I met my Father (HOME I)

                                                  I

                                                                                    I MET MY FATHER

Our journey home foreshadowed what lay ahead of us in Nigeria.  The flight delays, the crude airline services, the unappetizing food and drink served on board, and the drab, half-civilised atmosphere inside the generality of the airplanes.  We were three, my mother, my elder brother and I, each reacting to the dreariness of these circumstances according to our age, temperament and social background. My brother and I were born in London, but the difference in the schools we attended and in our peer groups meant a fine but significant dissimilarity in our social background. Not yet four years of age, I was generally fractious: I accepted the food and drink with sluggish reluctance, complained about the slightest physical discomfort, frequently shifted and twisted on my seats, wishing to be back to comfort at once.  As far as my uneasiness permitted me to observe, my elder brother, who was approaching eight years of age, complained less, but a shadow of discontent settled on his face, and he frequently rejected the meals. My mother was calm and collected, though her occasional hisses betrayed her dissatisfaction. We were all dissatisfied to varying extents, and our dissatisfaction must be partly attributed to the lousy chatters, loose dressing and unrefined looks of some of the passengers that sat several seats ahead of us, behind us and to our sides; they contributed especially to the social atmosphere on board.  My mother then had the task all the way of pacifying my brother and me, of making our uneasiness as unobtrusive as possible. 

Our births in London were occasioned by the Destiny that kept my father for years in London where he worked in various firms and establishments, and read Law at a University. During this period, he got married to my mother and had to arrange for her relocation from Nigeria to London.  His Law School programme took him to Nigeria after graduation.  He was not to return to London because he neither relished his many years of stay there in London nor had ever wished to settle in a foreign land.  He had an irresistible attachment to Nigeria, his native land. Now that he had completed the Law School programme and had got himself a lucrative employment as a Chief Legal Of ficer in the Housing Corporation of his hometown, we were travelling to meet him.

My mother had lived more than half of her years in Nigeria, and was now ending her eight years of sojourn in London. Eight years of painful acclimatization, during which her native preference for the tropical congeniality of Nigeria rebelled sharply against her descent into the icy world of the temperate zone. She socialized very well in the foreign land, got on cheerfully with friends and colleagues, but her physical and psychological selves cooperated only in half-hearted dribs and drabs. She frequently took ill and never got fully absorbed into the London society.

At length, after more than half a day of changing aircraft and taxis, we finally arrived home.  Being my father’s native land, home was in Akure, the capital city of Ondo State in Nigeria. My mother was from Ilaje, a riverine part of Ondo State, but, because my father was an Akure indigene, traditionally, my brother and I were automatically also indigenes of Akure.  A sunny afternoon in late December, it was dry and dusty, and my brother and I had been labouring endlessly under the withering pressure of an acute thirst we had never known. Unabated for hours, it was crushing to the marrow! Crying and whining all along, we got no more than tender apologies and reassurances of an end in sight from our mother. That was all she could possibly give in the circumstance. There was neither portable water nor soft drink around. Certainly, as far as we knew, no such agony existed in London, no such scorching thirst of heartless Harmattan severity. The one or two bottles of soft drink we were each offered on the journey between the last airport, in Lagos, and Akure were too paltry to keep our thirst at bay for a reasonable length of time. We were simply fated for the deadly spell of thirst.     

A taxi brought us from the motor park in Akure to our final destination whose address, my mother, a stranger in Akure town, had got from my father. Now, the very first things first! After a brief exchange of greetings between my mother and the young man we first met there, my mother made an urgent request for water. Salvation at last! We grabbed the cups of water with unceremonious haste and frantically gulped down their contents— metaphorical mad men in hot pursuit— though the water was very warm, just short of being hot, and the faded colour and coarse texture of the deep blue cups in which it was served were reminiscent of a rough-and-ready shanty. But we were mere hopeless derelicts who had been wandering ceaselessly in deadly cold. Therefore, no traces of spurning superiority now, only humble gratefulness for this life-saving shelter, for however brief a span.

My humility was quite fleeting.  Hardly had I taken the first gulp when I dared to look the gift horse right in the face. I gazed at the cup, the young man who had offered it and the living room in which we were now sitting, smelling the inferiority and lowliness of the new environment, comparing it to the “exalted” environment in London, where we were only a day ago, and taking in the oppressive atmosphere of this disparately new world in its apparent portentousness. It was a darkened room that impressed my subconscious mind with something like mustiness from distances of uncomfortable antiquity. This aura appeared to issue from some of the objects in the room, from the chairs covered in fading green leather that ill-matched the expiring creamy tiles of the floor, from the portable wooden sculptures, one of a woman with a baby strapped onto her back, a gourd on her head supported with her hand, another of a woman with a broken left hand staring into infinity as though in deep meditation, while the others maybe of human beings or animals, or both, scaringly combined, were too complex for me to associate with anything real, so they frightened me with their mystical formlessness. The quaint ceiling fan of fading cream and the dingy picture of the landlord placed beside one of the two-arm chairs adjacent to where I sat, also belonged to this set of evocative objects. An uneasy feeling of déjà vu descended upon me in this atmosphere. Living proofs of reincarnation? I had never been here before, yet I had indeed been here before! My uncomfortable sense of familiarity with the room was real enough.  Yet there was an atmosphere of genuine hospitality everywhere; nothing suggested that we were there on sufferance or that we might perhaps prove too foreign to live with. The young man’s cordiality created this atmosphere in the main, although he must have noticed that our looks and manners were quite different from those of the people in his social circle. They were unlike his, obviously. I noticed his hesitations and the punctuations in his behaviour which suggested a bashful unfamiliarity with our presence.

