Sentenced

Chinedu Kizzito Uwalaka

           

A tree that was once struck by lightning is never

scared to see the sky darken with rain clouds.

An Infinity jeep with a personalised inscription on the number plate sliced through the suffusing air on the quiet street of a rescinding day. The tinted glasses conceal its occupants except with a careful study of the inscription on the number plate; NSG-C-Boss which meant ‘naira smells good with the Boss’.

Behind the Infinity Jeep, an escort Hilux car kept pace in the drove and together, they raced towards a building with a sky-high perimeter walls, weirdly barbed wires. The sensor active security gate opened to allow the vehicles drove in.

At the parking lot, the jeep pulled over and the escort car grinded to a halt. Two men jumped out with feet of alacrity, their hands firmly grasped AK 47 rifles and stood astride on the ground. Their eyes gleamed behind the dark glasses.

The boots on their feet clapped with sturdy weirdness. It meant no harm to the interlocking blocks that symmetrically filled the expanse of the compound’s floor. A crisscross of artistically patterned paints of red, yellow and green enchanted a unified fascination.

Clinically mowed grasses set the triangularly shaped lawns pheering at the flowers that stood above them. Flowers in the circular ring treasured the company of the fountains. At the fringes bordering the fence, the plants stood tall and flapped their comeliness gained from the grace of daily watering.

Continually, fragrance emitted from them to sweeten the senses of every guest. The white painted two-storey building had a central positioning as a damsel before the king for a final selection. A stain-free orange yellow colour gave a ribbon’s beauty at the baselines of the building.

                        Boss stepped out of the jeep dressed in a white toughly starched Italian silk. A stick of cigar stuck to his mouth and a gold walking stick supported his weight, stylishly. He really could walk without it. A macho looking man stepped out with him and walked into the building with Boss’ briefcase.

“Hello, come on,” said the Boss, bending to the door to signal the man seated on the front seat of the jeep.  

“Okay sir,” said Tochi and stepped out with difficulty because of the bruises on his right hand. He could not hide his fascination of what he saw. It did not look like hospital to him but if it was then his life was set to change, he thought. 

“Come with me, it’s my house…you’ll be okay,” said Boss, walking along into the building.

Tochi followed with deliberate strides, admiring the scenery that energized the zephyr. In the sitting room, the white leathered cushion chair complimented the classical layout design of the space. The chairs, arranged in a semi-circle stared at the resplendent centre table. Tochi felt rebuffed to sit on the chair.

“Don’t sit yet,” said Boss with a rustled voice. “Not in that condition,” he added.

“Yes sir,” said Tochi, looking at the stain of blood on him and confused that his thoughts revealed him.

Otti was one of Boss’ boys. He walked in at the whistle of Boss, dressed in black suit and stood metres away to get his orders.

“Take him to the guest room,” said Boss to Otti.  “Let him bath, change into decent attire and bring him back,” said Boss.

“Yes sir,” said Otti, turning to the new guest of the house. He beckoned on him to follow and together, they walked out and crossed the stripe that divided the main building from another smaller structure with integrated apartments. Otti led Tochi into a suite, “the bathroom…there…be fast,” he said and withdrew.

The bath was warm and the wound thoroughly massaged. When Tochi stepped out of the bathroom, he saw neatly ironed safari shirt and trousers on the bed, and a pair of slippers was on the floor. He wore them and thanked his god who led him in the path of Boss.

Otti returned and led Tochi back to the sitting room.  Boss was impressed with the new look of his guest.

“Sit down”, said Boss in a quiet tone. “The table will be set soon.” Boss got up from where he sat, walked through a door and disappeared.

Tochi moped at the giant size portrait of Boss placed near the self-supported TV set. He pulled his feet out of the slippers to have direct feeling of the enamelled ties succinctly laid. Tochi relished in his experience of a lifetime achievement. He considered Boss being barely two or three years older than he was with luck working for him.

Tochi did not know when he sat down in the chair overwhelmed by the feeling of been in heaven.  In his trance, he rode in opulence and was already a lord over many attendants.

“Tochi, can you hear me, I’m asking you…where do you live?” said Boss, sitting in the opposite direction with a cigar in his hand.

“Yes,” Tochi awaken from his trance. “Sorry, I live everywhere that the day meets me and the night leaves me,” said Tochi smiling.

