Prof was thinking of going to bed when he heard a knock at the door. He unlocked the latch and returned to his chair, leaving Desire to slither into the house with the smoothness of a snake. She moved towards the chair muttering, ‘I am s-s-sorry, sir,’ before she added, ‘good evening, sir.’
The silence in the room was bold. Desire waited for him to talk, or at least respond to her greeting.
Prof stayed quiet. Only the fleeting sound of voices and traffic which came as a scream, a cry or a glass-shattering honk from outside, broke the quiet between them. He decided he was not going to say a word until she explained her absence. The silence, however, began to irritate him. He sighed, exhaled out loud and coughed. She did not say a word.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…’
Desire clenched her teeth as her fury grew, listening to him recite the numbers. She was getting angry at herself for coming to see him, only to be entertained by his silence, and now counting. She felt like a piece of furniture. She wanted to say, ‘Are you counting down to my exit?’ Instead she asked, ‘Do you want to live in this darkness forever?’ He stopped counting, but had no answer for her. ‘Do you want to turn on the lights?’
Rather than answer her question, he stood up from the chair and said to her, ‘You should start heading home. It’s late.’ The clock chimed 12, as if to confirm his words, and she stood up and walked to the door. He thought of Desanya, his constant companion who always appeared when he called on her. He had abandoned her since Desire began to visit, now he felt she was a better companion who didn’t bring him anxiety.
‘You came in late today, anyway,’ he said. Then, he did what could have made her jump out of the window if she was close to it. He moved towards her for the second time since she had started to visit him, found her hands in the darkness and tucked them into his, tightened his grip and in a low voice said, ‘You should stop asking about the lights.’ Desire could hardly hear him over her pounding heart, like the sound of a horse’s hoof stamping the ground.
Her head swirled and she stiffened to steady her feet. She wanted to think of something other than him at that moment, but with her head spinning so much, she knew it would be too difficult for any thought to stay in her head. She knew she needed to do something to put a stop to the way she was feeling and the way he was trying to make her feel, so she announced, ‘I met your son, Prof. His name is Ireti and he wants to meet you.’
She found his eyes and looked straight into them. She felt his hands go slightly limp against hers. She rushed out of the door. It was the first time she left without hearing him say, ‘See you tomorrow.’
Prof sat in the dark after Desire left and started to replay her visit in his head. A son? The idea that he was a father to someone calmed him for a few seconds and then his heart raced until he stood up and started to jump. Prof wished she was still with him in the room, so they could talk about everything, but not his son. He wanted to tell her about how he screamed in the prison when the warders came to pick him for the usual routine. He would have loved to tell her how he decided light was not for him. The more he thought of it, the more he could feel his head lengthening. He held his head in his hands and shook it, screaming, ‘Maami!’ He calmed down, breathing heavily and fell in a swoop on the ground in loud tears.
Prof hoped that one day he would tell Desire of his time in prison. He bore the early days. Those days when he thought the worst thing was complaining and planning with other prisoners over the prison food; soups that lacked condiments: just water, a sprinkle of dry pepper and salt. He was strong for the first year. He yelled at the warder and proclaimed how the country would become a better place because the people would fight back soon. They came for him. The warders took him into rooms where he was beaten until his bruised body and broken bones made him walk with a bend.
In the second year, the routine of his punishment changed. The warders came to him in the mornings, in the full glare of a hot northern Nigerian sun where he stood outside the prison walls with fellow prisoners and waited for the warders’ directives. The warders made them stand completely naked in the sun, like wet clothes being hung out to dry. The sun licked every part of his skin and scorched it with its rays until he felt his skin crackle in the heat. This was when he fell to the ground, shrieking, ‘Maami’ until the warders picked him up and threw him into a solitary cell. He picked a corner of the cell and shivered on the ground trying to make his body his once again.
In the evenings, a new set of warders came to interrogate him, ‘Tell us, who are you working with? Is it the US government? Who is funding your activism?’
He stayed quiet. They shone flood lamps in his eyes until he fell down calling out what was now a regular cry to them, ‘Maami!’ As he always failed to talk or give them the information they wanted, they would cover his head with a hood for many days. He always lost count of time and how it flew. Sometimes, they took him into a room where his hands and legs were shackled. They then forced him to endure strobe lights while screeching Fuji music blasted from the loudspeaker. His body hardened.
The warders then laughed at him and said, ‘Professor! March now-now. Change the world. Change the country.’ They lifted him from the ground, put a veil over his head and took him to his matchbox prison cell. Once they veiled him, he knew the strobe lights were over. He began to find pleasure in how the warders veiled him.
This was the routine until the head of state who threw him in jail died and another military government came to power. The strobe light routine ended. There was no longer any need for the warders to put the hood over his head. Yet, in the five years of having his face concealed, he had enjoyed the way it sealed the darkness and enclosed him in his own thoughts. His body grew rigid when they brought lights to his cell. It made him shut his eyes until they ached. He devised a way of dealing with the lights by wearing his cloth over his head like a veil.