Fiction: Lockdown

Badaru Basiru

The rays of the sun cascading down the roof, shadows forming on the cracked floor, I turned on my left, awake yet not too awake to rise from my mattress. From my position, through the open door of the room, I had glimpsed leaves of the tomatoes I had nursed flutter, the plump greenness of their unripe fruits, the bolted entrance door with its chain dangling from the lock, and the neighbours' voices faint over the wall. This typically traditionally set house, with a row of rooms and a shaded front space like a school compound, had always given this exact picture, in the morning of a rainy-season day, and evoked the same feelings of inertia when I had aroused. 

In a repeat mode, DMX's and Sisqo's "What These Bitches Want From A Nigga" had played before I paused it, raking up memories of childhood in the early 2000s, the formative years of this solitary life I did not know I was being lured to lead; a journey of immense solitude that I was to embark on later. Those early years of my life were the most memorable. I could still taste their sweetness in my mouth, feel their touch, when luckily some happenings had sparked a trickle of the happy hormone, and for no reason other than it I was elated, reminiscing about the past. 

Was it déjà vu? No, it was not. Might it be a mere fantasy? I would not think so either, but I had always felt that the past was sweeter than the present, that things were getting worse than they were. Yet it was what at a point in time was called the "present" that invariably became the "past" that I fantasised about. Clearly, things had changed. I believed they had like everyone else who had witnessed the return of democratic rule in the country in 1999. 

But what was I to do, being among the powerless multitudes who could not effect any changes for the better, even in their little lives, except their natural ability to procreate, multiplying the numerous everyday problems of survival? What, in the emptiness of what I called "my life", would I ever have to actualise my wishes, which were more plausible in the abstract than in reality? 

I lifted off the net under whose protection from mosquitoes I had slept soundly, its hems tucked round the size of the mattress, and crawled out. In some parts, it was stained with the blood of those mosquitoes whose insistence on annoying me with their endless whiz and occassional landing on my bare back had lasted beyond endurance. As I came to sleep, I habitually switched on my phone torch, checked the whole net for the bloodsucking irritants that surprisingly sneaked in at the same time I did or found their way in faster. I had luckily trapped some, clapped them dead in my palms, but one proved difficult to kill, defying every attempt until I got tired of trying and fell asleep with the assurance that I had killed five others and that one tiny thing, no matter how irritating its bite, would not disturb my sleep. 

I untied the straps from the windowsills, crumpled the net into a ball, and heaped it on the folding chair, the other two straps still on the nails hammered into the wall. A mild pain, starting deep from the joint of the head to the neck and lumping in the back of the throat, pierced down my backbone. I stretched to shake it off, my hands up as if to touch the ceiling, and my legs buckled simultaneously, giving off a creaky noise like heavily loaded metallic objects. I moved on and, stopping at the door, disentangled the wires naked in the dysfunctional fan switch. I could not recall when I connected the red to the black. And it could not have been my co-tenant, who had his separate room and had left for his town on vacation five days back. Who put the wires together? I had no idea, hissed and stepped out. 

Brushing my teeth, with a plastic kettle by my left leg and a toothpaste tube in my left hand, all the scary thoughts about the uncertainty of things, about the fickle nature of life itself, rushed into my mind as if I had had a premonition, as if the suddenness of the situation inundating the world was not such as to take by surprise someone like me with a rather ambivalent, anticipatory attitude towards everything: a fusion of a pessimist and an optimist in one body. Gobs, viscous with the whiteness of the paste, had slipped from my mouth. I washed them off, gargling, flushing with the remaining water in the kettle the caking pool of sticky, white foam down the waste pipe. The freshness of having been cleaned of the oral dirt, the satisfaction that always came with the taste of fluoride and minty coolness, the clarity of vision and thought arising from such routine activity, stayed strong in the head until the first morsel had been swallowed to blur it with the ridding of the pangs of hunger. 

