I Do Not Come to You by Chance

by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

He was as handsome as paint. His back was straight, his hands stayed deep inside his pockets, and his steps were short and quick as if he had an urgent appointment at the end of the world. Anybody passing him on the way to the stream could have mistaken him for an emissary from the spirit world on special assignment to the land of mere mortals.

Finally, he got to the last child, who was about four years old. As soon as he held out his exercise book, his mother leaned over and landed a stout knock on the little boy’s head. ‘How many times have I told you to stop giving your elders things with your left hand?’ she glared. ‘Next time, I’m going to use a knife to cut it off.’

‘Children are born foolish,’ Teacher replied sorrowfully. ‘If one doesn’t teach them properly from an early age, they grow up and continue that way. He’ll soon learn.’ ‘No, no, no . . . What I’m saying is that the way his brain is arranged, he uses his left hand to do things that other people normally do with their right hands.’ Teacher laughed. ‘I’m very serious,’ Engineer said. ‘It’s the white people who found that out.’

‘How can they say I’m not African?’ Engineer chuckled. ‘My skin is dark, my nostrils are wide, my hair is thick and curly. What other evidence do they need? Or do I have to wear a grass skirt and start dancing around like a chimpanzee?’

‘My learned friend,’ Engineer replied, ‘we are the ones who should know better. Any part of our culture that is backwards should be dumped! When I was in London, there was a time I was having my bath and my landlord’s son came to peep at me because he wanted to see if I had a tail. Do you think it’s his fault? I don’t blame the people who are saying that monkeys are our ancestors. It’s customs like this that give rise to that conclusion.’

‘I think a child should be named for his destiny so that whenever he hears his name, he has an idea of the sort of future that is expected of him. Not according to the circumstances of his birth. The past is constraining but the future has no limits.’ He smiled again. ‘I shall call you Augustina.’

As she approached, he looked her over from top to toe, like a glutton beholding a spread of fried foods.

‘I don’t think so. There must have been another earth that existed before Genesis, which was destroyed. Some parts of the Bible make mention of it. That old earth must have had another man who looked like a monkey. But when creating the new earth, God decided to make the new type of man in His own image.’ Augustina’s head swung from side to side like someone in a mini trance. He talked more about dinosaurs and other strange animals that must have existed in that old earth, about how scientists had even been finding their bones. Right there and then, Augustina fell in love with his brain.

For a poorly paid civil servant to dabble in an affliction like diabetes was the very height of ambitious misfortune.

And since his special diet banned him from large quantities of the high-carbohydrate staple foods in our part of the world, he was now constrained to healthier, less affordable alternatives.

My father had sat down with me and we filled them out together. We divided the task equally: he decided that I should study Chemical Engineering, he decided that I should attend the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and he decided that I must not take the exams more than once. My own part was to fill in his instructions with biro and ink, study for the exams, and make one of the highest Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board exam scores into the university’s Chemical Engineering Department.

That was one thing that sickness and poverty had not been able to snatch from him. My father was a walking encyclopedia, and he flipped his pages with the zeal and precision of a magician. He knew every theory of science and every city in the atlas; he knew every word in the dictionary and every scripture in the Holy Bible. It was such a pity that all the things he knew were not able to put money in his pocket.

Over time, his vocabulary had improved. But when it came to tenses, he was never quite sure whether he was standing in the present or dwelling in the past.

Although his position on the family tree could not be described in anything less than seven sentences, Odinkemmelu was introduced to us as our cousin.

That was my cue to vamoose. Deflated, I walked away with the sound of hushed giggling bruising my ears. For the first time in my life, I suspected that I was well and truly an idiot.

Her hair never stank, even when she wore braids for over two weeks. She always wore her make-up light and natural and she still had some hair remaining from her eyebrows.

Ola was 100 percent wife material. We had already started making plans for our future. She wanted all her four sisters and an additional six cousins on the bridal train; I wanted three sons and two daughters, preferably the boys first.

Marrying an Igbo girl entailed much more than fairy-tale romance and good intentions. The list of items presented to the groom as a prerequisite for the traditional marriage ceremony was enough to make a grown man shudder. And that was even before you considered the gift items for family members, the clothing for the girl and her mother, and the actual feast itself. Several couples had been known to garner all their financial forces together in the process of organising their marriage ceremony. Afterwards, they could sit back in their new home and gradually transmute to skeletons. At least then they would be married and could die penniless - but happy - in each other’s arms.