“I mean your house?”

“I have no house, sir.”

“Your relations?” said Boss, puffing smoke out of his mouth. The smell mixed with the air fresher dispelled by the steaming air conditional.

“None, sir”, Tochi said.

“Where did you grow up then, who brought you up…your parents, I mean?” said Boss, breaking the ash of the cigar into the ashtray that sat on the glass stool beside the chair.

“I grew up as a mate in the abandoned baby’s home,” said Tochi.

“Oh, I see,” Boss dropped off some ashes on the tray and continued smoking.

“Yes,” said Tochi with excitement. He wanted ask Boss a question about the meal he promised. But he felt restrained.

“What do you do for a living?” said Boss.

“I’m a labourer and wonderer,” said Tochi.

“Labouring…for what and how long?”

“I labour for everything…eighteen years now…on the street.”

“Eighteen years, wow!” said Boss looking at him closely. “Does the experience bring hell closer?”

“Yes sir, I live in it everyday but today, I’m in the best part of heaven here,” said Tochi, thinking that the answer suited the looks he saw in Boss’ eyes. 

Boss stood up slowly from his seat and walked across the floor. He dragged from the cigar and swallowed so that the smoke emitted through the month, nose and ears.

“Well, Tochi,” said Boss, halting. “You’ll join me in my business…no hard works but you’ll work smart.”

“Yes sir,” said Tochi, thinking that any business that provided Boss so much comfort would be a good one.

“You will?”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s okay…” said Boss, turning his back on Tochi. He measured five feet and two inches in height and had chubby cheeks. “Come to table then, table is set.” He walked to the dinning table and sat at the head of it.  “We’d have killed you when you ran into my car. The doctor will be by the time you finished eating.”

            “What I do on the road is not strange, that’s what I see in this country.  Everybody is a beggar and the wicked beggars are thieves either with the lips, pen or the gun.  You see, I grew up on the street and will die there,” said Tochi, putting a spoonful of rice into his month.  “Your car is the fifth that has hit me.”

“You must be very strong then but that’s a bad way of dying,” said Boss calmly.  

“Somebody needs to kill me…it’s the only gift I have to offer. The police shot twice, leaving scars here,” said Tochi, standing up to pull up his clothes to reveal them.

“Not now, just eat, okay, life is a risk but not the way you’re taking it,” said Boss.

“Sometimes, I pray for pardon, but what is my crime. Only my mother knows why she wrapped me in the Indomie carton two days after I was born and dumped on the refuse heap near Ikanete junction.  My prison life started then.”

“You’ve live a free man…free,” said Boss.

“Not in my mother eyes, I’m so guilty to be deprived her love. So early, she sentenced me.”

“Eat some more,” said Boss, pouring some Camus wine into the cup. He sipped to soothe his feeling. He studied Tochi to know what class he fitted in the category of his workers. “It’s ok,” he added.

“Sir…can I join you right away?” said Tochi, with stuck of chicken meat in his month.

“Drugs, hard drugs,” said Boss, dissecting the lump of meat with the cutleries. “That’s what we do and you’d stop hanging on the streets to ask for arms. If you work for me, you’ll travel abroad often.”

“I like it, you’re kind. Of all those who had hit me on the road, you’re the only one so kind and generous,” said Tochi, scratching his bony cheek.

Tochi had heard of hard drugs and smoked some hemp. Now, he was going to work with a baron. He poured some wine into the cup and sipped. Enthralled by the feeling, he filled his and emptied it. He conjectured that soon, he would live in such opulence like Boss.

The Wall

Karen Jennings

At first, it was a novelty and wasn’t sure how to behave. For a time he stood in the centre of the room, then, stepping forward to the window, he looked out. Through it; a metre away, he saw the wall of the opposite building. In the days that followed, he stayed in the room, thinking of no other thing than looking out through the window.

In the mornings and evenings when the water boiled on the stove, steaming up the glass, he would wipe the pane carefully and noticed the way the bricks rippled and steadied before him. He did not know what he was looking for; there was nothing to see, really. The wall remained unchanged.

With time, he learnt the pattern of the bricks; the neat rows, and the lines of cement. He felt their shapes filling him up. By the end of the week, the bricks sat in his eyes so that when the window misted he no longer needed to wipe it clean. He found a newspaper and some tapes to cover the window. After that he began looking down when he was in the room.

