You sat your wretchedness on a bench built from the logs of bamboo placed parallel over forked stumps. Your red pupils were bloated with indignation, heart throbbing and hands trembling like an orphan chick struck by the spell of harmattan cold. You’d just arrived from the farm some minutes ago salivating in retrospect to the plans made earlier before Iya Lekan left. You expected her to have prepared one of those intoxicating delicacies that contributed to you marrying her. She had won the village Sibi Obe contest two consecutive seasons, a feat none had ever achieved in the history of Igando.
Your sight had become deformed that it splits a human into four. Few minutes before, you saw yourself wearing a weak body, dragged home by an empty heart while Ayanfe, whose figure multiplied into two, welcomed you with a bowl of cool water from the earthenware pot to appease your protesting innards. You were chewing the livers of an unripe lemon like a mad monkey then. You were versed in the myth of food that such fruits provoke the spirit of hunger yet you kept devouring it like food was ready.
The amazed Ayanfe knelt and you patted her shoulders so she stood up and you gifted her with the remaining lemon fruit. You collected the bowl and gulped down its contents at a sip. Akanbi went to harvest the sack-bag and the hoe you dropped far away.
“Tell your mother to bring my food now-now.” You ordered Akanbi as he retreated.
“Ohooo, Baami.” He howled and scuttled away.
Your body was practically not yours, possessed with the demons of hunger, draining your strength with their beaky lips.
Now, you sat for four minutes but it seemed like an eternity summarized. Your belly wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t carved for such, anyways. It was filled with heavy emptiness; empty vessels make the loudest noise. No war sounds silent and no peace sounds loud.
You stapled your ‘where-is-it?’ gaze on the doorpost, cursing the entrance because it was gentle and didn’t promise that food would soon walk through it. Only the curtain was all you saw dancing to and fro to the rhythm of the howling concerto in the air; a symphony of warmth and breeze. You’d not stop slurping saliva to buy yourself time. A black goat cat-walked before you and you winked maliciously at it, almost picked a fight with it but it fled from the man who could ritualize it to appease the deity in his belly.
“Where’s it ooo?!” You stretched your dry throat again. You mustered all the strength and so it was loud this time that it split the door open and travelled to reach them at the backyard.
Your heart calmed when the door creaked but the sound almost deafened you. You thought it was your food walking to you on its own legs since you heard no accompanying voice. Forthwith, Ayanfe appeared with her face concocted with defeat and vengeance. Akanbi followed her like a lame sheep.
“What happened again?!” They almost fainted because you thundered.
The duo tried speaking but interrupted each other. You squeezed your dirty face at Akanbi, he read what you wrote thereon and gave way to the little girl to speak first.
“He beats me because I said I’ll report him to you.”
Akanbi tried winking her into silence but she’d not be truncated. You caught him winking at her and barked at him.
“Is your head correct? Ayanfe, oya I’m listening.”
She continued reporting how Akanbi had invited his friends to come and see the monkey you’d killed on the farm earlier that day. She was meticulous enough to explain the episode where Fijabi, the handicapped, said you’d die untimely because it was forbidden for twins to hurt a monkey. You lifted your arched brows when she mentioned how Baba Toye’s stubborn goat sneaked into the room because it was left open to entertain visitors. The goat strolled in like the invited guest it was and did justice to the infrastructures in the kitchen; a few tubers of skinny yams, half basket of cocoyam, rice, beans and maize. It left only two tubers of cassava, perhaps that was when it brimmed its curd to the brink.
“Wait!” You cut her short and poured your two pairs of malfunctioning eyes on Akanbi who, in the course of the explanation, found something to warrant smiles. His smiles brewed your wrath; you swung your left hand at his cheek. He collapsed on the floor, sweeping four teeth on the ground while blood rain fell.
“You did all these and still laughing?” You pointed a cursed finger at him on the floor where he was battling starry vision and displaced teeth.
“What’s it?” Your wife was at the door, struggling to unlock it. “Who’s that again oo?”
“Wuraola ni!” You nitpicked abruptly, “Iya Lekan, where’s my food?”
She knows you were a patient with an untamed belly. You’d once beaten her into visiting the corridors of hell when she knocked her feet against a stone and poured your ofada rice and fish stew on the sands. That day, the worms in your belly taught you a lesson that earned you the scars that the only doctor in Igando, Dr Wake, called ulcer.
“Ah! My husband, you’ve arrived,” she said, curtseying.
“Eheen!” You shrugged, “you wanted me to die on the farm before?”
She kept mute and a pregnant silence laboured for some seconds, the two of you exchanging meaningful glances. The children attended to their miseries.
“Are you deaf?” Your roaring voice murdered the silence, “or you’ve joined those group of useless housewives who say “what will the husband do?’’
“Ah! Rara o, not like that, Baba Lekan.” She walked on her knees towards you. She smelled hunger growling through you.
“And what’s it like? Tell me, I want to know?” By then, your voice wore a coat of muffler. She strained her ear to hear what you said in a nearly inaudible whisper.
“The…the…” she stammered, twiddling her fingers.
You were tempted to slap her but which among the six women your eyes could see was the actual Iya Lekan you didn’t know, so you improvised and sat back instead of embarrassing yourself.
Akanbi was still picking his teeth, murmuring like a wraith while Ayanfe was busy singing ‘sorrys’ to him.
You stood up lamely and grabbed the rod flanking the wall. They all fled, miscalculating that you wanted to beat them. Not yet at that moment, maybe. Six pairs of curious eyes perched on you as you searched your way into the house like a blind beggar. None of them dared follow you as they were cognizant of the fact that a hungry father like you is an angry monster. Hunger is a living being. When it enters and builds a colony in the belly, it loots the roughages and blocks entrance to other paraphernalia of life. That’s why the elders say ‘when hunger is in the belly, no other word enters thereafter.’
Five hours after, the sun had started to sink and usher in the hours of darkness. You woke up to a volcanic mountain of white pounded yam and a lake of aromatic egusi soup blessed with dried catfish, ponmo and soft cow liver. Its palm-oil countenance was seductive and you could picture its taste on your wet tongue. Your throat started to swallow the morsels imaginatively. Besides it, stood a sweating bottle of palm wine. Your soul ignited and you could see the food as they really were. Your innards float; begging you to help them.
The door creaked and four humans with the faces of the moon and body of water sauntered in. You didn’t care about their appearance but wondered who told them you were a seed of Oodua, a descent of Ekiti from Yorubaland, to prepare such recipe.
“Ajayi,” a woman with the nose of a star called you. You looked her face and she smiled, motioning that you help yourself.
You sank your fingers into the succulent mountain, pulled out a faction which you fondled and swam in the cosy warmth of the lake before burying it in the sepulchre of your belly. You aimed at weathering the mountain into a plain, evaporating the lake into a desert and draining the reservoir of whitish waters into drought.
Not long, a promiscuous voice slithered in to divorce you from your ecstasy but you blatantly ignored, focused on the belly business. The voice smells like your wife’s, anyways.
“Baba Lekan. Baba Lekan.”
It became recurring till it feels like the caller was banging your hand to make you quit your newly found job. When it came calling again, you felt water on your face, drenching your body. You jerked up and then found your weakness again. You squinted and found two-hundred copies of your wife.
“I brought you your food.”
“Where am I?” Your hands groped the empty air in search of the original of your wife.
Read – The Weatherman’s Creation – A Short Story by Bruno Sakalani, Tanzania
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