You were to have that evening like this.
Experienced a brief moment of respite. Not turn, think to look, and start running.
Seeing a half-man, his face healed blank, and weeping tissue should not have happened. Was not the plan.
The evening breeze should have turned you. Right way. Skyward to behold the heavens prepared for your sight. The pink and the gold of sunning sets. Like the lawns whose bloom and trees you had passed through. And felt safe in.
Turned to friend beside you and said, let’s go. A nod back. Go.
Neatly arranged, like your passage into this world.
We came up with the plan at the start, the moment you walked into the town. Set foot off the train, the ground felt it when you moved. That weight, the particular distribution of mass through those two points. What you must have seen on your sneakers was dust. Red, dry, annoying. Yet it was a welcome home, son of the soil. A re-baptism.
Sitting on the plastic bench of the train station, you decided to wait. For something to happen. No network on your phone, no way to call. It was decided you were a passive sort. Wait for something to happen and not walk five minutes down to get service. Or walk up to the ticket guy and ask him for help.
Thirty five minutes of waiting before someone walked in and pointed out these options to you. Many years of us waiting, creating options to get you. Before we set on this that worked, and failed, our options were-
Well first, we know your father. Son of the soil too. He is our son, set his own off on a train to a place he hasn’t set foot in a decade. The insult. The abandonment, was what we chose as our weapon. We would lead you out of the straight path, whisper wrong into the beginnings of your consciousness. Till you guessed what it was, then guessed wrongly. Then second guessed. But it was a cheap move. A lunatic in a tailored suit, or one in the white sneakers you wear. Or the half-tongue of ours you speak.
No one would count it. Village people, they would say when the news got home.
When you got to your father, therapy, pink pills. Anti-psychotics. Love.
So in anger, we devised a second one. The train you were in would go wrong. Accidents were a statistical improbability, maybe a fire. To your cabin. But there was already one that kindled once you got in.
And began to write this;
Continued the journey finally.
There is a presence here with me in the cabin. Or there are bags here with no one to claim as owner. Purple, the three of them. Seeming like they complement one other in function, to give you options. The first is standard luggage you roll on its wheels in an airport. The next is smaller, for staying over-night with a friend or lover. The last one is a school bag.
Purple all of them, like a friend. Or a person too proud to show face.
I saw the plastic ropes of a black earpiece sticking out of the school bag’s front pocket. And I guessed it was a girl. I don’t know why.
But I left the curtains on her side of the cabin drawn, out of respect. I chose this small private place on the train because I wanted to be alone, and still have company to chat with sometimes when I wasn’t taking field notes. But my cabin mate never showed.
On the first night, I did not mind. I just thought the person was careless, or believed only someone who did not need to steal could afford a private cabin. I did not know, and I was alone. Outside my own part of the window, evening waved into night like a gentle breeze.
And the train creaked along through the shut glass, I could hear it move. It sounded so old, like a tired man overworking himself again tonight. Yet outside, the street lamps were knocking past each other as the train sped on. Woov-woov, I imagined they would sound. They were ten feet away from the tracks and I was still worried one of them would hit my head from where I sat. Trains are dizzy, unlike cars.
The second night, there were fewer streetlamps, and more mountains. I knew I was getting closer to home. Long ago, my mother had told me to expect this if I ever went here. She had been taken away by the sight of them, all of them. Looming larger as they approached.
Guessing from the origin story, Oba Pupupu’s mountain might have been the biggest one I can see now. Or an innocuous one. Or the table-top one, the only one domed with a patch of purple sky. I wrote that down.
Did not write this, felt it was an arrogant thought. The Oba’s mountain should have given a clearer sign, maybe I hoped to see smoke from the top, like she had seen to know the diviner was waiting for her there.
Clear instructions, take this stick and go on. Wherever you stick it in the ground and it does not come out again, that is home. I looked back into the cabin, saw the bags again and felt how loud that muted shade of purple was against the silence.