I would not have a bath. Bathing would have to wait until after I had had my favourite beverage, perspired as profusely as a leprous beggar in the blazing sun, and come back from the coffee stall. I had learnt, from experience, that sweating post-bath was not good, at least for me. Better to drip and dry before the morning cleanliness, even if later in the day I would not be spared from the harsh weather of my arid region: the result of deforestation without afforestation. So, I put on again the kaftan I had taken off and hung on one of the net nails. I hardly repeated clothes, but the feel of fresh, ironed clothes on a clammy skin would be no less uncomfortable, no less guilty of inappropriateness to prick the conscience. My eyes were drawn unblinkingly to the dark-red-earth building of termites on the wall further down away from the nail. Disgust rose from somewhere I would say was my inner stomach, getting stuck in the region of my throat, and dispelled momentarily from my mouth the sweet scent of the toothpaste. 

"But I swept off these things the other day and sprayed insecticide on them!" I mumbled, wondering at the stubbornness of the insects, the longevity of their miniscule lives. 

Behind the door, there were palm and hay brooms. I grabbed the palmy one, because only it could scratch off easily the built-up mound. The termites fell down with their shelter as I grated the part where the elastic rubber had been strung and the frond root strands tightened in a crisscross knot that added to their gathered strength. They were confused, the termites, agitated in their frantic effort to escape from the unexpectedness of the disruption of their tireless work of building, eating, destroying everything they came in contact with. I bent over the helpless creatures, some of which had been crushed, then hurried back to the door for a dustpan. I had to really be quick, packing them up the pan so that they would not disperse around the books at the head of my mattress, which were, in fact, the cause of my worry and the necessity for clearing the room of even the slightest sight of a termite. My books were my treasure trove worthier than a cache of the shiniest gold. If they were spoiled by termites, the damage would not be on them alone but also on my whole being, my mind: the tool of my calling, the only thing whose existence I could truly know of. 

My left hand was slightly dirty with specks of the redness of the earthen termite building. I emptied the dustpan on the raised ground around the toilet, which had served as a small garden of vegetables growing from washed-off seeds. Some of the termites that had not yet died moved in a frenzy. I poured water on them and watched them glue into the compost, believing  they would not survive such an onslaught, go back into the room and pose any threat to my books. To be sure, I poured some more until what was left was enough only to wash my hands, which I did, dropped the kettle and headed for the entrance. I unbolted the door, took down the padlock, with the key in its hole, from the capped nail up on the foreroom wall. I usually hung it there, to save myself the trouble of remembering where I had tossed it and I needed urgently to find it and leave. The door, made of steel, painted creamy, encrusted with leafy designs slanting, like some oval-shaped object falling but had not wholly touched the ground, the base of its frame gnarled from the weight of the motorcycle of the previous tenant hauling it in and out daily, would not budge at first. 

I pulled forcefully to open it, though I knew the rattle it would make was something I had always resented. The echoes it would cause as it scraped against the unevenness of the floor often jarred on my nerves. I hated, still do with my life, the scratchy noise of metal against concrete or any rock-solid surface, or even the frictive clash of metal against metal. Lord! What a beautiful day full of sunshine and life, full of the promise of the continuation of such to last until the last, what a day to rejuvenate the soul and instil into it the enormous hope for all its desires to be fulfilled within a lifetime, what a day to rekindle in the heart flames that the misfortune of day-to-day encounters had gradually dimmed to a very low glow that was almost nonexistent!

There was no denying the freshness of the morning as I locked the padlock, the sun generous on the nape of my neck, even brighter against the creaminess of the door paint. I put the key in my left trouser pocket, feeling it jiggle sparsely against the folder and a couple of crispy Naira notes. In my right pocket, it was a piece of plain paper folded into a square and a blue ballpoint pen with a sticker on it marked LUCKY. These I carried with me wherever I went as a defence, as a preparation for instances when someone who personally knew me would ask for a pen, like the other day someone filling in a form  at the bank away from the counter at which the bankers would have grudgingly offered him one. In my breast pocket was my phone, heaving a little with the white-striped brown handkerchief buffering it as I moved, while in my side pocket my earpiece coiled.

