Priya
Sethi was a meticulous woman; nothing escaped the trenchant scrutiny of her
brain, fingers and broom, not the cobwebs that gathered in the ceiling corners
of her living room, the dust settled at the back of the LCD television
suspended from the wall or the mysterious contact numbers in her husband’s
mobile phone.
On such
moments as these, she would drop the phone and wear her henna tattooed hands on
either side of her thickening waist like handles of a ceramic tea-jug, in
aggravation that only peculiarly stubborn grime like these could bring. A
couple of years back, when these numbers saved with curious names like ‘Baby’
or ‘Heart’ first surfaced, Njideka, 48 then, broke down in tears, claiming that
they were members of his ancestral occult in his village who were after him,
threatening to kill his darling Indian wife and two half-caste sons if he did
not join their secret cult. Priya did not know what to say. Her newly married
parents had moved to Nigeria
in the late 50’s to serve as Doctors under the British Government and had her
months later, so she had no knowledge for the spiritualism her country was
renowned for. She never went to India
either, her parents were honorably buried in Nigeria years later when they died
and when the time came for her Masters in Gynecology, she only went as far as
Yale.
She met
Njideka at Ahmadu
Bello University
in the 70’s, she was the only Indian student that year and he was the only
course mate sympathetic to her plight. Boys ridiculed her mercilessly and she
wanted to run away to India,
without telling her parents, suddenly overcome with nostalgia of a country she
had never known. She wanted to wear a sari, eat roti and greet any stranger she
met on the street crowded streets of Mumbai ‘Namaste!’ She had been crying at
the back of the class and making these plans when Njideka walked up to her. He
did not tell her sorry or how it would get better, he only told her she was the
most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
So she
had let him figure out what to do with his occult oppressors while she
continued being his wife and mother of his children. This fateful day, the
particular contact that disturbed her was saved ‘Sweetheart’ and she did not
need to be a witch to know whoever the person was had nothing to do with the
occult. It had happened to her Nigerian friends, had she thought it won’t
happen to her?
She
dropped the broom on the carpet and dropped herself into nearest leather
cushion. She made sure she did all the cleaning, all these years, fearing her
husband will look elsewhere as it was rumored most business men were prone to
do. For the same reason, she did not employ any nanny either. She maintained
her job as a Gynecologist with the Ministry of Health, in case his export
business might go bad. Yes she had taken all the necessary precautions to
secure them a happy life and his family hated her for it. His relatives had
threatened and screamed and the more endeavoring like her mother in-law had
lunged for her neck on several occasions. But Priya was a peaceful woman and to
exacerbate their disdain for her, she neatly didn’t dignify their attacks with
complaint. She had not married them, but Njideka.
Njideka
who was now terrorized by an occult member called ‘sweet heart’.
She
needed to take her mind off the things, wasn’t she supposed to be a calm
peaceful wife? There was only one way to go about this, to pretend as though
she had not seen the mischievous contact on the phone he had forgotten, before
travelling for his business trip yester night.
She
remembered their foodstuff was exhausted and mentally combed her room for her
Federal Government pension receipt card. Njideka would kill himself before he
let her touch it. She hauled herself from the chair and went to her room. The
card was in a folder dated 10 years ago, when she retired from the Federal
Government and started collecting pension. It felt a betrayal to her India,
to serve another nation and get paid for it. As retribution, she paid attention
to it from the safe distance of the internet since she couldn’t just go there.
It felt sometimes like the house was tying her to Nigeria, preventing her from
visiting her motherland.
As she
stood up from the bed her sons spoke to her, soothed her from the picture frame
on the wall above the headrest that housed their hopeful faces, frozen in time
by camera. They were undergraduates at Oxford University
so there was no one in the house to ask where she was going. What she was going
to buy for them before coming back. How she missed them.
It took
effort to remember where exactly the Pension Office was, even though they had
lived in the Abuja
City for the last two
decades. Maybe it was because the last time she came here was 3 years ago or maybe
it was because the dynamic metropolis was in a continuum of structural
evolution. Storeys rose even higher, road-side kiosks cleared away to permit
billboards, crescents widened into roads and roads doubled into express ways.
The monsters of glass and concrete loomed above her, almost obliterating the
sun, lonely and devoid of people, like the city that housed them had reached
the end of time. Observing all these things driving along Miatama District, she
felt suffocated by an inexpressible sense of an ending.