My mouth fell wide open. I completely forgot that I had been in the middle of a speech that was designed to bring about world peace.

After the third accident, I had read an interview in which this same governor’s press secretary had blamed the governor’s enemies, insinuating that they had used a powerful juju to engineer these mishaps in order to embarrass the governor.

There are some native doctors in Ohaozara who I hear are very good when it comes to unlocking people’s wombs. Maybe you should speak to Papa Kingsley so that both of you can go there and see one of them.’ My mother insists that her niece’s advice went in one ear and out the other. She and my father never consulted any native doctors. They did not swallow any alligator pepper and animal blood concoctions, my mother did not dance naked under the moonlight with a white cock draped around her neck. ‘I just kept crying to God,’ my mother had told me. ‘I knew He would intervene in His own time.’ One look at Godfrey, Eugene, and Charity, and God’s intervention became clear. That was what I needed now - divine intervention.

‘It’s all stolen money,’ he often said with a voice stuffed full of pride, whenever he saw yet another person who had built a house or bought a new car. ‘How could he possibly afford that on a civil servant’s salary? At least ‘I’ll always be remembered for my honesty. Nobody can say I stole a farthing.’ I did not think anybody would have been blind enough to accuse my father of stealing public funds. Anybody could see that he did not have any farthings.

I hope this letter finds you in a current state of sound body and mind. My principal reason for writing this epistle is to gravitate your mind towards an issue that has been troubling my soul. Even as I put pen to paper, my adrenalin is ascending on the Richter scale, my temperature is rising, the mirror in my eyes have only your divine reflection, the wind vane of my mind is pointing North, South and East at the same time. Indeed, when I sleep, you are the only thought in my medulla oblongata and I dream about you. I was in a trance where I went out to sea and saw you surrounded by H2O. In your majesty, you rose from the abdomen of the deep. The spectacle took my breath away.

It felt as if a gallon of 2,2,4-trimethylpentane had been pumped into my heart and set alight with a stick of match.

When I was a child, we had watched a documentary on television about an East African tribe who spoke with clicks and gargles instead of real words. I used to imitate their chatter to amuse Godfrey and Eugene. Now I appeared to be talking the same language, the only difference being that I was not doing it to amuse anybody.

My mother’s advice was definitely biased. She was not a fan of Ola’s mother. She claimed that the woman had seen her in the market one time and pretended as if she did not know her.

Take my Aunty Dimma, for example. Long before she separated from her husband, moved to Port Harcourt, and subsequently became a religious fanatic, she was considered as one of the most incompetent wives to have ever been sent forth from my mother’s whole extended family. Generally, she was a lovely woman. She was kind, helpful, always the first to turn up and support us, even if we were simply mourning a wilted plant. But my father once commented to my mother that it was a miracle for anyone to remain married to her and not lose control of themselves. Where could a husband start in recording matrimonial complaints against her? She always left home in the morning before her husband and did not return before him. She had wanted to employ a cook even when he had made it quite clear that he wanted to eat only meals she herself cooked. She was always arguing with him about what was appropriate for her to wear and what was not. Once, she even insisted on wearing a pair of trousers to accompany him to a meeting of his townspeople. Aunty Dimma had also been known to openly slight her husband and despise his role as head of the family. Like the time when she had gone ahead and bought herself a car even after her husband had insisted that she should continue using public transport until he was able to afford to buy the car for her by himself. Despite all this, the most obvious sign that the marriage was in trouble was when the embittered man started eating out. Matters degenerated f...

Probably because she was a liberated woman, Aunty Dimma usually spoke in a loud, red-hot voice, even when she was not angry. She also had an opinion about everything - from the second-class status of women in Igbo Land to the status quo in Outer Mongolia. And she always made sure that her voice put the final full stop to every conversation.

Terrified, I shot a glance at my father, wondering if he had heard. If he had, he would want nothing more than to rise from the bed and empty his catheter bag into my aunt’s mouth.

Next to Onitsha, Aba was the hometown of jungle justice. The people of Aba did not want to depend on their government for everything. They had taken the nobleman’s advice literally and asked themselves what they could do for their government instead of what their government could do for them. They had chosen to assist her with the execution of justice. Therefore, when a thief was caught red-handed - whether for picking a pocket or napping a kid - people in the streets would pursue him, overtake him, arrest him, strip him naked, secure him in an upright position, place an old tyre round his neck, saturate his body with fuel, and light a match. The tyre would ensure that the flames continued until all that remained of the felon was charcoal.