Past through the sandy field, taking care not to raise its grains and smudge my feet in the side-cut leather sandals, I stepped on the crunchy, pebbled path to the Juma'at Mosque and nursery adjoining the road to the FCMGC. Further to the right along the newly constructed road were the Shagari Quarters flats, standing strong since the1980s (thanks to the quality of masonry in the country back then). I walked and did not look back at the panorama of the area until I had reached the T-junction, straightened east. The nim trees, planted during the time of Sardauna's visionary Premiership of the North, swayed with a rustling sound, their shades cool, extending past the lip of the road where the tarred part started off the rough, stony pavement. The trees had shed a lot of leaves, littering the ground, which was nearly covered over, except in some parts with whole stumps fallen and their hewn debris scattered, blending with the lighter brownness below. 

For a quarter of a kilometre, I walked, immersed in my thoughts, to the area of the mobile telecommunication mast and cars of the neighbouring houses parked under nim, mango and eucalyptus trees, away from the watchman's  thatch-and-stalk chalet, a clay pot of water dug half in the ground, and a couple of mats spread out as early as they would remain so for their need to come up in the afternoon. And not a single vehicle had driven by. It was curious that a road that vehicles plied all the time was this deserted, this quiet. I began to suspect something must have gone wrong, or else by now I should have crossed over to the left side of the road to be meeting vehicles rather than following the right with my back turned to whatever was coming. I had always thought it much of a risk to turn my back to speeding things but at night, ironically, I would do so to shy from confronting headlights that reckless drivers shot at haphazard, blinding angles.

"What's happening really!" I said, barely audibly.

My suspicion was confirmed seeing at the roundabout the shops that would have been busy with customers and private cars going to and fro and children riding their bicycles to school. Here were supposed to have been long lines of commercial vehicles parked on either side of the road divided at the extreme in two by a traffic island, groundnuts and fried soya beans cakes in transparent, medium plastic buckets, and horns honking, voices loud and interrupting one another, the generator of the soft drinks shop pumping power, its exhaust pipe emitting poisonous, black smoke between the two drums brimming with water on concrete pedestals. I descended down the road to the tea stall and found it unopened, the formica-topped table with woven wires empty like the ghost town that the whole area had just become. But there were the benches that were arranged rectangularly, and the tea pot was also there with a cluster of tinders stuffed into the hearth. There must have been an attempt at doing business earlier in the morning but which had, sadly, been scuttled. I sat on the longest of the benches, facing the road and the black-and-white kerbs edged with an uneven mixture of overspilled tar and cement. And the view was much clearer, taking in the wooden hurdle that had been placed in the way, very much like the one that Olympic athletes jump over but very much wider, a little lower. In the middle of the road, where the traffic warden usually stood under a wheeled roof marked "Powered by TAKAINO", dexterously giving orders to drivers with his hands in white gloves, his orange khaki shirt contrasting with the black belt fastening his slender waist in black trousers, there was nobody. But farther was a navy-blue police van inscribed SAFER HIGHWAYS, and the officers, all in camouflaged uniforms, were sitting on a bench by the open door and the driver policeman was on the steering staring into his phone. The woman frying "waina", millet paste baked in a firewood-fuelled earthen oven, had not come either. Her spot glistened in the sun with the blackness of soot coated in oil dripping from the lubricating spoon turning the delicacies in the hollows of the pan.

"Something must be awry," I thought, looking towards the policemen, one of whom seemed to have singularly noticed my presence. 

I shuffled towards them with so much confidence as to exude innocence, ignorance of whatever had brought about this unusual state of things: because to exchange glances, even from a short distance, would be to arouse suspicion over a matter that had none. One could never tell with the police, but none of them bothered to ask me what I was doing or whether I knew I had gone against the law of the "new normal". I kept my pace, flashed a forced smile at them as I came a few inches to their bench. The one who had stared at me I easily recognised. He lived in the area I had lived when I was growing up in the 1990s. I did not know exactly when he had joined the Nigeria Police Force. I just saw him one day in uniform with his AK-47 slung on his shoulder and glasses, dark as his shoes, over his eyes.