This is the last lap of the journey, and I do not know what to expect once I get down from the train. I did not expect that we would arrive in the afternoon, and we are only an hour away. And I did not expect my cabin to still be empty when I came back from the train’s kitchens. Thought my cabin mate would be back to claim their bags by now. But no.
What I meet, could be a surprise or could be nothing. Like regular life. Or could be both, like an irregular interlude.
But I will record it in these notes. Whatever I find.
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The first time I almost got mugged, I knew what to do.
Seventeen is old enough to be strong and know how to fight, but I chose not to. They were my friends those people, even under the cover of night and their masks, I could tell. The way they spoke, their inexperience. And then one of them kept calling me boy, boy, boy. Get down!
And I knew it was Sesan. I thought about him when I was running through the back of someone’s farm in this town. What would he think?
What was he thinking that night when he pointed the fake gun at my head?
That I would not recognise that same posture to his shoulders, the way he hung them down in the corner of my eyes, and corrected them to stiffness when I looked directly?
Two days before the mugging incident, it was morning and I was trailing behind a friend and his father. Pressing my phone, walking distractedly through the aisles of the supermarket. We were there to pick up, drinks. My father must never find out. It was for a small get-together at their house. I was helping, I was feeling good.
Sesan was working at the pay-point. I placed my shiny new phone on the counter to free my hands and help with bagging the bottles. I noticed the pay-point guy staring at it as I put in the last bottle, took it back to be safe. I looked up, the guy was Sesan. An old classmate.
That was when he stiffened.
Like he did that night when I dropped the phone down again, looked up at him and placed my hands behind my head.
Boy, boy boy. Push that phone forward!
“Shebi you think say you be man abi? You dey drink drink. Dey drink hot. And na only you wan use phone.”
And again.
“Push that phone forward, boy” Said boy the way our physics teacher used to say it to us when we did wrong.
So I was sure it was him. Even before he came closer, and put the gun against my head because I had refused to move the phone further.
“Who you think you be sef? I fit blow your head commot. Nothing go happen.”
I wanted to say, you no fit.
It was not a gun, but he could strike my head with it. There were at least three guys hanging behind me, or in the shadows. They could do something.
I was calculating what to do.
Maybe it was not what I did or did not do that saved me. It might not even have been a real mugging. They left without taking the phone. None of them touched me other than the contact with the gun.
So when I was running through that farm this afternoon, I was thinking about him, and about that time, because I was wondering if I had enough cause to be worried now. To be running.
I was tearing through the place, possibly knocking down stilts that support young vines. Entirely the reason those farmer women looked up from their work, confused. And decided not to raise an alarm because no one was behind me running too. No one was chasing me. My panic was subsiding then, and I was too foggy to remember why I had even started running. So I stopped, and not to look strange, continued in a brisk walk through the narrow path that linked individual farms.
The trees were spinning above me, the canopy they cast under the sky turning. And I had to stop, then walk, stop then walk to keep from falling down. A pre-teen carrying a bundle of firewood on her head stared at me wide-eyed. Like, what is wrong with this uncle?
After she passed by, I had a thought, or a voice that said with such certainty; you will fail.
And I wondered, at what? Even before I had the idea to question it.
I started thinking through what it could be. What mattered to me, what did I care at failing at?
Earlier, when Femi took me around his school, his University, I was asking him what part of it he was most proud of.
Not really proud of, he replied. The thing that has made me very happy is the new friends I’ve made along the way.
And he was not being trite. He meant it.
But the University, it was beautiful. Magnificent. Something to be very proud of.
He showed me around the place, newly built. It must have been an expensive endeavour. Even the corridors were air conditioned. The University was multiple large bungalows linked together. There were very few storey buildings, I think I only saw one or two; the admin block, and somewhere else. Think it was a research lab.
The insides of those buildings were starkly white. With the artificially cooled air, I felt like I was in a foreign country.
Think that is the vibe they wanted to create, Femi said.
I nodded. We were walking along one of the few hallways that showed the outside world as it crossed to a different building. And they know how to keep a nice garden too. Tiny blue chested birds zipped through trees that bloomed red and yellow flowers. It was so serene, the clipped cries of the birds punctuated a silence that itself sounded like music.