A fart becomes a stench only when there are people around.

His Excellency had tripped on the Aso Rock Villa marble staircase, dislocated his ankle, and had to be flown out to Germany for treatment. There had been a time when things like that did not make any sense to me. But with my recent intimate experience of our hospitals, I did not blame anyone who swam across the Atlantic to get treated for a hangover.

While his fellow Soviet crew members returned to earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, being a black man from a Third World country, AVM Ojukwu’s place on the flight was taken up by cargo, which the Soviet Union authorities insisted was too valuable to be left behind.

You say you don’t eat rats but you just want to taste only the tail.

It was vital for every Igbo man to be buried ‘well’. The amount required to give my father the sort of send-off that would be deemed suitable for a man of his untitled status would total ten times more than what we had expended on bills for the duration of his hospital stay. Apart from the entertainment of guests for the wake-keeping and funeral, there was a certain amount of livestock and liquor that tradition required us to present to each of the different age grades in our village. There were the expenses for the obituary, the mortuary, the embalmment, the grave, the coffin, and the welfare of guests that would come from far and near. To make matters worse, our house in the village was not yet complete. It was extremely embarrassing for our guests to see my father being buried in a compound with a building that was mere carcass.

Chinchi si na ihe di oku ga-emechaa juo oyi. The bedbug said that whatever is hot would eventually become cold.

‘So why are you swallowing Panadol for another person’s headache?’

‘Kings, sometimes I get very worried about you. Your attitude is not money-friendly at all. If you continue talking like this, soon, whenever money sees you coming into a room, it will just jump out through the window.’

I must have looked as if I wanted to run up a tree and hide, then uproot the tree and pull it up after me.

Dr Harold Shipman.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/13/shipman.health

Siphoning from foreigners in parts of the world where the economy was sound was one thing, but stealing from your own brothers and sisters who had entrusted you to serve was the abyss of wickedness, especially when you had the firsthand opportunity to witness their daily sufferings and struggles.

I could not vouch for the entire black race, but the niggers of Nigeria were certainly not monkeys.

And her skin shone with a glorious luminosity that had nothing at all to do with nature; it could only have come from inside an expensive cosmetic jar.

I stood, marvelling at the effects of this ironic sort of rage that immoral single women suddenly develop against immorality as soon as they get married.

While we were eating, an enchantress stiletto-ed over to our table in a short red dress that clung dangerously to her derriere. Her knees and knuckles were black where the bleaching cream had refused to work. Her hair extensions went all the way down to her waist and curled at the tips. Cash Daddy patted her behind and introduced us.

Poor Ola - her husband was unpardonably ugly, as if he had done it on purpose. As if he had gone to a native doctor and asked for some juju that would make his face hideous. Where was I to start? Was it the square eyes or the spacious nostrils, or the puckered face or the quadruple chin? The man was a veritable troglodyte.

At that moment, I decided that if losing Ola to this man meant that the human gene pool had discontinued some frightful traits and produced a better-looking hybrid, then I was glad to have made my noble contribution to the advancement of humankind. I handed back the photographs.

There were many possible explanations for the atrocious traffic in Lagos - population explosion, insufficient mass transit, tokunbo vehicles going kaput, potholes in the roads, undisciplined drivers, random police checkpoints, and fuel queues. But in Cash Daddy’s opinion, the go-slow started whenever the devil and his wives were on their way to the market.

‘Don’t mind him, don’t mind him,’ Cash Daddy said calmly, like the elephant who had just been told that the spider was coming to wage war against her. ‘Just ignore him. You don’t blame him, his problem is just poverty. Can’t you see the type of car he’s driving? If you were the one driving that type of car, wouldn’t you be angry? That’s why I don’t like poor people around me. They’re always looking for someone to blame for their problems.’

The man greatly amused me. He was tall, thin, slow, hairy, with heavy linear eyebrows that looked as if they had been cut out of a thick rug and pasted onto his face with cheap glue. Each time he shifted his head, I half-expected the eyebrows to drop onto the floor. His look was stiff and sluggish, like all his mannerisms. When he began a five-word sentence, I could have walked up the flight of stairs, gone to the bathroom in my bedroom, turned on the tap, washed my hands, turned off the tap, descended the stairs, sat down, and he would still not have finished speaking. But there is some good in everybody: beneath his burdensome eyebrows, Johnny was quite handsome.