"Bear with the situation. It won't be long, God willing!" He said.

"Hopefully, officer!" I responded. 

I passed by the Post Office, looking at the rows of boxes in the verandah wall and their stainless, circular locks. The Post Mistress was on a mat, leaning on a leather-tasselled maroon pillow, a light brown envelop bulging with something, most likely a book parcel, lying beside her. I immediately remembered the time I had ordered for some books and received a call from her. That was back in the days I was crazily absorbed in pursuing a writing career, specifically literature or at least journalism, before the reality of life's harshness burst the bubble of illusion in which I had swirled oblivious of the material world. 

But I was, still am, grateful to myself for choosing to indulge in the dreamy life, because I would say it was a relief from the pain of having had nothing tangible to occupy me since school: a real relief from the piercing knowledge of the fact that, in the event of a streak of failures, there had got to be something to give the despairing soul a shred of hope for things to improve even if they would be unchanged as they were. 

There was the makeshift mosque near the mechanic's garage cluttered with broken-down motorcycles, unscrewed nuts, parts dripping with blackened oil. A kind of softness on the sole of the shoe was noticeable, even to the one walking briskly, due to ages of grease and dead oil melting in the sand there, smoothening it with a dustlessness. I brought the hems of my kaftan up to my hands and held them as I squeezed my way between the undone front wheel of a motorcycle and the dismembered engine block and carburetor of another, its clutch cable loose like an inelastic, thin rubber rope. 

Then came into view the phone repairer's kiosk with its red-printed Mobitel logo, stashes of dissected phones on wooden shelves, packets of earpieces for sale, and two phone owners waiting with an eagerness. Across it, the boutique had a stretch of steel cage round its perimeter, and it took an accustomed eye to see the shirts and trousers on bolts, nails and hangers. There had also been mannequins, but the spiritual authority had cautioned against displaying them, issuing an order for especially the female-shaped ones baring bouncy breasts, tempting innocent passers-by with their lewdness, to be removed so that there would not be any salacious objects in the street: moral police at work. A foot or two in front, the woman food vendor had had her wares stationed, covered with a large transparent polythene speckled with the evaporating heat from the content, like beads of sweat on a silky skin. But she herself had not arrived, perhaps a little later when she would drive in a rickshaw with her thermo-container of stew and cuts of beef; or perhaps she had come but the situation had made her return and send the driver for the wares.

How many like her who would have prepared to go about their daily businesses but who had had to cancel in such a hurried manner as to be unbelievable? How many would have woken that morning thinking all was well only to be told some abnormality had begun to ruin things too numerous to count?

Down the road, it was silent, as if the trumpet Angels of Death would blow to discontinue life itself had already been blown. But in the nooks and crannies, life went on as if nothing had happened, though it was obvious the frequency had lessened and people seemed to be tiptoeing, whispering so as not to attract the attention of the security agents buzzing about in vans in the name of enforcing compliance, which they too must have found ridiculous. Duty. Obedience. The law enforcers must be ready to enforce the law, must at all times appear appreciative of the meaning and necessity of ensuring adherence to the provisions of the law, even if deep down they themselves hold doubts and may break them in their personal capacity, abetting those close to them.

"How do they think we're going to survive if they don't let us out? I ask, how!" One bystander reasoned to his fellows in the path to the bakery behind the old supermarket that had once been the perfect example of a thriving business, the others nodding in agreement with his reason. "Or do they think everybody is like them who have stores of food to eat a whole lifetime? This isn't wise. The poor were already in difficulties, and now this foolishness. What's it called again?"

"Lockdown," said one of them. 

They all shrieked with laughter, clutching their paunches to reduce the effect. How the poor never run out of laughter in the face of adversities, how the human system of the downtrodden absorbs shocks of displeasure and contains them like they were not, is beyond comprehension! Or could it be that the plebeians are endowed with so much strength of the body and mind that dissipates only in their rise to the station of the rich where they are consequently afflicted with feebleness, fear, baseless suspicion? 

