pointed with his jaw, and then he was gone.
I was afraid. This was precisely the point for me to call it a night. I urgently had to return to the safety of my car and the security of my boys—because scientific research is best conducted with two feet solidly on the ground. Any mugger looking at my clothes just then could reasonably expect to raise three or four hundred thousand naira between my wallet and mobile phones. I was a legitimate target. But the speed of Jonszer’s withdrawal made it impossible for me to remove myself from the area of risk without actually taking to my heels—an undignified option, which was out of the question. I was still undecided when a man stormed out through the huddle. He was carrying a box and cursing under his breath. The scientist in me paused, warring with the human in me, which desperately desired the owner’s corner of my Mercedes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, as the man flung the box into the boot of the car.
‘I am a detribalised Nigerian!’ he shouted, seemingly, addressing not just all of Lemue Street, but the entire Kreektown itself. ‘My father is Yoruba, my mother is Ibibio!’
‘Calm down,’ I told him.
He only shouted louder: ‘My hospital is in Onitsha! I have lived in Kano! In Calabar! In Lagos!’
‘Just like me,’ I told him, but he had slammed the boot shut and stormed back into the house.
I was free again to go, but by now the human in me was even more curious than the scientist. I approached the house, whose number I now saw was 43. The huddle resolved into two weeping women. The younger was begging the older, who was replying, ‘There’s nothing I can do, now, there’s nothing I can do.’
I clasped my fingers over the gentle rise of my stomach and, using a voice developed over thirty years of clinical medicine, asked, ‘Are you quite all right? I am Chief Doctor Ehi Alela Fowaka, JP. Is there anything at all I can do to help?’
I got the polite response that has been my lot, anywhere I go in this respectful country. They greeted me properly, the younger one curtseying, but before they could speak further, I-am-a-Detribalised-Nigerian stormed past, fuming, ‘You are all wizards and witches! I’m sorry! Wizards and witches, that’s what you are!’
‘Easy, Denle, this is . . .’ began the younger woman, but the man was having none of it. He had a half-packed bag in his hand, and with the other hand he grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her towards the car.
‘Let’s go, Sheesti, before they actually kill you. Wizards!’
‘Is because we love you . . .’ began the older, but two doors slammed shut and one very angry Honda swerved away from Lemue Street.
I was standing before the older woman when suddenly I recognized the transcendental moment of the entire research project. A river of wisdom and calm understanding flowed through me, and I understood how the gurus of the fallen religions of the world can become seduced into the delusion of godhood. I deduced the elaborate social mechanism used by this atavistic society to corral her poor members into communal compliance. ‘You must be Sheesti’s mother,’ I said gently.
She nodded.
‘She looks quite alive to me; why would you hold her funeral?’
She opened her hands. ‘It has nothing to do with me. It is custom. It is all right for her to marry a foreigner—we encourage our daughters to marry foreigners—but they must take your name and come and live in Kreektown. That is our custom.’
‘Otherwise you apply the emotional blackmail of a symbolic funeral?’ I shook my head gently, as nonjudgmentally as it is possible to be without partaking in stupidity. ‘This is 1994, you know, not 1794. We have laws, federal laws. And what does your husband have to say about this?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You don’t mind if I have a word with him? Is he in the square, partaking of this lu—of this custom?’
‘He’s inside, but . . .’
‘Oh, don’t worry.’ I smiled. This is one thing that thirty years of senior medical practice gives you: the ability to say grave and serious things with a smile. People are used to accepting tough news from doctors. Anyone else brings the news and they go to pieces, or go ballistic, but a doctor—with the experience—breaks it, and you see the difference. I pushed past the woman—now, this is not something I would normally do, pushing myself so precipitately into private affairs, but the things one does for one’s nation . . . I stood in the middle of a large living room—desperately poor, of course, by my standards, but in the context of Kreektown, quite middle-classy, really. There was a colour television, a fancy sofa, and most bizarrely a chest freezer; and in the middle of all that sat a sad-looking man in a wheelchair. ‘Good evening, sir,’ I began.
He just leered at me. I began to feel vexed. I normally would not have given him a ‘sir’ but for the wheelchair.
‘He hasn’t said a word since his stroke in 1989,’ she said, from very close behind me.
Munificent God! This guru thing was quite exhausting.
She continued without a break: ‘He has nothing to do with this; it is custom. He himself is an Igarra man. We married in February 1973, and he moved here in April of that very same year. Since then he only visited his own town in Igarra maybe five or six times before his stroke. Is what I told Sheesti . . . Is it cold enough?’
I touched the bottle of wine she had produced for my inspection from the chest. There was a strong smell of goat meat from the exterior of the bottle, but the cork seemed intact.
‘It’s very nice, thank you.’
She opened it and poured me a glass, talking all the while, as her physical proximity forced me backwards and heavily onto her sofa. ‘Is what I told Sheesti, I told her, “Marry him and bring him here, like I did with your daddy,” but no . . .’ and she went on and on.
I sat there sipping the wine, ignoring the smell of meat, and trying hard not to stare at Sheesti’s father. The mother was clearly a woman’s woman; her English was as fluent as her Menai and her sentences flowed steadily, brooking no interruption. She manifested the Menai custom of aggressive hospitality, which I was prepared to indulge in this case, since her offering was a sealed, if pathetically cheap, bottle of wine. A few weeks earlier I had been forced to reject an unhygienic offering of locally brewed gin invested with an eye-watering reek, only to observe the subsequent hostility and animosity, which forced my visit to end rather more precipitately than I planned.
The eyes of Sheesti’s father seemed quite alive, despite the long dribble that led down from rubbery lips to a wet shirt. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from this Igarra man who could not attend the funeral of his Menai daughter who was not yet dead. Yet I was a scientist with a job to do. I turned to his wife, feeling the Igarra eyes burning paralysing lasers into the side of my head. ‘Who is behind this thing?’ I asked, firmly, cutting off her chatter. ‘Who organized this funeral?’
‘Excuse me,’ she said, and disappeared into the house, apparently to produce some documentary evidence. This was the good thing about dealing with people of a better quality than the Jonszers of this world. Documentary evidence would go down very well on a presidential report. In the meantime, I was forced to return to the scrutiny of the ‘master’ of the house. I wondered whether to attempt a one-sided conversation in which I would supply commentaries, questions, and suggested answers.
