LOVE MEDICINE (1)

 

‘Go and meet my wife and tell her to open the doors of her shop so you’d pass through that place to do your work,’ a baritone voice ordered us as the mason I was to serve announced, after our greeting, we had arrived for work.

‘Yes sir,’ Abasiama replied and wheeled around as I followed and we headed out again from the commodious corridor to the frontage. He stopped to ask a tall teenage boy sitting on the parapet of the veranda and watching the street, ‘Where is grandma?’

The boy sprang to his feet and moved towards the far end of the concrete yard. He stooped and stepped down under the broken roof of the shop and walked to the metal door, knocked on it and called, ‘Grandma.’

The broken wooden post (one of two) Abasiama just told me we’d replace with two metal posts later in the day or the next day.

The knock and call went on for some long seconds before a bolt rattled and the door opened.

We drew close and greeted, ‘Good morning, ma.’

The elderly lady in the doorway answered our greeting and smiled genteelly. The boy returned to his seat. He and the woman had a close resemblance.

‘Daddy said you should help open the shop doors for us to use as we work in the backyard,’ Abasiama said.

‘No!’ was the curt reply from the elderly woman with an intense shake of her head. ‘You’d use the corridor.’ She calmly stepped out, turned her gowned back on us and locked the door.

Abasiama walked outside and I followed. The boy was in a small room with a window opening onto the street and had pipes supplying water to three taps selling it to the public. We could hear the sound of water splashing into containers and the lad chatting excitedly with the customers.

Through the well-swept corridor, we reached the backyard where another elderly lady, wearing a blouse and tying a wrapper, sat on a low stool in the veranda of a kitchen and was busy plucking the feathers of a chicken in a large plastic bowl. We greeted her and with a smile, she gaily replied to us. She chatted familiarly with Abasiama as we walked further in the opposite direction. A younger woman, quite robust and wearing tight-fitting trousers and a T-shirt, was sweeping the yard. We greeted her and Abasiama stooped and moved into a passageway that took us past a toilet with an immaculate white bowl and a bathroom with a shower, the doors open, to reach a large veranda stacked with discarded household items. A tall external wall adjoined a narrow space that separated it and the roof of the bungalow. The leaves of the plants I saw around here were on the other side of the wall.

The owner of the baritone voice heard our footsteps and from inside his room heartily chatted with the mason.

‘How is choirmaster?’ he asked, referring to Abasiama’s father. At that point, I realized the man knew Abasiama well.

‘He’s fine, sir,’ the mason replied.

I hummed within myself. Abasiama’s father was truly fine. A fundraiser was conducted and over two million naira (even with the spiralling inflation, it was big bucks) was collected for his retirement after swinging the baton to guide the choristers for over sixty years to sing sweetly before the flock but it seemed like in less than three years his numerous children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren had made the money vanish like dewdrops on the grass before the blazing morning sun. They had also commandeered the other good things he should’ve depended on – a dozen rooms he could’ve rented out and would pluck the fruit before the old man would realize his fruit trees had borne any; and to their entire neighbourhood, they had become something akin to a nuisance. Frequently, the man was heard hollering and throwing punches at them but being old, everyone blamed his acts on senility.

‘Don’t forget to greet him for me and tell him that vivid still is the saying he shared with us while we were young that no matter how long the distance, a dog can’t be taken on a bicycle to the farm.’ He paused but then resumed with a sad undertone: ‘Only as time passes I’ve come to realize a whole lot of things change with it.’

The man emerged from behind the netting door with a white towel on his waist. He was huge and far advanced but clean-shaven with wrinkly but glowing skin and had a slight paunch. Though his eyes were wide open and seemed to stare at us, his hands were fumbling for specific targets – the wall and a cable stretching the entire length of the veranda. He felt for them as he chatted and walked towards the passage of the lavatory. ‘You’d build the store as was planned. I want every item around here moved in there and I’d be using the cleared space to relax.’

When he moved into the bathroom, locked the door and turned the shower on, Abasiama whispered that the old man had grave issues with his sight.

We changed into our working clothes and in earnest, started work. From the outside, I followed the long route to bring the sand and the blocks. There was a tap nearby I fetched the water. While mixing the concrete, Abasiama dug where the foundation would be laid to attach the store to the main building.