I crossed the road to the pharmacy on the left and stopped briefly to greet the pharmacist bent on the counter looking outside. We had known each other since Science Secondary School days, lived in the same dormitory and class but were not quite intimate, because he had his circle of friends and I had mine. Yet we were all friends, coming from the same town, living in proximity. He had his further education at the College of Health Technology while I went to the College of Legal Studies, leaving entirely the sciences for the arts. A science student replacing Physics, Chemistry,  Biology, Geography and Agricultural Science with Literature, Government, Economics and Islamic Studies. Call it scholarly apostasy, call it educational heresy, call it conversion or whatever more suitable word, but I had always felt odd in the science class. I knew full well it would be hard for me to go for a scientific career with my aversion to Mathematics. Instead, I had secretly nursed an ambition to go into the arts where I had never doubted that my aptitude for languages would help me catch up. Languages to make up for my half-hearted grasp of the mathematical sciences. My pharmacist of a friend would criticise my switching to the arts, if as a field of study Law could strictly be categorised as an art, not as a juridical science in itself. He would deride it, calling it "intellectual cowardice", an "academic sacrilege" that would have warranted me 80 lashes if it were at the altar. We would laugh it off, and I would dare him to do the same if it did not take as much discipline to memorise "Latin legal maxims" as "scientific terms", if there was any difference reading late at night, sweating in the stifling heat of exam halls, and the anxiety over the uncertainty of whether one had written the right answers or not. And there would be no response from him other than a shake of the head in partial agreement, and we would clap hands, go our separate ways. Childhood friends were that congenial, that joy-giving for the simple reason that they were there during the boyish years of one's life, their presence embedded in the most remarkable moments one had had; hence their indelibility. 

Following the swing to the left, off the table of the grocer who would normally have by now loaded it with freshly plucked tomatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, salad, onion, I quickened into the neighborhood along open, shallow gutters smelly with all that the households had luckily got themselves. Through the lengths of the buildings lining the lane, with shops built where there had been sitting rooms or car garages, because the times had become too biting that such architectural alterations were necessary to stem the tide of familial economic crisis, the sharp turn to the right led to another a few metres apart. Then there was the whole road undulating, curving a little this way or that, reaching its height at the left corner shortly after which a phone-charging kiosk stood. Beside it was a generator, supplying power into the phones whose owners had paid for to charge their batteries. Instinctively, I put my hand in my pocket and brought my phone out. The screen was dim in the sun. I moved aside to let pass a car coming to turn the corner I had just emerged from, and increased the brightness of the screen, which I usually did during the day. The battery bar was at 19%. I needed some charging also.

The previous night, I had lain supine, propping my hands to hold my phone at an angle, and watched video clips for hours. And the data bar was on, and so the fast draining of the battery I had charged until it had warned "Battery full. Unplug charger, please." Afterwards, I watched offline some films, Korean drama series, I had saved for long but had not had time to finish, maybe because I was not really interested in the story, or maybe I was not familiar with the actors who were not mainstream Hollywood actors I had been conversant with their works; or maybe the incomprehensible language was what put me off. 

"Not now," I said, moving towards the Psychiatric Hospital. 

A signboard arrested my eye with the inscription "Drugs kill the future. Better not patronise them to have a bright tomorrow." courtesy of some youths on the completion of the mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme by every university or polytechnic graduate. The future that the inscriber of the words alluded to, he or she could not have had any guarantee as to its brightness. In fact, it was all bleakness, right from Orientation Camps where the graduates were indirectly persuaded to put at the back of their minds that there were no jobs for them in the public and private sectors, that the way for survival would be in entrepreneurial endeavours; that the knowledge and certificates acquired would be to guide them towards excellence in their personal application, and not as tickets to the national treasury as they had all dreamt of while toiling and moiling in school; a tomorrow that might never come, or if it reluctantly came it would not have been preferred to the day gone. 

