19/12/2014 You are standing by the roadside waiting for a bus that is headed towards Mararaba. It is twenty minutes past three and the sun is still severe. youd decided to pick a book from a bookstore today and the only bookstore that is close to your area which you think should have what you want is the WONDERLAND BOOK CITY in Mararaba where you are about to head to. You could not afford to continue in boredom at home. Even your companion (Facebook) is beginning to bore you this days, no new stuffs, so much repeated rants on the upcoming 2015 elections, rants on choosing between two evils; the eifishi and the fidifi and of a truth these things dont interest you. You board the green and white bus popularly called araba. The bus is damn hot and the body odour that emanates from the fat lady seating beside you nauseates you. you are restive. Its almost like you were kept in a tight room and all the air in the room is being sucked out leaving you to choke in your own released carbon dioxide. You pull out your hanky from your pocket and wipe the dotty sweat on your face which had formed like vapour on the lid of a boiling water pot and then begin to fan yourself with it. This is one of the things you hate about this town, the heat. Other towns are already boasting of hamattarn. But this town you are in, it always dares to be different. The bus gets filled up and the driver takes off. Warm air rushes into the bus and you breathe a sigh of relief. The bus conductor summons you for his fare. On a normal day you paid fifty naira to Mararaba but today youd pay a hundred naira because the yuletide period is near, petrol has all of sudden become scarce, long endless qeues are seen in filling stations which had petrol, and for this reason, theres hike in transport fares. The bus drops you at your destination and you walk into the bookstore. You have a book in mind; black boy by Walter Wright. Youd read an excerpt of the book somewhere, you cant really remember where now and since then youd longed to read the complete book. By the left corner of the entrance is a man in his early twenties seated in front of a flat screen desktop computer. Good evening sir You greet. Evening sir. How may I help you? he replies in a customer friendly manner, his English neat and void of unnecessary tongue twisting. Do you have novels? You ask. He says no, that the only books they have are Christian literatures. Your hopes are dashed. It is the biggest bookstore you know around. You thank him and take your leave. You cross to the other side of the road and head towards the Abacha road. As you walk pass the Gamil complex which houses different business from pharmacy, to transport, bakery, supermarkets etc. You sight a young almajiri lad curled up in front of the bakery sleeping, his hands hugging tight his knees with his blue rubber plate held tightly between his fingers. You look at his white face, his ragged shirt that was torn at both sides of the shoulder, his cracked lips and foot; a product of the hamattan and you felt pity for him, so much pitty that you swallow hard your saliva. Is he an orphan? Why is he sleeping at this time of the day? is it because he is hungry? Could it be he has parents somewhere in Kano, Maiduguri or any of these far Northern States who had sent him far away at this tender age to fend for himself? So many questions ran through your mind, they were all questions you had no answer to. You take a left turn and walk into the tarred street of the Abacha Road. This place is were the big men who have retired come to live. The street has a different air from the street you live in. There are so many plazas scattered on both sides of the street. As you walk down the street, your eyes scan the sign post on every store until it caught a bookstore. You walk in to meet a woman, big the size of a hippo. She sits there, relaxed her frame fully tucked in a plastic chair. You ask if she has novels and she says no and tells you to check the next bookshop which is opposite hers. At the next bookstore you dont still get what you want, but you saw other books of interest mostly Farafina publications. You picked up Americana by Chimananda and checked the price tag. it was two thousand five hundred naira, it surprised you because of a truth the Internet has made you believe that hard copy books are no longer in Vogue and as such should be very cheap. you had only two thousand naira on you. You searched for more books and then finally settled for The thing around your neck, a collection of short stories by Chimananda. Youd read excerpts of some of the stories on the New Yorker websites. You pay the lady, thank her and walk away. You board a bus back home. it is a staff bus the conductor asks everyone to enter with their change. The bus is a very long one so the fare is fifty naira. You are holding a hundred naira but you still enter anyways . It is time to pay the conductor. You ask the lady sitting beside you to give you her fifty naira so you could give the conductor your hundred naira for the both of you. She says no, she tells you to pay yours because she had only forty naira and she was going to give the conductor before alighting. Other people on the row give you their money and you hand it over to the conductor. You get to your junction and alight, the lady sitting beside you alights too. She does not pay the conductor the forty naira instead she comes down from the bus filling victorious and whispers to you that the conductor hadnt even notced you didnt pay your fare. You wondered how the country would move forward with such people still in existence. And yet everyday this same people point accusing fingers at the government for corruption. If only these people knew the change they so yearn for was to start with them, then, the nation will be a step ahead in fighting corruption. But no, these people dont know. They see corruption as what only the government did. Corruption to them is a term attached only to the government. You cross over to the other side of the road, picked a bike and went home just to meet mama pounding yam. You later eat and want to update a journal of the days activities on Facebook, but the heavy meal took a hold on you and you slept, your phone in hand and your novel beside your head. ~momohslaw~
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 22:29:39 +0000