Mother had an excellent memory that traumatized me.
She held on to dates and events immediately they happened, and kept holding on
to them for a disturbing and amazingly long time. She held on to dates and timelines of
children’s death, of bad dreams, of disappointments. Like they were catalogued
in a sort of mental archive, a part of her memory that would constantly allow
her remind people of the evil of the devil, and of how much prayers and Jesus
can work wonders.
And so after a certain incident that stole five years
of my life, in a manner of speaking, she began to nag me like an ill-tempered ogre
about finding Jesus. It was simply an incident. Yet her pastor had advised her,
and asked her to warn me not to speak of it carelessly.
For how else could she explain the sudden death of one
man, and the disappearance of another, months into their relationship with a
young lady like me? I hated her idea of religion. If mama had brought
Christianity to this world, I once told my Aunt Kemi, then no one would be a
Christian.
It was August. Twenty-one days into the university
lecturers’ strike, two years after Ade had gone without prior notice, and three
years since Onimisi’s death, she reminded me. What are you doing about your soaring age? What are you doing about finding
Jesus? What are you doing about having a man? You are in your second year at the University for Christ’s sake!
And when I tried to absolve myself of any of these
accusations, saying that it wasn’t my fault, her retort would bite even harder.
Whose fault is it that you are chasing
thirty? She would bellow. She would remind me about how irresponsible the
men in Lafia were, and how much she disliked Ade the first day I brought him
home and how he had validated her presentiment of being dangerous the way he
had abandoned me like a sour business deal.
As I left Lafia
for Jos that day in August, her words slashed my flesh like shards of broken
glass. Aunt Kemi’s arms were as warm and open as ever. She understood me very
well. Your mother asked me to tell you to
accept Jesus, Aunty Kemi said with the grin that often made her look my age.
She’d just called her sister to keep her mind at ease about my whereabouts. I
was happy to be with her. Jos felt like nirvana.
Jos in August is radiant. It rains almost every day.
And I seemed to get the idea that God was pleased with the way the flowers
sprouted out of the mountains. Whenever I visited Aunt Kemi at her shop in
Abuja market, the place further sealed my love for the people of Jos. Everybody
worked with an air of confidence here.
It was in this soporific mood I met Toyo. “Has
everyone found Jesus in Jos?” I asked with a sarcastic smile when he told me
that he worshipped in the same church with Aunt Kemi. “I think so,” he replied
with a flash humour that lightened my face. “Jos is an acronym for Jesus Our
Saviour”, he added. And every day after that, with the exception of Sundays, I
always met Toyo whose printing shop was two shops away from Aunt Kemi’s.
In the intervening months between August and December,
I bonded effortlessly with Toyo the same way it happened with Onimisi in Zaria.
We talked randomly about everything: the lingering lecturers’ strike; my
mother; the weather. I liked his idea of calling me a nonconformist because it
often nudged me out of the frame of mind that my mother was getting me into. So
on one hazy December morning, I received the news of the strike’s ending with
mixed feelings I couldn’t describe.
I kept faith with Toyo. In March, he came to the
university in Zaria to see me and to apply for a post-graduate program. “I’m in
love with you,” he told me matter-of-factly, “and I forever will”. I captured
that moment and froze it in my mind for eternity.
In May, one hot evening, in the sweltering heat, the
television screen came alive whilst the students lounged in the Common Room. Abuja
market had just been bombed by the insurgents! I went outside for some fresh
air. The gust of hot wind enveloped me. In the days and months to come, the
tears would keep flowing whenever I remembered my mother’s words that all the
shops on Aunt Kemi’s lane had been affected by the blast. It will be hard, I thought.
It will be hard to find better memories.
