Waves Aligning

Adaora O

Description

Chinny learned at an early age that with her background and heritage, life does not simply hand you opportunities - especially not when you're a girl child living in Eastern Nigeria. With only the meagre resources hewed out of her parents' low-income jobs, the decision to send either Chinny or her male, unenthusiastic sibling to school is inevitable... and defeating. The only bright spot in the tempest of her life is her best friend, Ejiofor. With every scrap of courage and conviction, Chinny faces her life's storms as she encounters disillusionment and tragic losses, ill health andbetrayal, and worse still a foreboding unwanted marriage, with each wave crashing her dreams down. Will she drown in life'sdisappointments or can she rise above them to destinations only yet defined in dreams?

Sujets

• Nigeria

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838599102
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Adaora O

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.


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ISBN 978 1838599 102

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To every human swimming against the tides.
Contents
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Epilogue
1
Half awake, Chinny frowned at the first crow that always heralded the start of her day. Since she turned seven years old, she had always dreamt about a day when she would be able to sleep for as long as she liked. In her opinion, the cry of the supercilious cock always telling her it was time to pull her frame off the bed and begin her day did not signal a happy life. Her discomfort with life as she knew it grew progressively and today, ten-year-old Chinny not only wished she slept longer, but also looked forward to when she would go to the city and become one of those sophisticated ladies in the magazines which Ejiofor, her friend of eight years, brought back home at Easter and Christmas.
She cried so hard on the 4th of January as she watched Ejiofor go after his mother and sister into his father’s car, on their way back to the city after the Christmas holidays. For days, the tightness in her chest and the lump in her throat refused to go away as she recalled her friend, waving through the window, saying, “Clean your eyes o? We will come back at Easter o?” For some inexplicable reason, Ejiofor believed adding ‘o?’, a local variant of ‘okay?’, at the end of every statement provided the warm blanket of comfort needed for any situation. This often confused Chinny because, on most occasions, it only made the warm blanket feel wet and heavy.
Chinny almost jumped out of her skin as the second crow rang through the air. She had to wake up. The cock, as usual, did not show any signs of getting off her case anytime soon. So, although every cell in her body shrank in protest, she hauled her frame out of bed. Her father Dede had cleared his throat once and his next reaction would be to reward her with an incentive for having second thoughts about their early morning devotion. It often came wrapped in a curt slap on her back or a nearly hard knock on her head. However, once Chinny made it to her parents’ room for the morning prayers, she seldom remembered the sting of the light slap or knock recently served her, since prayer time for Chinny only provided a change in location for courting the concluding part of her sleep time. ‘Sleep courting time’ served as a psychological cocoon that spared Chinny the agony of sacrificing precious sleep time on the altar of morning prayers. But the lifespan of her cocoon suffered an unforeseen end, many thanks to her mother’s bright idea of alternating who led the songs often sung in worship before the Bible reading and prayers. To say that this turn of events did not go down well with Chinny would barely scratch the surface of the depth of her torture. In her opinion, her brother’s more than occasional absence from home blessed him with the evasion of this painful morning drill.
With the prayers over, Chinny wore her ankle-length kaftan, picked up her chewing stick from the cup on the stool beside her six-spring bed and headed out. It was time for the first of her four trips to Mr Oko’s house. He installed a brand-new borehole two days ago, which meant clean water just came closer to home but at a price. As soon as she opened the door, the eastern early morning harmattan chill, typical of the month of January, slapped hard across her face.