***

In the early morning, cool air touched his cheeks and ears as he walked. From beyond the streets and buildings, there was a smell of salt and the sound of calling gulls. He walked with his hands in his pockets, taking small and slowed steps, careful to balance as he climbed off and onto pavements. Before him the sky was grey over a grey mountain, behind him the sun begins to show pink. To his left the flower sellers unpacked.

Cramping the pavement, buckets and buckets of flowers were unloaded from vans. There was nowhere to walk. He stood for a while and watched. After a night alone in the room, all the colours surprised him by the chattering of men and women, by the smell of flowers that weighed him down. By nightfall, he knew, they will be gone, the pavement scattered with the remains. Now the breath of flowers was heavy in the air.

It was uncertain where he came from and he had no memory of anything before; only of the place where they sold flowers. It was where he, once, chose to make a nest for himself and where he had continued to return night after night. It was there that he breathed all night of the damp smell of the pavement on which the content of the buckets emptied, where leaves and petals lay. 

He remembered the scent at dawn, when the trucks arrived, laden with their buckets of flowers, loud with the flower sellers calling out to each other. At this cue he would stretch and unstiffen, rising to earn a few coins by unloading the trucks. The names he never bothered to learn, but he knew, still knows, each flower by its scent. Come back at six, they’d say. We’ll pay you to help us pack away. But he never did. He could not risk having money on him after dark.

He continued to walk, passing shops now, keeping his eyes on the ground, watching where he stepped. His heart taught him the observance’s rule. He learnt it years ago; scanning pavements and gutters for coins with which he could buy single sweets, single cigarettes. He was yet to unlearn the habit, and often he would stoop for brown coins, despite the humiliation of manoeuvring his legs in such a way that made it possible.

Behind him, three women talked loudly, shouted at each other as they walked side by side. Their voices caught him; calling, they pass him, turned their heads slightly to look at him, greet him. He lowered his head further, did not acknowledge them. He waited for them to turn a corner before he continued walking up the street. At the traffic lights he stopped. That was where he would stand for the rest of the day.

 By noon, his knee locked. By three, he would be in pain but he could not sit. If he sat he was glared at, resentment. Therefore, he stood. It was still early, only a few cars passed, the drivers frowning. As he stood, he felt the wall before him. The rows of bricks were around him; he thought about them, tasted them. He rarely spoke and if he did, the wall was on his tongue. His words patterned into bricks and cement.

Standing there, he could see back down the long road. Towards the end of the road, he knew, in a circle of traffic, was an island with a fountain. He could not get to it nowadays; he was not agile enough to dart through the moving cars, but as a boy, he spent long afternoons there, cooling his feet in the water. He remembered the mulch of litter and bird droppings that lined the fountain, how they sucked at his toes, how they clouded and pooled around his feet.

With seagulls and pigeons sitting nearby, he longed for sunset, staring back up towards the city, watching as the light faded slowly behind the mountain. It was the Christmas lights he was waiting for, for that moment when the road before him would become a mass of shapes and shifting lights, everything colouring and moving, indistinguishable, alive, against a black sky.

The day was warmer. Around him, there was noise. Cars slow and speed up. Vendors called to each other as they set up their stalls on the pavements. Shop owners swept, washed windows, men and women walked to work, looked clean and tired.  Everywhere, people were on the move. Everything was moving.

All around him, the city seemed to grow taller. Buildings stretched above him. He felt drawn out; he felt his head pulled upwards, his face pulled towards the sky. He could not look down. His head was full of car fumes, of sea air, of flowers and coffee. His tongue felt bound; his eyes took in the sky and the tops of the buildings. In all of that, the noise and motion, the elongating and stretching, he stood still as the city lengthened around him and the scent of the morning filled his nostrils.

Thieving Chiefs

James Lisandro Jnr.

A spade is not a wood in the hands of villagers

Whose valleys have deep belly where

Mild or wild pigs do not live encaged with loneliness,

Let no pilferer gain from their folly,

The comfort on a bull is fierce warning

If a masquerade reveals his face at the square

The beat and pump dies like ineffective herbs on a wound,

Let no greedy chiefs walk away in chameleon’s garment

Shoot at the watchers that yearns outside the box

Where a prepaid solace will snap at the jury

Propelled fury gapping at their dark hearts

Let nemesis assures them of a fair share.