I turned east, stepping over intermittent bumps. I always wondered why these were built, but then the realisation that if they were not there some cars would be dangerous and children rushing out from home might get hit, would strike me to submission, and I would convince myself that they had to be to slow down overspeedy drivers. I would then ask in my mind if in other countries, our neighbours, speed bumps also obtained on their roads as prevalently as we had on ours, or if they were structures peculiar to us for our "driving behaviour", our brazen disregard for traffic laws. And I would agonize over our unwillingness to diligently apply our laws, which could rival in quality any laws anywhere but which, regrettably, we lacked the strictness to uphold. I would recall my Constitutional Law lectures, marvelling at the beauty of our laws and how things would have been utterly different were they to be stuck to and the coercive institutions to be granted full independence. How great studying those acts and legislation in addition to the written constitutional laws, how superb cramming sections and sub-sections of the 1999 Constitution of the Fourth Republic the way we crammed verses of The Book on our slates at the evening school! 

Another lane cut across the main one to the west, just after the tailor's shop and the spot where the dye-man had had his rusty, zinc-walled workshop off the drain along the adjoined fences of the houses. The tar here was newer, smoother, cleaner, even softer. One could feel the smoothness as if the shoe would dip under the weight of the walker and leave an imprint. It was recently laid, perhaps one of the "constituency projects" by the lawmaker representing the zone at the National Assembly, or by some civil servant at the federal level leveraging his high office for infrastructural community development. Dividend of democracy, they say on the radio. 

There was a sharp curve, not more than 100 metres from the start of the lane, back through the area. As I walked, glancing sideways at the masonic allure of the buildings, I caught my side view in a silvery window. I stopped, reversed a foot, and stood checking myself up in the mirror-like glass. It was then that I realised I had forgotten to wear my cap, which I was learning to get used to. I had never been fond of caps, though an ardent kaftan wearer I was. My mother had scolded me for refusing caps. The proprietor of the school I had worked at had once given me two sets of kaftan and a cap. I knew the gift at the time was more to inculcate in me the culture of putting on a cap than to add to my clothes. Yet I had not picked up and tossed the cap somewhere in my bag. But some urgency had necessitated buying with my own money another cap, wooly, black to match all colours when coupled with a pair of sleek black shoes. That was when I accompanied a friend to a girl's house to meet her family, and tradition had it that on such a courtship visit the suitor and his escorts of friends should be attired traditionally to fit the description of perfectly culturally oriented youths worthy of being handed a girl's hand in marriage. And after the visit I too had come to terms with the expectation of matching kaftans with a cap and begun to love it. How costly the price we had to pay to blend in society, to earn for our individual selves and families the mark of good upbringing! 

I climbed down the slabs over the drain to the left of the steel water tank up on its low, welded stand knotted at the base on square concrete platforms with the plaque "Project by Senator Kaci Banza". I trod on the dirt, past the mosque in the centre of the phase serving as a barricade against large motors cruising through. The houses were mixed around here; some traditional in design, with forerooms daubed with red earth and cement while others, taking the majority, modern in shape with long, sloping, colourful corrugated aluminium roofing sheets. At the stamp of my feet in the eerie silence of the area, a dog started to bark, thrusting its head in the gap between the pillar and the gate hinged to it. It grew fiercer as I came directly opposite it where it could see me clearly, hopping to break free from the chains it was in. A bushy, black-and-grey-dotted fur it had, a breed of a domesticated wild animal fattened on the riches of its owner with the ornamented house. I hated dogs, still do. I would not have followed the phase if I had known there was one. I hated being rattled by a barking bastard when I had least expected to come by one and suddenly heard its flurry of hair-raising grunts from nowhere. And I had to look around and realise that the nuisance was directed at my poor, slow-walking self. 

But a girl rushed and dragged the dog's head away from its peeking position back into the interior of the house, knocking it to a hush. She must have been unsettled by the noise as other members of the household might have, since the house was spacious after the gates and the rooms across had their doors flung open, to let the breeze in. I hastened towards the intersection and stopped at the shop on the right, jumping over the gutter bobbing with inflated, discarded sachets of water (pure water, in the common parlance) and all the liquid waste the houses nearby had flushed. Behind the counter, I saw the young man who had kept the shop from the first day it was started two years back. I had had my shopping here since, and the familiarity was there on his face as it was on mine. 

