SAD DISCOVERIES

The dust in the room was thick and palpable that I later noticed I left footprints as I walked about in the room. Expectedly, I was greeted by strands of cobwebs woven by generations of spiders of almost two decades. The room was dark but for a ray of sunlight that streamed in through a crack on the wooden window. I groped, in search of the bolts on the window. The window did not open without a considerable application of force. The bolt was rusted and stiff. The deluge of light that poured into the room as I forced the window open was almost blinding. Geckoes feasted on the spiders that were put into disarray by my incursion.

Papa Nnukwu’s radio- what I would term his most valuable property because of the way he guarded it- was on the table beside his bed. I imagined him sleepily turning on his spring bed to turn it on. He surely, did not understand everything said on the English segment of the radio programmes, but he listened anyway. While he lived, he could read simple English sentences. One of the memories I have of him was reading one of my older cousin’s Textbook of English language for primary three pupils. Till his death, he bemoaned the fact that his father, my great-grandfather did not see any reason to send him to school citing the fact that he was strong, unlike his brother, therefore useful in the farm.

The walls of the room, with a plaster of cement, had inscriptions I could not understand. His akpakoro- a cup made of calabash- hung on the wall; his metal boxes, well arranged at a corner of the room. They were three in number; their sizes reminded me of comparative adjectives. I lost count of the number of times I sneezed. Nostalgia hit me with shivering goose bumps.

I lifted the smallest of the boxes off the floor and onto the bed. Dust swirled. I ran my fingers on its dusty cover, drawing vertical lines on it. It had a padlock. A look at the bunch of keys that hung on the door’s key hole revealed the key that unlocked the padlock. I hurriedly disengaged the bunch from the door. I felt like a character in a movie that was on a mission. Soon, the box was freed from the closure of the padlock. I slowly opened the lid of the box; not knowing what to expect. The box held documents, books and some albums old pictures inside it. It was indeed a chest! One of such documents was my grandparents’ baptism cards. It revealed that my grandfather was born in the year 1904-just like Zik- and my grandmother, 12 years later.

Soon, I was flipping through the albums. The palm trees outside whistles freely as the wind played their fronds like strings. The constant rush of the cool harmattan breeze through the window filled my nostrils with the dust that smelt like nzu. The albums held pictorial history and memory of the two generations before me. My grandparents; dressed like Nigerians of the northern extraction. This must be at Lafia; my father’s birth place-that of my uncles and aunts too.

The Lafia of my grandfather’s youth. I saw their- my father and his sibling’s- baby pictures and the one taken when they had grown too. My grandfather had lived at Lafia. All his children, except the last were born there. Therefore, they could pass as ‘Dan Lafia’. It was the pre-Civil War events that drove him and his family down to the East. There were some other pictures that were not in any album. I later found out that they were their post-Lafia pictures. One of them caught my interest that I had glued my face to it till there was a push at the door. It was my father.
“Which picture is that?”, he asked.

I handed it over to him, seeing no need to answer.
My father’s face lost every glow as he looked at the picture that had glued my attention. It was him, in the middle, flanked my two Biafran soldiers with rifles. I could not recognize the one on his left. In fact, I didn’t know him. The soldier on his right looked a bit familiar, yet I couldn’t place the face. My father motioned me to shift then sank on the dusty bed beside me. He was speechless. His face flushed. For the second time in my life, I saw uninhibited tears run down his cheeks. First had been when a dear friend of his died. I was confused. I felt bad for having reopened a chapter in his life which he was probably trying hard not to remember. He rummaged through the box, brought out wads of Biafran currency notes and heaved a roaring sigh. He then said, in a voice laden with sadness and grief, “Will we ever forget…?”.

He told me the two men who flanked him were his elder brother- Ede Be Nwodo, on the left and his friend, on the right respectively. Before then, I had always thought that my father was his parent’s first issue. They said little or nothing about the war. For me, it was a sad discovery. I told him the man on his right looked familiar, like someone I usually saw around the village.

He said I was right. That was Oko B’Edenshi; the man we all know as ‘Animal-and-Jungle’. The two of them had become close friends at the time my grandfather’s family returned from the north. Oko had been in the village all his life. It was my deceased uncle that gave him the moniker- ‘Animal-and-Jungle’ because of the dexterity he employed during their hunts. No one ensnared the animals nor knew the bushes-jungle- like he did. He was the Dinta extraordinaire. My father said he taught him all the hunting tricks he knows.

My uncle never returned from the war. Animal-and-Jungle did. He returned non-compos mentis, with all his fingers chopped-off by half.