James Lisandro Jnr. is transformational writer who hails from the deep west of Nigeria. His works have been published on Moraks’ Blog, Palapala magazine, YNAIJA magazine and www.omojuwa.com. James is hopes that one day Africa will assume its greatness and be respected. www.facebook.com/lisadrojnr

Bereft Of Love

Chinedu Kizzito Uwalaka

                          When a man’s heart is eaten

     up by lust he loses his senses.

A handful of people gathered in front of Mr. Vitalis’ house. They were sympathisers and hardly confined to a permanent position. Some hung by the door while others walked about. Another group sort support on the scrapped car packed metres away from the building in the compound.

“Chai, so dis woman don take like that go!” said a female sympathiser in Pidgin English. 

Forlorn cast on every face and most of them folded their hands across their chests.

“Wetin dem say kill lam?” a man said.

“Nawa…nobodi no,” replied the woman who lived next-door to Mr. Vitalis.

They sighed and shrugged their shoulders. Sad news never pampered faces with smiles except the faces of pitched enemies whose fervent prayers attracted such answers.

“Where em husband dey now?” another neighbour said.

“Inside the house, poor man” said a sympathiser.

“What about his son Chike?” the neighbour said.

“Nobodi no, they say na playboy,” said the same woman.

Everybody’s attention pulled at the black 190E Mercedes Benz car that drove in. The door opened and Chike walked out. He stood a while, looked at the spattered crowd that collected in two’s, three’s and four’s in the compound. His mind went to it and he walked into the room, not talking to anybody. 

“Old boy,” said Chike to his father, “I didn’t know you were serious.” He sat on the mat with his father amidst friends and relations. 

“It’s now you think of returning?” said Mr. Vitalis.

“What did I do wrong?” Chike spread his arms in bewilderment.

“For one week now, you’ve be gone and ignored calls from me until this morning?” said Mr. Vitalis, sternly.

“Business…from one hotel to the other,” said Chike.

“It doesn’t stop you from checking back home to know how your mother, at least, was fairing.”

Chike remained silent.

“You know your mother was sick…she had your name on her lips in her dead,” Mr. Vitalis clipped his hands together across his chest.

The silence was smashed by mutters from sympathisers.  .

“But dad I . . .?” said Chike, with an emotion-ridden voice.

 “Shush…, but what? You’re a worthless son. I don’t know why you choose to come to this family. You would have come to this world through other parents,” Mr. Vitalis said.

Grin…. grin… Chike’s phone rang and he received the call smiling.

“Ah! B.J,” said Chike into the phone. “B.J what’s up, So how far, did you get the babes...oh yeah, the night is not going to be easy, you know...in the hotel, I’m right on my way.” Chike ended the call and looked at his father.

“Just imagine you…” said Mr. Vitalis.

“You’ve always told me how worthless I am. I thank you for training me through university but I can’t do things your way. We’ll bury mama next weekend…I shall come back tomorrow to talk with you as a son; a bad one,” Chike looked at the faces in the room and stood up. “It’ll be a gathering of who is who with all my political and business friends in attendance. Everything turns into an opportunity in life, you know?” Chike walked out, entered his car and revved off.

Vain Merriments

 James Lisandro Jnr.

Hear them chanting, singing and dancing

Their laughter lurked beneath mourning faces

Panting like leopards on the run

With legs shaking from the thighs

Because health was lost health from the sinew,

Their deceptive smiles were hideous imperfections

With retrogressive impartations as crazy partakers

Walking round modern and mundane shrines  

With intoning incantations like herbalists

Seeking healing for infections yet sowing ominous seeds

They watch the trees giving up its health and life

The recession unclipping their delight to see more dead;

They show off the joy of a slave with lie-infected tongue

Convincing his master that he speaks the truth to keep his life,

The end will not come like torrential rain

That lives in a room where hope remains as a relief material,

Doers and those who approve of ruthless offences will become

Seeds in the hand a farmer who plants in heat infested soil

And wait without hope for produces of gnashed teeth.

James Lisandro Jnr. is transformational writer who hails from the deep west of Nigeria. His works have been published on Moraks’ Blog, Palapala magazine, YNAIJA magazine and www.omojuwa.com. James is hopes that one day Africa will assume its greatness and respected.

www.facebook.com/lisadrojnr