Driving into the station, I was watching out for the boss of words. He was supposed to be standing outside the station. It was a real summery day. I even turned on the air in the car. It was like the Gulf of Alaska. One moment the conditioned air was on, the next moment, the fresh air was on. Right in front of me stood the boss. I was still looking out for him when the front passenger door whished open, and he struggled to fit his frame into the front seat.
“Why you dey look out for me?” the bossman questioned me. “Didn’t you recognise me? Have I changed that much?” he asked.
“Where do I start from, boss, to answer your queries?” I managed to reply.
“Not in any order. Start from anywhere,” the boss commanded.
Driving off from the station, we headed towards Oxley Park. We pumped hands and embraced. The embrace was not an ordinary one. It was an embrace that spoke volumes – of being contemporaries, and of fraternity, a fraternity of words. It also spoke of cult and occult, brotherhood, friendship, history, a future, and shared dreams; it spoke the same language. We were home. The moment we met, we were home. Home to our dreams, our literary cult, our ambitions, and to the sacrifice of the poets.
At my lodgings, he sat with a glass of orange juice, hazelnuts, and hobnob biscuits. With a thoroughly pumped face, he was clad in a pair of denim pants, moccasin shoes, and an Editor’s jacket that squeezed his abs. The two sides of his jacket wouldn’t meet without a conflict. I was struggling to locate his neck. There sat a man who I once sat with decades back in a classroom who would fit into the lecture chair effortlessly. This same man sat with me today, and the sofa we were both on was whining under the force of our weight and literature.
He laughed so meticulously, and each time he laughed, he threw a hazelnut into his mouth. I asked the boss whether he was hungry, and he said “Yeah,” but warned me against ‘oyinbo’ food. He told me how he went to visit an old uncle of his and was offered tea and biscuits throughout the entire duration of his visit. His uncle did not offer his kids anything apart from kind words and ‘oyinbo’ greetings. He was so disappointed that he vowed he would never visit the man again.
“So, what were you expecting from the man?” I asked.
“Oof. Oodles of oof. He hasn’t seen any of my kids, his nieces and nephews, since they were born. That’s our culture,” he concluded.
“Yeah, but this is a different terrain,” I reminded him.
“The only thing the man did was express his anger at how I went to pay for accommodation when he was right here with a house in the big city. How could he possibly have housed us when he couldn’t even give a dime to his nieces and nephews?” the boss argued.
Pulling into the stadium parking, we located a free lot and parked the car. We walked off to find an eating house.
“Excuse me. Please, where is the ticket machine?” I asked an old lady.
The lady looked at me in a strange way. ‘He must be a stranger here from the big city’, she thought.
“No machine darling, parking is free here,” she replied.
“Oh, wow, really? That’s nice to know,” I said.
Sitting comfortably in a chimichanga restaurant, we devoured tacos, nachos, guacamoles, sweet potato fries, baked chicken, and beef. We ate to our fill and off we set for our legendary expedition. We took selfies and photos of our nearly bursting bellies, then asked the waiters and some strangers afterwards to take several snapshots of us. The only place we did not take photos was the loo. We called and spoke to our contemporaries over the phone and via WhatsApp video and call services. We told tales and laughed like we used to do many years ago. We remembered things and moments from our past, like lanterns, candles, corner shops, sleeping on mattresses on bare floors, the institutes, the ladies with and without agendas, our tuition fee services, and our tuition-free services. We talked about noblemen and the not so noblemen. After all the fun, we struggled to fit into the car and drove off to the woods to walk like poets and writers, to talk to birds and nature, and to laugh at how we could see squirrels and yet could not hunt them for bush meat.
We walked for a long while, saw fat and slim people, saw dogs and people cleaning their dog’s poop. We saw old and young people talking about how the weather was lovely and wondered if they didn’t have anything else to talk about apart from the weather, like football and Brexit, which they didn’t know jack about. We walked on.
A squirrel came to us and asked us whether we saw his relative. He smelt us from a distance. They were the runaway squirrels that ran for safety because they did not want to ‘rest in pieces’ in our bellies. They travelled for months and years, from the motherland to the free land for animals. They hid as stowaways in ships, they had heard of a land where they were free. Some made it to the free land safely and some didn’t make it. Man frustrated their efforts. They were caught and sent straight to the belly. When this one saw us, he smelt that love for bushmeat in us and had the guts to ask us about his relative. What audacity!
Just like it was written in ‘The rite of passage’, in the forest of words we wandered, we did the maze, we saw our forebears, and we had conversations with them. They gave us messages to those living and consoled and comforted us. They reminded us of the tasks ahead and how we must speak lest we die with the words buried with us. We had a headache; the message was too much and too weighty. We could not afford to forget a single word. We borrowed extra RAM space from the son of Anavhe, the big-headed one, who always had extra room in his head for messages. We carried the words, every single word from the forest back.
In our hearts, bubbled these words. In our hearts, these words were concealed, and straight to our tables sat and dipped the feather into that pot of ink and spewed every allowed content out, that all may hear and learn.