Growing up in Jimo Village taught me very invaluable lessons on interacting with the opposite gender. I was brought up between the Late Analogue and Early Digital Eras, the days when village dating was more physically than economically draining. There were no mobile phones then, and even if we had one I am not sure my father would have sanctioned their use in his house. I grew up in a financial crisis of sorts, knowing that exercise books were exclusively for schoolwork, and my father would crosscheck every page of an exercise book for spillage before he exchanged it with a new one. So plucking even one page for miscellaneous acts of pleasing twinkle girls with sweet nothings was unthinkable. There were no pocket moneys either. My father was that parent who would come to school during visiting days swinging his arms with only that day’s newspaper under his wings, when other parents arrived with open car boots overflowing with home made food and supermarket stuff. And my father was that parent who could not entertain his children having boyfriends or girlfriends while still in his house. The day he saw you walking with a girl in a manner likely to suggest that you were in love, he asked you to pack your stuff and go run your house from outside his compound. To him, having a boyfriend/girlfriend was a sign of rebellion, and he was keen to remind us that as long as he was alive, there was going to be only one centre of power in his homestead. But village romance had to go on, with or without my father’s blessings, while still living under his tough roofing. It was like having your cake and eating it, an unthinkable act of treason my father would kill you without demur. My father loved children who were married to their academic materials, and this was the chink in his strong disciplinary armor. Jimo Primary School had not enough textbooks for every student, so we would be paired with the classmate living closer to your home, one person would begin with the Maths textbook, while the other with English Aid, after which we would exchange later on in the evening. This was the most anticipated leg in the entire homework relay. Because textbooks were scarce, Jimo Primary School made it compulsory for students to cover the textbooks with a newspaper leaf to slow the inevitable process of wear and tear. My father never allowed anyone coming in to drop a book to get into his house. He would stand by the door, personally receive the books on my behalf, then hand them over to me. So the seemingly naïve girl would come home, knock on my father’s door and ask him to handover that book to me. I would receive the book, unfold the back page newspaper cover, remove the letter under the cover of darkness, then destroy the evidence before my father got wind. But romance has a way of backfiring when least expected. So this day, the girl came, handed over the book as was the norm. Those who’ve ever been in love know the feeling too well. Waiting for my father to call me for the book took forever that day. So I decided to peep by the door hinge to check what was going on. There was my dad, reading the newspaper cover the textbook was wrapped in. The story was about a political issue that was of keen interest to him. My father would do anything to get informed, and when I saw him uncovering the book to read the full newspaper details, my heart stopped beating. There it was, the carefully folded letter, in a white single-line exercise book page, dropping down my father’s lap. That is the day my father cursed why he had asked contractors to design our village house with a backdoor. I was halfway around the world by the time I heard him calling my name.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 05:32:04 +0000
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