‘There’s light! There’s light!’ three youngsters in the rear yard happily announced and in a detached apartment, a television was switched on and a movie, I could tell from the audio though low, was showing.

The elderly man after his bath returned to his room and tuned his radio to the local FM station and the most recurring phrase on the broadcasters’ lips was ‘Covid-19’. The initial figure of seven infected persons was cancelled by the health authorities in the state. There was a mistake. The figure now stood at five. It wasn’t the health authorities’ fault. Nationally, we have this perennial problem of collating data. From census to emergencies, we’re always making mistakes.

Out there in advanced countries, we heard of millions being infected and droves of them dying. Covid-19, from the news, was a pandemic. But here, we weren’t sure of our status. Some said the virus had slipped into the country while others argued it did not though the deaths of a handful of prominent citizens were linked to it; and so the jigsaw puzzle went on. But the authorities, being proactive, had implemented the lockdown where citizens got little or no palliatives. Those fortunate to receive distributed items got as much as one cup of rice and a few cooking cubes after months of being rendered unproductive. There was palpable tension in the air and a crisis was brewing.

But that tension fizzled out this week as the authorities said citizens could move about and go to certain places, the banks and markets, on specific days of the week but with their masks on. Owners of vehicles heeded the order to evade the police from impounding their vehicles rather than to actually protect themselves. And trudging to and from work, I was witnessing funny little incidents though most of us pretended not to believe the virus was real.

I’d returned home from work yesterday evening trekking as I thought it was safer than sitting on a motorcycle or squeezing myself into a minibus or the tricycle. I followed Market Road which was abnormally scanty of people at twilight and a short distance from me near a roundabout; a teenage boy cheered a teenage girl, rushed across the street and embraced her.

I’d skirted them as a voice behind me said: ‘What sort of a hug is that?’ If I thought the fellow meant it as a joke, he was closely tailing me and quarrelling hard with himself. ‘What sort of a hug is that? How could a young boy hold a young girl so tight?’

I’d pretended not to have seen the hugging twosome and refused to turn to look or answer who decided to whine over them. I’d even stuck a hand into the back pocket of my trousers and brought out one of the minty sweets I’d bought with the money I refused to use as fare, unwrapped it and started sucking it. When I left the market area and was drawing near home, the thought of the fellow disturbing himself over the teenagers lousily embracing themselves in public again crossed my mind. Clearly, he wasn’t concerned about the rampaging virus but felt it was an affront for them to embrace right at his front.

The way he buzzed all along like a bumblebee till I lost him made me giggle and the sweet slipped down my throat and I quickly coughed to bring it up. The sound I made almost sent a girl standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a vehicle, racing across the front of a speeding car. (Certainly, she was not waiting for a commercial motorcycle as motorcycles were banned from riding the streets here at night due to the activities of hoodlums who used them two years or so ago to terrorize residents of the town.) My heart was bouncing balls on the walls of my chest. I was grateful my innocuous cough didn’t send the young woman diving to harm and wondered if she had a mask; and I thought the best thing would’ve been for her if she had such dread of the virus, to wear it; not hide it like I did mine in my left trouser pocket.

With the news and the little incidents I’d witnessed here and there, I attempted to spark up a conversation with Abasiama to sample his opinion while the broadcasters were on a music break. ‘This disease is really killing people around the world.’

Abasiama retorted: ‘I don’t believe this “kolo” thing exists. It just looks like the government is playing politics with it.’

I laughed. ‘Kolo’ had been incorporated into pidgin and connotes ‘mad’ and is widely used in songs by our musicians. And most folks here had used the tag too for Coronavirus.

But our employer, which I’d noticed was keen of hearing and erudite, had overheard us and decided to chip in his opinion: ‘Covid-19 is real and has killed a few prominent citizens of this country who had travelled and contracted it out there. But what bewilders me is the fact that in advanced countries of Europe, America and Asia, people are dying in large numbers. We don’t know where we stand yet in this country but then, the stark reality is Covid-19 shows the entire world that no human race is above a calamity. We’re all feeble mortals under one blazing sun.’

The old man’s response made me think deeply as we worked.

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