So when
Priya stepped into the ground floor of the Pension Office, she was rudely
awakened by the brawling mass of people that infested the place, they were
everywhere, on the zigzag queues, spread on mats on the ash-tiled floors,
standing on the plastic seats, seating on the window sills, harsh and feral
looking, under the florescent lights, everywhere. She couldn’t see them as
individual people, they were one, a single organism of frail moving bodies,
exchanging roles when one got tired from a position. Those tired of squeezing
and pushing on the queue for example, resorted to replacing those hurling
insults and curses from the window sills. Some got tired of that too and spread
themselves on the tiles on the immaculate tiles to recover from their battle
scars, for the mats had been exhausted. After regaining their strength, they
patriotically marched back to the queue to fight. The enemies behind the
counter were barely visible above the wrestling bodies. It was sad, old people,
trying to collect from the cashier the years they had dutifully served their
country in hopeful anticipation of secured tomorrows. They did not seem to be
making any progress.
Undeterred,
Priya stepped forward. She was not a newcomer in this country, she was born
here. There was a hallowed silence and a pause when they saw her. Some
shamelessly stared and Priya ached for them. Many Nigerians still nursed the
superstition that foreigners carried something superior into their country,
something that was supposed to make their lives a little better; her Muslim
friend’s friends held them in high esteem for having an Indian friend. Of
course laughing, she would remind them that she was not Indian but Nigerian,
that she was born here, but it would not matter to them.
They
began to step aside for her to walk up to the counter.
An old
woman, presumably in her 60’s began screaming something about witches and
marine spirits in Pidgin English. Priya mentioned in the hallowed silence that
she just wanted to inquire her account balance for the benefit of those
listening. They let her walk up to the desk and the cashier who had been
panting, sweating profusely behind his desktop immediately composed himself at
the sight of her and tried to act like attending to Indian-Nigerian Pensioners
was something he did all day. How could he help her? She told him how she
originally wanted to withdraw some money from her account but seeing the number
of people on the line, she only wanted her account balance. The lanky young man
insisted in a feigned American accent that it didn’t matter, he could do hers.
She was getting to dislike him, his pretentiousness and wanted to ask him why.
Because she did not look Nigerian? She calmly insisted on checking her account
balance.
After
collecting her particulars including the Pension card, his face wore a confused
countenance it wasn’t accustomed to. From where Priya stood, she could see him
press the F6 button, the shortcut for refresh, over and over again. Then
defeated he finally looked up. Something was wrong, impossible with her
account. She did not understand. How? He handed her two sheets of freshly
printed paper, containing all her details, year of registration, period of
service to Government, age, all that. Nothing was wrong she told him, except
that her account was empty.
He told
her, gravely, that her name was printed in red ink.
There was
a collective gasp in the sea of people. The woman who screamed something about
marine spirits earlier was now talking about ghosts and pointing wrinkled
fingers at Priya. The murmurs that built among these people only made Priya
desperately curious. So what if her name was printed in red, she wanted to
know. The boy looked sadly at her as the answer reared its ugly head at her,
springing up from her years of being a Doctor; it meant she was registered as
dead.
Everything
started falling together in Priya’s head. She did not need the death
certificate her husband had signed to know he had withdrawn all her money. Her
sweat and toil in a country that was not her parent’s after he had killed her
with the red ink. Walking down the aisle, she felt something die inside her.
She was so immersed in her mourning that she did not notice the stupefied
stares of people. She would have understood, for they had seen a ghost come to
collect its pension.
She
welcomed the melancholy outside the building this time, it was only fitting.
The sun was an impotent yoke in the azure sea above. She was not just a
betrayer to her India,
she was now a harlot, pro-bono. The woman in her, craved to call him and accuse
him or break-down somewhere and cry or call a friend. But it was that woman,
she realized with dread, that was the thing in her that had died. When she got
back home she realized she hated the place, hated the memories she had with
him, she hated with such violence and passion that consumed and surprised her.
Except her boys. How did she tell them she was going to leave?
Leave.
The word,
full of purpose and action startled her. She wondered if she had done anything
with purpose all these years without Njideka’s inspirational input. It was she
who wanted to have children. When he realized she cherished the idea of having
offspring to love and cater for, he tried to steal the originality of the idea
from her; he wanted offspring to carry his family name. He bought all their
clothes, insisting on suits for her even though she would have loved flay
chiffon skirts. He decided hospitals she would work in and when the time came
chose careers for their boys. 10 years ago, he decided for her that it was time
she retired from her labors in the government. The only original thing she had
left was her surname, Sethi.
