who was now asleep beside me, and told her to go call Nurse Ijeoma. 10 minutes later she was back, panting, and said Nurse Ijeoma says she is very busy and will come later in the day, and that I should go have my shower, drink yogurts and read my schoolbooks. I only did two of her three suggestions.

At exactly 5:00pm she came, and connected the second bag, added Piriton and some other injections. Not too long after that, I slept. When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was this thick darkness everywhere, I put my right hand under my pillow and pulled out a torch. I beamed its light at the wall clock, it reads 2:05. I looked at the bag and it was empty, I closed the clamp. Then, suddenly, I felt a bitter taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in  my stomach. I tried to sleep again, but it wasn't until dawn that I succeeded.

I now feel that same sick feeling in my stomach, but instead of a bitter taste in my mouth, my mouth feels dry. It must have been that second bottle of Chelsea dry gin I took, it, no doubt, has pushed me to stupor forcing me to sleep before supper time. I stand up, with the torch in my hand, and tiptoe to the kitchen. I pour myself a mixture of garri, sugar and water in a bowl. I, then, tiptoe to the living room to get the bottle of groundnuts dad brought home two days ago. I tiptoe back to the kitchen and finds a dome of wet sugar sitting comfortably on swollen garri. I hurriedly pour some groundnuts on top and sat on the kitchen floor with the bowl between my legs. I, then, spend the next couple of minutes swallowing the ill-mixed garri, sugar and groundnuts. Some parts have more sugar than garri and groundnuts combined, while others only have garri.

I carefully rinse the bowl and tiptoe to return the bottle, and finally tiptoe back to the room. My stomach is now bulging, and it does not take me long to fall sleep.

Akin Smith: Chapter 1 - Part 2

Part 1 here
However, today hasn't been all bad. In fact, the drowning of our family albums has been the only sad occurrence today. And to be sincere, today has turned out to be a very good day. Fatai, one of the single-room tenants in the 40-room apartment adjacent to our house, won a lottery yesterday evening. And today, he is celebrating it. He has been playing Baba-Ijebu every evening for the past 8 months, since his bosom friend won N50,000. And yesterday was his own lucky day, after the evening prayers, he went straight to the lotto stand, and ended up picking the winning number that bagged him a whooping N250,000.
The noise from the 4 feet tall locally made speakers, 5 of them, is deafening. Since noon, there has been a big party, all the youths in the neighbourhood are sitted, standing and waltzing from end to end in the empty space that separates our house and Fatai's. I have been having a swell day too, for the first time in my life I not only tasted beer, I also drank an entire bottle of Star Lager beer and two 20cl bottles of Chelsea dry gin. And argued with some six other boys on who has drunk the most alcohol. Being the most scientific, I have been proving to them that a single 20cl bottle of dry gin has got more alcohol than a 60cl bottle of beer. But they were too vain and lousy to listen or understand. And not too long into the argument, I began to feel sleepy, my speech became slurred and I became very scared, and immediately staggered into the house and headed straight for the bed.
This wasn't the first time someone in the neighbourhood won a lottery. Four months ago, Jide, another single-room tenant living in the 26-room apartment opposite our house, won in a Coca-cola raffle draw. He won a Volkswagen Golf, but since he could not drive, he sold it to Emeka (his next door neighbour) and bought the biggest air conditioner I have ever seen. After installing the air conditioner, taking up the entire lower half of his window, he bought a very noisy generator to power the air conditioner on most nights. The generator was so noisy, three other tenants moved out of the apartment when they could not prevail on him to change the engine. If only they had been more tolerant, because just three days after the last of the three moved out, Jide decided to service the generator. And Yusuf, a co-tenant who works full-time as a generator repairer, is still servicing the generator, for six weeks now. Some people say that he has never serviced a generator that big, others say he is trying to get at Jide for not giving him the contract of purchasing the generator. And now, every night for the past 8 days, Jide has been threatening Yusuf. He screams every night at the top of his voice that he is going to get Yusuf arrested by the police and locked up forever if the generator is not restored to a working condition by month end.
Life in these multi-room apartments is a strange mix of comedy and tragedy. Just last week, Tunde married his next door co-tenant, Jumoke. And now, they have broken a portion of the wall separating their rooms, to install a door between the two rooms. Tunde's room is now the living room and Jumoke's room is the bedroom. It's the cheapest house upgrade I have ever seen, I just hope Jumoke won't mind continuing the rent payment for the room - considering that Tunde now sleeps there. Just yesterday, there was a mother of all fights in Fatai's apartment. Soji had just come back from a friend's birthday bash, and went straight to the shared toilet. God knows what he ate at the birthday party, but he used up an entire hour offloading his bowels, and locking out twenty people waiting to use the toilet. When he finally came out, there was a free-for-all fight, as all the twenty people tried to enter the toilet at the same time. It was so terrible, Tinu lost half a crate of empty Pepsi bottles, six people were stabbed with broken bottles, four had knife cuts and two were beaten senseless with blows. In the end, several of them had to go visit their friends in other apartments just so they can use their toilets. Every morning there is always a long queue in front of the toilet and bathroom, some tenants wake up as early as 3am just to beat the queue. But only Mallam Ali has successfully developed a winning scheme, he takes his daily bath only at nights.
But living in such an apartment has its unique advantages. There is always ample audience/participants for every event you do - from an in-house football competition to the burial of a grand-mother nine states away. And you are never short of an helping hand - be it people to help put out a fire at 2am or  to help with the cooking and event set-up at your wedding.
Though my parents are against me befriending the other children living in those apartments, I have managed to put them in the dark as regards my blooming friendship with most of them. Every late afternoon, when my parents are not yet back home, I shuffle between several of those apartments visiting my numerous friends. They excite me with the stories of the day-to-day happenings in the apartments and I help them do their school assignments. My closest friend is John, he lives in the apartment adjacent to ours. He moved in there with his mum, four months ago, after his father kicked them out of his 6 bedroom mansion without a divorce notice or severance pay. The father claimed he has found a new love and wants to start his married life afresh. John is the only boy in the neighbourhood that is as intelligent as me, and his spoken English is way better that mine. But I beat him hands-down when it comes to written English. In fact, he occasionally bribes me with some chewing gum he steals from his mother's store, to make me do his English essay assignments. But what I love the most about him is that he doesn't shout and curse like the other boys. The other boys are very vain, they have swapped out every greeting and common words with swear words.
Even though today's party is at John's apartment, he didn't join us in drinking beer and dry gins. And when we teased him and called him mummy's pet, he simply stayed silent and watched us. He is really the best behaved boy in the neighbourhood.

