PRACTICE - ONE

When I told Dad, I expected he’d be… surprised… or something. But he appeared not so. He didn’t even seem impressed. I thought parents always loved to hear their sons or daughters say this… Confirmed why I always tagged with my mother in things like this. I now wondered why I hadn’t gone to her first.

When he finally lifted his head from his newspaper, he corrected gently…

                “Don’t say you have found a wife; say you have found a girl you wish to marry”.

He said this without any sort of animation, and then went back to his reading.

                “Noted,” I said, to regain his attention.

That may have been a little rude.

To end the conversation he said he was going to activate Grandpa’s role in the ‘marriage process’… that Grandpa was going to tell me what to do.

                I went to my room. My Dad and I never held long conversations. It was always questions and answers. Close ended ones. I sat on my bed deep in thought: ‘Grandpa? What more role does he have to play in my marriage than my own father?!’

The next week I travelled to the village. Grandpa had been briefed, and I was to become his ‘student’. When I arrived, he was out, so I and Grandma simply caught up, almost naturally avoiding the ‘course’ that Grandpa would exclusively teach.

                After dinner, Grandma was carrying on some domestic chores away from earshot, leaving Grandpa and I to get down to business.

I narrated it all to him… I’d never imagined a rush to get married would come upon me, but as things stood, some progress had to be made in that direction as soon as possible.

It was late August; an academic sojourn lay ahead of me by six months. The scholarship could accommodate a man and his wife – for the trip at least. So I’d thought that, if we got married, I could travel with Laide. Otherwise, I could be away for too long to sustain our relationship… and I didn’t want to lose her. My family didn’t know she existed; no one even knew I had a girl in my life. Neither did we – she and I – know each other too well. All I knew was that, this was the girl for me, and I bothered heaven frequently with the request to make her mine.

My plan, in the least interpretation, was to initiate a move… so that a formal introduction wouldn’t be too far behind. So the first thing was to inform my folks; and that simple speech had brought me here.

                “Grandpa… I want to initiate the process of marrying a girl. I love her very much and, with time, I ah… supposed… we’d gradually come to this. But I travel in February for a course in the US and, not advancing reasonably along this path before then is a risk I don’t want to take.”

I was trying to impress the old man with my linguistic ability, but I adulterated my Igbo with English vocabularies here and there.

For a while he didn’t say a thing, only cast his head backwards on his easy chair, eyes closed, seemingly in deep thought. Then, eventually, as if he wasn’t the one I’d been speaking to, he called out to Grandma from within the house.

                “Get me my snuff box”, he said to her.

                “Grandpa?” I called him gently.

“Grandpa?”

                “Hmmmmm…” he acquiescingly faced me as if to say ‘yeah, what are you even saying?’

“Chinedu!” He called my native name.

                “Sir.”

                “Where’s the girl?”

I was confused.

                “Sir?”

                “It’s a girl you’re to marry, am I correct?”

                “Yes sir.”

                “Where’s she?”

                “Papa… she’s in Benin… That’s where they live…” I was stuttering, but Grandpa had made his point.

I continued to try to explain, lest the conversation be dead and my mission over.

“Papa, she’s quite young… and she’s an only child… they probably wouldn’t let her travel… So I was thinking that… that… if maybe... papa was aware, he would advise on the next step. Maybe… we arrange to see her people… or… or something…”

The old man didn’t appear to be interested in my tale.

Grandpa was a strict man, I knew, but I was very confused on why he was treating me with such coldness. I’d come all the way from Abuja… I wasn’t even being hosted as such. I wondered if they – he and my father – thought it was too early for me to talk of marriage. Not a case of disapproval of the girl in question yet; they didn’t even know her. They hadn’t even asked me who she was or where she was from and all that. That was where I’d envisaged problems. So I wondered: if non issues were this hard to surmount, it meant the project would altogether collapse upon their realization of the fact that the girl in question was from Edo State.

                “Papa…” I tried to speak again and he took over.

                “If the parents of the girl cannot trust you enough with their daughter for one week, then I doubt they can do that for a lifetime.”

He poured out some snuff unto his left palm, and that gesture snuffed out the conversation.

I went to bed, dizzied and discombobulated by the shoddy attention my ancestors were paying to my intention to marry.