How do
you break your children’s hearts with such news? She knew they would pretend
not to care because they were boys and their Father’s culture summarized
emotional traits as effeminate so she considered waiting for them to come back
to Nigeria
for summer holiday. But she knew she would not spend an extra moment in this
house than necessary, she sent them an email in three lines. Taking a deep
breath, she walked into the 3-bedroom flat that she’d called home. As if
begging for a last chance, it tried to talk to her, to remind her of the
memories it held. The almost invisible distorted crayon alphabets from when
Gozie started writing. The roundish worn dentures on the lichen carpet where
the boys sat playing their video games. The dark circles engraved into the arm
rests of the tea-colored leather chair, where fingers had clawed. The faint
shadow of an explosion just above the Television where an empty bottle had
narrowly missed it target one alcoholic night. The phone Njideka had left
behind, on the book shelf…
It was
the phone that held her gaze longer. It was desperately curious she thought,
that a phone number will bring to precipitation in one moment things unspoken
for years. Priya went to her room and began to rummage through her things in
search of something that wasn’t Njideka’s idea. Her drawers. Her brown leather
suitcases. Her jewelry box. She found nothing, not a single piece of cloth. Not
an earring. That was when she started to cry. For things that might have been
if her parents had chosen to stay in India, maybe she would have been
born there. Maybe she would have been married at 18 and not have to fall into
the arms of the only boy who did not ridicule her in school. In this moment of
despair, crumpled on the bed like a wilted hibiscus, she remembered the only
thing she had that was truly hers, which she did not share with Njideka, her
surname. Yes. Ramalingham Sethi had given his daughter a wedding present, a
silk gown and matching sari that she never saw reason to wear. In Nigeria
anyway. She clawed and unraveled the compartments in wardrobe until the dress
spilled out.
Wearing
it gave her a new kind of joy, something beyond nostalgia, it was like her
parents had somehow, come alive in the fabric, her people believed love
superseded human life-time anyway. She felt young, new, her. She gathered up
all her clothes in a pile outside and sprinkled kerosene. She dropped the
phone, car key and jewelry Njideka bought her into the flames, like spicy
ingredients sprinkled into a cooking pot. How joyously the flames leaped! She
went back inside and picked her ATM card. It contained some salary savings she
reserved for rainy days. In a hurry, like this opportunity to leave was only
fleeting, she rushed outside the house like she would be forever trapped in it
if the sun set before she left and hailed a taxi. She was gasping when she told
the driver she was going to the Nnamdi
Azikwe Airport.
She
almost cried in relief when the cab drove her away from the malevolence of the
house, the malevolence that had kept her captive for decades. For a terrible
moment she realized she had not locked the house and Njideka was to come back
from his trip that evening. The driver wanted to know if anything was the
matter. No, she assured him with a specious smile. She continued smiling to
herself until the taxi entered the express that will take them to the Airport,
until it warmed her heart. Nothing was the matter, in fact there was no matter
at all, the only inhabitants of that house she worried about were far away, not
due to come back till summer. She thanked the driver at the airport and paid
him the spare change she had left. Yes the hostess said there was one last
flight to India.
Why did these things have to be so dramatic, like the movies? Because she told
herself, handing over her Mastercard, because one usually made the right
decisions by narrowly missing the wrong ones. Because right decisions rarely come
to us.
It was in
the Airport that she bought her a new phone, with her money. It made her giggle
all the way into the plane, a woman in her late forties excited at buying
something for herself for the first time. She sobered when she remembered she had
to give her sons a kind of explanation. I’m
going away for a while; call you boys when I get there.
She was
overcome with childish delight when the plane left the ground. She had no care
in the world; her sons were in Oxford.
She had no luggage either; she was going back the way she came, with nothing
but her parents’ spirits cloaking her. She giggled wickedly when she imagined
the look on Njideka’s face when he came back from his trip that evening. She
knew what his reply would have been if she confronted him. Sweetheart is the leader of the occult group, he had been blackmailing
me, so I used your money to pay off, come on P, you never lacked anything, I
made sure of that. Well she was going away from Nigeria; she did not know when she
would come back. She wished she would though, for the sake of her children.
When she
came down from the plane under a new kind of sun in New Delhi, her skin sang with pleasure and
her heart gave a joyous leap. She even removed a sequin from her dress and
placed the shiny thing on her forehead, as a bindi. The young taxi man waiting in front of the airport to pick
her luggage was a little surprised when she came empty handed, but quickly
recovered and closed his palms under his chin and bowed his head a little.
“Namaste!”
“Namaste!”
she replied, the only Indian word she knew, but it would have to do for now,
she was going to take it one bit at a time.
 |
T J Benson is a Nigerian short-story writer. His works have
appeared in the 14th issue of the Sentinel Literary magazine, the Kalahari
Review, Myne Whitman, Aspire.org.ng. He works as a Fashion columnist for the
online magazine www.afrisphere.com and
he recently started an arts magazine www.kaanem.com.
His debut novel The Color of Silence
awaits publication.
|
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