Akin Smith: Chapter 1 - Part 1

It's amazing how I can't remember any of my primary school friends, and dumbfounding that the only people in the first decade of my life who have made it in my memory to my thirteenth birthday (two months ago) are - my parents, my two sisters, twelve relatives and three family friends.
We had moved from Ile-Ife to Lagos when I was just 8 years old, and it was more than a location change. The rapid behavioural adjustments I had to make, no doubt, precipitated this amnesia, and not until after two years in Lagos was I able to make a new friend.
But today, something terrible has happened and now have I truly lost a decade. It has consistently being raining at midnight for the past four days, and today's rain came around 1:00am . As expected, our two bedroom flat became a mini dam, taking in water from under the two exit doors at the peak of the rainfall and letting it out after the rainfall. But the unexpected happened too, today's in-house dam reached a new height and flooded the lowest drawer of a cabinet that houses the entire family photo albums. And all my childhood photos are now ruined, the faces I'm struggling to remember are all gone, perhaps, forever.
Our family albums have joined the ever expanding list of casualties claimed by this recurrent flood. The first was our beautiful cream color saxony carpet, just two months after we moved in from our rented three-bedroom apartment in the same suburb, barely a year ago. Initially, I blamed my dad for this, for building on a parcel of land right in the middle of a valley. Then my mum explained to me that this parcel of land wasn't actually the one my dad wanted, that this was sold to us at one and half the original price to pay off the financially strait owner and compensate us for the loss of the parcel we had earlier bought. The parcel my dad really wanted and earlier bought was snatched from him when a banker suddenly showed up and took us to court claiming he had bought that same parcel of land 8 months before it was sold to my dad by the same land agents. And so for the first time in my life, I learnt the hard lesson: If the desired is not available, the available becomes desirable.

In the grand lottery of birth

How we hold some few in high regard
All because of their family
The deeds of a long gone ancestor
Concerned more about the family line
Than the man's own line
Basing a man's worth on another's deeds
Bestowing nobility on a day old baby

Birth is so much like a lottery
You cannot choose your family
Nor your location and society
Your beliefs, religion and dreams
Your education, learning and hopes
Your fortune, health and dignity
Your opportunities, expectations and capabilities
Are so much determined by birth

Yet there some brave hearts 
Who against numerous odds
Being ill fortuned from birth
Steered their own course in life
Overcoming lack of proper parents
Lack of formal education
Lack of societal support
Lack of the basest opportunities
Forging their survival in great heat
And still made a huge mark on earth

It is for people on that route
That we should reserve our high regard
People who can't readily dream of a future
Too embroiled in trying to see tomorrow
People who lack life's necessities
Yet good natured and industrious 
People who spend their first decade 
Trying to make up for their ill luck
In the grand lottery of birth