Don’t hit your head bro! Femi called.
And I swerved, fast enough to not collide with one of the poles supporting the walkway’s roof.
Sorry, oh, but bring your mind back here please. Femi said to me.
And I tried to, we were going to meet his friends, I should work out an appropriate mood.
They were a generally happy set of people, Femi’s friends. They were somehow strange too. The word is not ghetto, these are ajebo kids after all. Bohemian? Is that the pretentious word? Almost all of them were dressed in baggy clothes, late 90’s kind of baggy. And one girl stood out, she wore black lipstick. Her hair was a pile of dreadlocks with multi-coloured tips.
She was the one that challenged me.
After the introductions, we passed through that same walkway to get to a lab. We were going there to chat and have some snacks. And the garden fascinated me even more the second time. One of the birds perched a few steps away from me, before it flew away. But I felt the girl staring, unsettling the moment and shivering with a supressed anger. I did not know at what.
I was brushing off chin-chin crumbs from the workbench in front of me, and in the middle of a conversation I was half-paying attention to, the girl asked me this
What about you? What do you think?
About what? I asked, snapping to attention.
She rolled her eyes, sighed a little like she could.not.be-lieve.it and said, about the Boni-e people.
I was blank.
A satisfied cackle before she said;
Are you not the journalism guy? Yes you? You’re doing IT now in journalism, and you don’t know the biggest story shaking our country right now? Wait, why are you actually here in our Uni sef?
She turned to Femi. Then her eyes came back to lock with mine.
Then we both turned to him. Both asking for an explanation. Her in indignant disbelief, me in a quiet pleading way. He just stared and shook his head, almost imperceptibly.
That was when I got up, started walking. Walking, walking to the back gate that led out of the enclave of a school. To the edge of the scraggly town outside of those fences.
And that was when I started running.
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Here is a list of the things that have happened so far, since the day I started running for no reason.
- Femi told me the lady that challenged me was his babe. Don’t be angry he said. She was just trying to defend me. From what? I asked. Then he stumbled out some sounds and ended there.
- I didn’t tell him about the running, or the mugging by our old friend Sesan. But he knew I was moody about something, and said something had to be done.
- He took me to my town to free my mind. My proper hometown, my father’s. Those hills, those mountains that stretched bigger than Pupupu’s own could ever dream. I walked in them for days, without aim. Or to clear my mind.
What could happen? I was young and had already been mugged before.
- When I came back after those few days, Femi was angry. He said; on top this Boni-e people matter? You sef why you no know? He stormed out of the hotel room we were sharing. And I took out my phone from the drawer I had left it in, and googled them.
- Even if I decided to make my IT project about the Boni-e people, my own people - my relatives- would not care. Not about the Boni-e’s struggle to reclaim their land. The over-mining that was poisoning their children, crops, future. Or the University building infrastructure from the profits. I mean, nuclear energy in a residential town.
- What my own people care about is killing me. Poisoning my soup. Falling my star. And I know. As facts since one evening during my time in those hills, I passed my Uncle’s hut. He was talking to his wife, “We will kill him the way we killed his mother”. And they both laughed, like evil. That night, I sat somewhere, I don’t remember now, and brought out the paper I had folded into my pocket. In it, a poem I had written after visiting a small stream that afternoon. It brought no comfort, and I felt like throwing it away. But I folded it again, and kept walking.
- Femi and I came back to the University. That evening, it was 6pm, and we were walking around the campus, in an awkwardness. Trying to speak but both hoping the silence fades away the things we should say. I stopped under a tree and moved to apologise, but I felt something happening behind my head. I turned, and saw a man without a face, like it had been melted off. Holding a chainsaw, coming.
- I started running, for the second time. Was outside the gates to the scraggly kingdom for the second time, screaming. Black encircling the corners of my eyes. My chest like lead on it. I couldn’t breathe. A purple at the edge of the breathlessness. Hopelessness. Feeling alone. Like where is my mother, can she see me now?
And now I just want to go back home.