"What do I even want?" I whispered, leaning over the counter. 

The shopkeeper smiled, reading my indecisiveness. He knew exactly the stuff I usually bought whenever I came: pasta, rice, sugar, teabags, and once in 6 weeks or more a pair of slippers. 

"Well, what you often want I've it all," he pored over the shelves behind him stacked with stocks of canned, packaged food, with sweets, detergents, exercise books, pens, pencils.

"I'm not sure. That's why," I said, crossing my lips with my forefinger in thought, as if by doing that I would be able to decide what to buy. After a moment, I added, pointing at a package of Lipton Yellow Label Tea, "Give me that." 

He carefully removed the package out from the stacks above it so that they would not fall and collapse the whole part. He seemed eager to bring the thing to me for not having had a lot of people ask for things, almost stumbling into a sack of salt against the grid-like shelves, but he did not care. 

"Then what?" He asked, placing it on the counter before me, looking past out at something, which when I looked back to see what it was my eyes met with only an agama lizard, its head red, body dark blue, tail light orange and black at the tip, on the unplastered cement-block wall of the house opposite. 

"I think this is all I want for now," I said. 

He just stared out at whatever invisible thing he had been staring at, his fore and middle fingers on the package, waiting for more orders, which to his dismay there would not be. He maintained silence as I delved my hand in my pocket. 

"How much?" I asked.

"This curfew is nonsense. It's going to kill people and businesses faster than the bogus virus," he spluttered.

"Exactly!" I said, clenching the money, in curious concentration on the subject of the "new normal".

"Can you imagine how little I've made since 6:30? Imagine this paltry!" He was now bumbling to bring his money box to the height of the counter for me to see inside, ruffling notes of the lower denominations: three old torn 50, six 20, and a lot of 5 and 10 Naira notes. 

"Wallahi, it's this situation! I trekked round town and there wasn't anything going on. I don't think it'll take long before people start breaking the rule. Because it isn't possible to stay indoors with empty pockets," I blurted. 

"Not only impossible. In fact, it's madness," he said, about to blow a laugh but collected himself to say more after hearing my side again. 

"I didn't want to use the 'M' word, but that's it," I concurred. 

Now there was no restraining ourselves from laughing out loud. A conversation about the current state of things we or anybody else could not deny would naturally generate such mutual agreement. The obvious was beginning to affect the economy, disfigure what people had all held as "life". The conditions of poverty and endless worries about myriad other life problems that began in the womb through the cell, tissue, organ and system developments, the souls of the ordinary men of the land had somehow had the capacity to live with, to never let them overwhelm the little space and time between life and the slow, subtle slide into the void of the side beyond sight. 

"It's ₦350, but leave it at ₦300," he said, still the visible after-effects of the laugh on his face, in a wide smiling form. 

I counted the money and gave him. In my mind, I was finding it hard to suppress the urge to pay him full, but I thought better than to reject the discount he had willingly offered even though he had just complained about the tightness of market. I walked out, holding the package in a black polythene bag, and shouted on the roofed veranda floor, "Haba! How could this go on! It can't be sustained!"

Cutting across the road, past another much larger water tank up on a steel-crossed tower, I trudged on the sandy fields of the Government Primary School with its storey buildings, rails along the edges to prevent the likely occurrence of stubborn, playful children falling off, and the locked iron bars at the staircase built in after the incident of some pedophile vagabond raping a minor. The return home was much less effortless, zigzagging through corners, thin, pebbled lanes, and pure sand partly taken over with gravelled, rough, tarred roads. And the knowledge of what the world I had known as "normal" had suddenly turned into had dawned on me, and the beginning of a catastrophe that had never been imagined loomed large on the horizon, clear even to those who had accidentally lost their seeing ability; for the pain was about to sting all.

---

Setu, July 2024