THE TWINS (1)

Dan lazed on the bench at the rear veranda and watched his grandmother, Ekam Dan, busy prepare a meal of yam and plantain in her open and detached kitchen. A twinned plantain she put behind her back and her hands had dragged them to split. The first time Dan had seen his grandmother do it, he had asked her why and though she had long past the age of menopause, she said she was doing it so she would not have twins (probably in her next life, if you asked her grandson) and by extension, so that her offspring would not have them too. Dan had laughed then and still laughed now over his grandmother’s antics and wondered out loud why she was still hanging on to some uncanny tradition and doing things bordering on superstition.

‘Well, my child, I was born at a time quite different from yours and saw some horrible acts. I thank God for our new ways of life and doing things,’ Ekam Dan had replied. ‘But our people only have the new ways hanging on them like a white shirt while underneath it are the old ways like a piece of white-turned-brown underwear. If we have truly done away with the ugly things in the past, why would Eka Amaniba till this moment not approach our chief’s palace and her twins? Do you know that Eka Comfort had twins, Comfort and another girl? But she had to give away the second girl to a nurse in the General Hospital before returning to this village?’

‘But why?’ Dan asked, feeling aghast.

‘But why not?’ Ekam Dan had rhetorically answered. ‘Well, you were not born at the time women suffered untold cruel acts because they gave birth to more than one baby. Only animals do it and their owners are joyous over it. Women who did that here were seen as animals and fit to associate with animals. They were instantly dragged to the “evil spots” in the forest after the women had wailed over their misfortune and left there with their “evil bundles” to the mercies of the elements and wild beasts. Though Christianity formally stopped this heart-rending practice and we are all Christians today, some traces of the stigma are still with us and as much as I can, I would wish them away from my offspring.’

‘But putting a twinned plantain behind your back to split cannot stop your children from having twins?’ Dan said.

‘You are a child and you are always talking like one. You had argued with my statement over planting the corn with an empty belly and saw what happened. You had argued with my statement over the twitching of an eyelid and striking of a foot and saw what happened. You had argued with my statement over the cracking of palm nuts at night with the chickens in your home and saw what happened. For the man who did not pay his wife’s bride-price but was quick to grab that of his daughter from his son-in-law, we all witnessed what happened to him. Now, do not argue with me over a twinned plantain, as God forbid, I would not love you to see what would happen next,’ Ekam Dan sternly warned.

Just like the hen suffers several atrocities for the cock to have its pleasure, the people of Dan’s grandmother’s village, Ndon Inim, endured the tiring marathon and the hard pecks on their heads by a gang of armed robbers that terrorized their vicinity for a very long time. The vehicles and commuters that plied the section of the main road that passed through the village were now and then stopped and harassed. The incidents dented the image of the inhabitants of Ndon Inim as neighbouring villages and towns believed the robberies could not be possible if the culprits did not live close by. When the problem became intractable, the villagers decided to bravely confront it.

‘Every day, the pot goes to the stream but one day, the carrier would trip and the pot would break,’ the head of Ndon Inim said. ‘This constant harassment and terror against us, our visitors and strangers passing through here we must do everything possible to stop. We must return our neighbourhood to the state it was in before. It again must be peaceful and decent. People around us all believe the robbers are groomed right in our midst hence our inability to apprehend them and we have no solid argument against their accusation. Instead of the child of the herbalist to die, let the forest be emptied of its leaves. This vigilante group is formed today to curb this ugly development.’

Every man and woman who gathered and listened to their chief’s speech shared the sentiments and nodded in pensive agreement.

The chair of the vigilante group was appointed and a group of men were chosen to police the paths in and around the village nightly. While like a hawk the robbery gang were scheming hard to swoop and snatch an unwary chick; the village, the owner of the chicken, had kept a good missile next to them to hurl at the hawk.

A day came Ekam Dan complained about the twitching of her left eyelid which was unremitting for days and then she struck her left foot twice or thrice which made her confidently repeated that an unwanted event was sailing in. She had kept praying again and again that whatever it was should be barred by higher forces from coming close to her and her kith and kin.

A week went by and the ominous signs did not retreat. Then, in broad daylight, a passenger waved down a pickup truck which slowed down as the driver saw the bulging sack beside the young man. While negotiating the distance and the fare, a group of jeans-clad masked men emerged from the sides of the road armed with machetes and axes and menacingly bounced in their boots towards the pickup. The driver jumped out. He was a lizard racing off from an approaching cobra.

The robbers grabbed the vehicle and zoomed away. The fleeing driver saw a church and rushed into the premises hedged with ixora. Breathing hard, he came across a man in the front yard and gasped out what had happened. The man rushed to the bell tower and let the bell toll a special message to the people around. The men around rushed to the church grounds. When they heard what had happened and the direction the vehicle moved, the message was quickly passed around the village and the motorcycles with a man or more on each roared and howled onto the tarred way which was old, narrow and full of potholes. The chase was a constant swerve to the left or right by the pickup truck and the motorcycles tailing it as they dodged the death traps along the road.

When the gang of five robbers saw the convoy of men with machetes, clubs and a few hunting guns on motorcycles surging towards them, they stopped the vehicle and leapt into the bush. The men too braked their motorcycles to a halt, dropped to their feet and were in hot pursuit. Three robbers were nabbed and mobbed right there in the bush while two escaped into nearby houses. A systematic hunt for them began.

Homes were searched from the living rooms to the kitchens and the detached toilets in the rear yards. Like a comb in a man’s hair replete with lice, the men scoured the neighbourhood to see no robber escape.

A borrowed torch splashed its light on one lying flat on the top of the huge sacks of palm nuts in a store. He was dragged down and then outside and beaten mercilessly. He pleaded for his life to be spared as one man, Akpo Ikut, was bent to eliminate the young man. Contrary to popular belief, the four muggers with their masks off were not members of Ndon Inim or even the neighbouring villages so obtaining information from these young men to most people who chased them was vital.

‘Look here, folks. You can only waste your precious time advising a thief. Once you are out of sight, the thief would do his or her will. These guys have rubbished our reputation for long so spare none of them,’ Akpo Ikut had said. To set an excellent example for others to follow, Akpo Ikut had moved furiously closer to the robber with his machete raised.

‘Your son,’ the young man blurted out seeing Akpo Ikut was bent to harm him, ‘brought us here and he is inside.’ He pointed to the door of the store he was apprehended.

‘You’re a bloody criminal! Whose son? Is it the one that is in the university right now studying his books?’ Akpo Ikut said, quivering with rage.

‘But that is where we caught you. We found no other person inside again,’ Udoka, a fellow with great insight, interrupted. He was afraid a massive truth could be buried with one man’s anger.

‘He pushed and created a hole between sacks at a corner and slipped down into it,’ the young robber blabbed.

Akpo Ikut’s machete froze in mid-air. When the men rushed in, threw the sacks aside and beamed the torch on the suspected corner, they found a masked man, dragged him out and removed the mask. It was Akpo Ikut’s son truly. And when he was searched, he had a loaded pistol buried deep in his tights.

‘If you see a bush rat dancing disco in your home, look carefully and you would see it is a home rat that gave him the invitation with an RSVP (Rice and Stew Very Plenty),’ Udoka remarked. Honestly, because of how serious the situation was, none of the men did openly laugh at the comment (right there, every face mirrored the stone) but they laughed days later in their various homes while narrating the incident to their friends and relatives.

Akpo Ikut never recovered from the shock and shame. In the compound of the head of Ndon Inim, the police were called and the five young men, with badly battered faces, were turned over to them.

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