At the weekend I went to my parents’
house. Everything was normal. No one asked me questions. Not even Dad… He
didn’t ask me how things went with Grandpa or what I’d been up to. Lately, he
and Mom had become quite distant and hard to reach. It made me think they were
unhappy with me or something.
Usually,
if married couples take a vacation – or whatever exercise prescribed to
rejuvenate their love – the first signs of success are usually spotted in the
ways they attend to their children. It becomes often shabby. They take the love
and attention meant for the children and shower on themselves. All of it! The
children’s affairs take back stage: The crying baby would have to make do with
the attention of the nanny; all the children would have to cope with long
stretches of hunger; the maid would have much more work to do... all the while,
Mom and Dad would be in their bedroom looking into each other’s eyes and
laughing at their unfunny jokes. Having retired and moved to a quiet part of
town, it was as though Mom and Dad were newlyweds now. What they had now was an
everlasting vacation. Every time we came around, it was clear where their
priorities lay – in each other. It was difficult to connect with them.
Beyond
that matrimonial preoccupation, however, it was possible that my Dad wasn’t
happy with me. A friend of his had fed him a million fascinating stories about
chattered accountants, and he wouldn’t have me be anything else. It always
seemed I was going to get involved in the race there… in a matter of time. But
now that my immediate academic future lay in purely artistic fields in the US,
he must have felt I would never become a chartered accountant after all. I was
going to study classical literature… and I nursed a personal ambition of
merging it with modern to create a writing style of my own. I didn’t seek to
get into it in Nigeria because I didn’t want to always come home to his
disappointed and disapproving countenance. Moreover, how could a venture like
that put food on my table in this country? Now I was switching careers. As if
that was not enough, I was talking about getting married… and marriage
pigeonholes a man’s path, leaving little or no room for risky career
adventures. Simply put, if I didn’t become a chartered accountant before I got
married, I would never become.
I
imagined Dad’s inhaler would be running out, so I bought him a new one. I
bought him a new tin of coffee too. As he always did when I bought things for
him, he refunded the money I expended… against my wish… said he didn’t want to
bother me. That wasn’t how I saw it.
The rains began to increase in
frequency, but decrease in intensity. A few good rains lay ahead, though. September.
The ‘Ember’ months were here. The franticness was setting in. Time was running
out. I knew I couldn’t take Laide away from her family at Christmas season. The
time was now. All the joy they knew in that family probably revolved around
her. Even if I could, I didn’t want to be in the village with her at a time
when Dad and Mom would probably be there. It might lousy up Grandpa’s schemes.
Plus, I could face Grandpa’s tortures – if at all… couldn’t say the same for my
Dad’s.
I put in two full weeks at work,
calling Laide’s Dad ever so frequently.
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