The Married Bachelor

Teju could not wait to get back to Ibadan, despite his poor health. Though he could not return to Ibadan with Lara that day, he had made up his mind to travel back the next day. It would have been completely impertinent for him to leave without saying ‘goodbye’ to his relatives who had taken him in and taken care of his illness in their own way despite all economic odds. He was a little bit strong enough to go on the journey even though the malaria was still very much healthy in him.

Within the twinkle of an eye, he had found himself in one of the half-empty streets of Ibadan. It was one of those days when vehicles were as scarce as the fuel that powered them. There was fuel scarcity across the nation, even though ironically, the nation happened to be an OPEC giant. Teju’s travelling fee from Igbo-ora to Ibadan was half a flight ticket to Abuja from Lagos. When the agberotold him the price of his fee to Ibadan, some hair had fallen off his body, including his pubic hairs. When Teju asked why,the agbero said it was fuel scarcity. Then he went on and told the adventure of how he got up 4 A.M and went to a filling station where they had fuel to sell. He had gotten up early so as to avoid the extremely long queue at the filling station, but he was the tenth person who arrived early. Though he got to the filling station some minutes past four in the morning, it was not until twenty minutes past eight that he left with his keg full of fuel.

Teju never had the chance to look into the mirror and see the reflection of the body that housed his damned soul. When he got to Ibadan, he saw his emaciated self in one of the reflective glass doors of barber’s shops. His appearance was as if he had been small-boned by a large boa constrictor. He wondered if one’s body was the true reflection of one’s soul. He wondered if his soul was also a shrunken entity like the entity that stared at him from the door.

Teju had become a runaway yet again. He had disappeared from Igbo-ora as mysteriously as he had appeared in it. His uncle came back from the market the previous day and devoured a bowl of eba and efo; he washed it down with some of the diluted palm wine he had bought in the market to treat his fever. They sat outside and drank the palm wine together. Teju used the opportunity to tell him about Lara’s strange and unheralded visit. He lied about the reasons for her visit though, and he shored up his cock-and-bull story with his office. His uncle refused to be hugged into fraudulence. He did not grant Teju the permission to go back to Ibadan and attend to the lethal problem that had developed in his office in his poor health.

He would not encourageTeju in murdering himself with juvenile restlessness in his lifetime and under his very nose. He said one should not put one’s hand in a work that would kill one, and prevent one from eating the fruit of one’s labour.

“Where was your office when you were bed-ridden with illness?” His uncle had asked with more of a rhetorical tone.

“But that’s not the point, an office is a place of work, not a doctor or a pharmacy” Teju wanted to respond. His aunts also came rushing under the moonlight where he sat with his uncle. They took side with his uncle. They kneeled and begged him to have mercy on his relatives if not himself. They begged him not to kill himself as if the intention of committing suicide was written on his forehead. He had to finish the herbs to complete his treatment, they said. His office could look after itself, they said, as if they could smell his lies as a shark could smell blood.