But I ultimately grew fond of all those objects, those apparent anachronisms that made me uncomfortable at first sight.

The young man, Jude, was my adolescent cousin who then lived with my father. We were to live with him for a few months.  Now that we had settled in easy chairs, his swarthy face grinned us an African kind of  welcome,  inscrutable in its unrestrained embrace and puzzling in its outlandish familiarity: he exposed his teeth to evoke the image of Dracula embellished into a suspect picture of scheming joviality.  Frightened, I clung to my mother, to whom I had been sitting closely, for refuge. The T-shirt he wore was non-descript, but his knickers embarrassingly exposed his lower legs—those bowed, black and fat legs, thickly covered in hair reminded me of the long tubers of stout black yams I had seen some months ago in London, perhaps for the first time in my life, as they were displayed in frightening clusters of fours or fives, not completely free of humus soil, on a stall my mother and I walked past in the open market on our way to a supermarket. I was just as sharply uneasy at the sight of those legs as I was at the sight of the yams. His movement was brisk and confident, his utterances polite but rather unappealing to me in their deep, adolescent voice and their *Yoruba enunciativeness.

After we had taken the water and had rested a little, Jude showed the three of us into our bedroom. It was a cozy and inviting room that testified to the refinement of the nursing sister, a wife of the owner of the house who was a cousin of my father’s. This was to be our bedroom for the first few days. We did not meet her at home, but on her arrival, she was very excited to meet us, and gladly vacated the room for another.

My brother’s relieved features were certainly no conclusive reflection of his inner reaction to the new environment or to Jude’s looks, just as no one around— my mother, brother or Jude— knew what went on in my critical and contemptuous mind, behind the harmless mask of my innocent face.  We did not meet our father at home that afternoon, so we had to wait for him in the darkened front room in which we were first received. Just as I had done, my brother, Sola, had gratefully accepted the cup of water and had eagerly slaked his thirst. Now he sat beside me, apparently calm and sanguine. Being older and more perceptive than me, Sola probably noticed more in the environment than I, and true to his nature, he perhaps looked forward to an oncoming transformation of the environment into the one he knew and enjoyed back in London. Judging by his tastes and mentality, it was not beyond the bounds of his expectation that the arrival of my father would bring about this necessary transformation, this magical “Londonisation” of the environment in every respect. As for my mother, her apparent gratefulness for the water could only have been genuine, considering the biting agonies of her pestering two little boys. Before our departure for Nigeria, she had an idea of the physical environment that awaited us, so her surprises at the environment, if any, were probably negligible.

I had never seen my father before, for he had left for Nigeria before I was born, and had remained there ever since. Sola knew him quite well; he had missed him, longed everyday to see him, and had infected me with the implacable desire to go to “Africa to see Daddy”.  I had joined him in his continual harassment of our mother with this desire for Africa.

Seated now in this African living room, we had been waiting for my father for hours. Night fully descended before he finally arrived. My mother was not too pleased with his late home-coming, for she had expected him to be home earlier, eager to receive his distinguished “guests”. After offering his presumably tenable excuses and receiving the subdued warm greetings of my elder brother, my father settled on a sofa directly opposite the easy chair on which I was now sitting beside my mother. I did not notice how husband and wife greeted or embraced each other after years of physical separation.

I was staring at my father directly for the very first time.  He was beaming a “hello!” at me. He did not call me by my name as I had expected, said nothing. But rather frightened, I flinched. Who is this? My daddy? No! Can’t be! And what on earth is he smiling about? Such were his were his looks, he looked so unlike the adult friends I had known in London. And there were no signs that his late-middle-age face had ever known the London reality I knew (the only reality as far as I was concerned). Nothing of the spotless or “polished” skin texture of the London people. For a Nigerian, he was not badly groomed or unkempt: he was fair in complexion, healthy and quite strong-looking. I found him facially deficient, and this deficiency at once created an inner gulf between me and him. I even thought I divined something sinister in his speechless beam. In any case, his was another display of rebarbative Nigerianness, not considerably different from the embarrassing gestures of the men and women who had been welcoming us since we arrived. Their yelping, theatrical greetings for which they had to open wide their mouths, exposing the heart of their tongues, their pink or brown teeth gums, some women throwing off little drops of saliva at my face in barely controlled excitement, uttering in Akure dialect “ In kaabo, Oyinbo pepe! In ara, Tokunbo, Loindonaa!”— “Welcome veritable Caucasians! Welcome, arrivals from overseas, Londoners!”

Being more educated and refined, he was not nearly as loose and uncivilised as these women in the way he gazed and smiled at me; but somehow he reminded me of them. Perhaps it was the underlying cultural basis he had in common with them, the cordial informality of Nigerian Africanness. Definitely, the man before was not the “Daddy” I had cried to be taken to in “Africa”. I had looked forward to a Caucasian “daddy”, expected him to be a “part” of my mother, identical in every respect of her motherliness and her ever-readiness to satisfy my whims and caprices for toys and sweets— a pampering gentleman from whose bosom toys and sweets would immediately gush towards me in a perpetual, non-cloying manner. Not at all strange to me but close and congenial in perfect consonance with my fanciful expectations.

Only if he had satisfied those conditions would his speechless beam have been meaningful. It would not have aroused my suspicion. But no biscuits, no sweets, no toys, only this dumb, intangible beam which merely emphasised his facial shortcoming so scaringly. I took my eyes off him, clung to and clutched my mother for refuge, the mystery’s gaze having pierced my eyes quite unconscionably. 

                                                                         


GLOSSARY
*Yoruba: The native language of the people of Southwestern Nigeria