“Chimoooooo!” Chinny exclaimed dramatically, calling out on God for help in the eastern Nigerian dialect – Igbo – in the way she always did when met with anything shocking. Stepping back and quickly shutting the door, she went to her room to pick up a wrapper from beneath her pillow. Now snugly wrapped, she headed out again, took a bucket from the side of the house and walked off to fetch her first bucket of water for the day. As she chewed vigorously on her stick, she thought, Next week, I will buy myself a toothbrush and toothpaste. Ejiofor says they are better for cleaning the teeth . She trod along but this time with a determined bounce, forgetting the harmattan chill that was still very present.
“Chi,” as her mother called her, “is this your third bucket?” Chinny poured out the bucket of water into the drum beside the kitchen door.
“Fourth Nne’m,” she responded. Chinny always referred to her parents or anyone she held dear as ‘Nne’m’ or ‘Nna’m’, depending on their gender, meaning ‘my mother’ or ‘my father’ respectively.
“You must stop before you pull out your arm from its socket. I have told you to always carry this bucket on your head. It is a lot easier,” her mother chided.
Chinny gave an over-emphasised nod and with a playful glare said, “Thank you! You want my head to fall into my body, so I can look like Sempe the village clown’s twin? The heavens forbid!” Ama smiled fondly at her daughter’s awareness of beauty. Chinny typified beauty by all standards. More refreshing to Ama was the almost equal allotment of time her daughter gave to her quest to enhance her beauty and her pursuit for an enriched mind. She wondered if fate would be more kindly to her daughter than it had been to her.
As the weeks went by, the evening breeze became less brutal than its morning counterpart. The shadows came out to play and Ama dished the okra soup she just prepared with the antelope meat Dede bought on his way back from work. Tonight, his favourite soup would go with cornmeal. Before now, cassava meal always accompanied soups in the Onas’ residence. But since Chinny came across a piece of information in one of Ejiofor’s books, she took to opting for soup alone for dinner. The book claimed that cassava meals contained four times the starch found in cornmeal dishes. It took weeks of Chinny’s near starvation for Ama to find out the reason behind her child’s behaviour. Today, her parents thanked her for this enlightenment. It was now clear why the entire Ona household bid farewell to cassava meals. They since observed that getting out of bed in the mornings following a dinner of cassava meal always required considerable physical, emotional and mental effort, compared to the mornings after cornmeal and soup.
Ama secretly admired her daughter’s interest in the nicer things of life. She set the plate of cornmeal and okra soup on the tray and called out, “Chi! Ask your father if he would prefer eating inside or outside.”
“Inside,” Chinny shouted after a couple of seconds and went to take in the tray to the dining room where they all settled for dinner. Dede did not say much as he ate. He could be described as a man of deep introspection, but today’s silence indicated that something worried him. Ama suspected her husband now considered himself a failure as the head of the home and his steady withdrawal confirmed her suspicion. They ate in silence, relishing Ama’s good cooking. Brooding mind or not, Dede’s taste buds were in excellent working condition.
“Nna’m?” Chinny ruffled the silence.
“Yes, my child,” said Dede while chewing with relish on a piece of meat.
“Remember you told me I would go back to secondary school this year?” Her voice bubbled with excitement.
“Mmhh.” Dede nodded, grating the meat between his molars. There were soft tendons in this piece of meat and Dede liked tendon-wired meat in particular. Ama guessed that the reason for her husband’s meat preference might be economically motivated. Tendon-wired meat cost soothingly less than lean meat. Chinny reminded her father that school resumed two weeks ago and told him of the soon-closing payment window. She wanted to return to school to begin class two.
Mrs Johnson, the school principal, had told Chinny to stay home and promised to reserve a spot for her until her father paid her school fees. This was after Chinny showed up at the school gate for five consecutive days following her unceremonious withdrawal from school, only a couple of days before her class one third-term examinations. When Dede informed Mrs Johnson of his decision to withdraw his daughter from school, as her elder brother Dubem had finally passed his secondary school entrance examination, the school principal became confused and emotional. She argued that Chinny, being the brighter of his two children, stood a better chance at education. But Dede’s decision was final and the fact that Chinny passed the entrance at one sitting while Dubem passed the same examination only after his third attempt did nothing to sway him.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked her, not really expecting an answer. “I can afford to