Jill Okpalugo-Nwajiaku
Run, Yesterday is a Ghost!
Arinze said that Yesterday must be forgotten for it is a ghost appearing with dimness and melting with luminosity. That idea stood close to my heart until he called on the phone and said he was in Abuja, nestled against his clean bed-sheet on the ninth floor of a prestigious hotel, absorbing a pretentious view of Nigeria. Arinze was eating mangoes when he called. It showed in his lip-smacking and hurried way of talking, and flat eagerness as he requested one of Chimamanda’s books. It was our ritual in London; this reading of African literature before siesta; and after we rolled up the soft blanket like a mat, we’d read portions of delicious African books till sleep came and possessed us. Arinze’s theory is that siestas are ephemeral, like youth’s passing beauty, and must be spent in the coziest of ways. I was a composite part of that ritual — a thread interwoven in his cloth of ideas — because I sought an aroused mind that could pen the laughable trivialities of life, like how Mama’s jumbo fowl crowed whenever the clock struck five.
I knelt on the carpeted bedroom floor like an infant listening to stories of naughty Mbe or the tortoise, and flipped through my pile of books. I picked memories not worth remembering and dropped them when they grew hot in my hands. I ran a palm over Purple Hibiscus, wiped its dusty cover on the floor, and prayed the storyline wouldn’t be easily misread by a man in love with a woman. But I was nothing like this in London. I never wiped dust on the crimson carpets my Hoover walked over till they shone like new grassland. I tucked the book into my handbag wondering if we would ever get to read it. It stuck in the bag’s throat like fishbone and slipped in after I hit it on the mahogany desk.
I scratched my legs prickling from insect bites, unsure if the moistness on my palms was due to the humid weather or fear. My little isolated cosmos was shattered by piercing thunder as the rain sprayed on sizzling hot shingles. Just to keep thinking, I fantasized Arinze’s reaction if he ever discovered my chance meeting with Nnamdi eight years ago. I was a sweet sixteen learning to ride a bicycle in the solitary parts of Zone 6 when we met. Fresh out of cleaning the charcoaled blackboards of the secondary school, I was returning from the bank where I had gone to buy a university matriculation exam form when he spotted me and carried me in his sleek car that smelt of talcum powder. After he slid down the car windows mirroring my reflection, I slipped in because I read in Mama’s beauty magazine — the one with a bare-skinned fashion model on top of the bookshelf — that exposed skin suffers when it sunned. So I entered the car out of concern for my skin and not to listen to his advanced sweet-talk.
I recall caressing the leather seats just to be sure they were genuine leather and not personas in my daydream. I remember reliving my favorite fantasy in which I rode my bicycle down the neatly tarred roads knocking down the shocked passersby. Other reveries were a bit more colorful but not as expressive as that one and yet, I couldn’t ride my bicycle in the afternoons because too many cars sped along the tarred roads. And the February sun, I imagined, was hot enough to bring a potful of clean water to a boil in a matter of minutes. We exchanged cool pleasantries, pulled into Herbert Macaulay way and joined the long queue of cars on the tarred road. The dialogue began as a drizzle then progressed to heavy rain. I don’t recall who said what, but I remember rolling my eyes when Nnamdi said that he was a thirty-year-old banker in search of a homemaker.
Nnamdi’s amorous glances melted like butter on hot bread after I said that I was questing after encyclopedism and not romanticism; and he managed to look serious when he warned that the university is an intense institution that will give you knowledge you may never need. Freshly mowed grass perfumed the air as we drove past the manicured gardens. Their scent was deeply delightful, like the perfume of newly opened pomade. On stopping at the traffic lights, his dimpled cheeks collapsed into a smile when I said that his skin is the color of the coffee Mama made on Saturdays before she added milk to it.
“I don’t see the university as negatively as you do,’ I argued with lukewarm pomposity. ‘You sentence it as if it was a filthy criminal, yet it has produced the best minds of our time.”
Nnamdi’s face crumpled into a melancholic smile when he said that I had a romantic view of the campus that will change when I discover it simply nurtured my craze and suppressed my practicality. He laughed at my confusion, then at himself for confusing me. One way or another, his laughter merged with the air and made the masquerade trees chuckle with bent heads. Nnamdi’s tie laughed too, pausing on his chest occasionally to catch its breath. But after he said that females believed he was such a good catch, I smoothened out my short skirt and arrogantly pointed at the green signpost leading to my destination.
Nnamdi rushed out of the car and raced after me like a sprinter amusing the idle bystanders with his fake theatrics. I didn’t turn when the bus wheels screeched, when the sound of his split bones whooshed up pity from the mouths of passersby and splashed it into my ears.
“You didn’t even turn,” Arinze said without looking as I opened the door and handed him Purple Hibiscus. I couldn’t imagine how he unearthed me so quickly. “Ojugo, can I ever forget that my brother Nnamdi was reduced to a limbless man in a wheelchair, and you didn’t even turn?”
‘I didn’t know that craze could also mean a type of fashion,’ I said walking away, glad that he didn’t call me back.
About the author
Jill Okpalugo-Nwajiaku writes whenever she can. She studied pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband. Okpalugo-Nwajaku is interested in African creative writing that focuses on female gender issues. She has been published in online literary magazines, including Snap! All Things Girls, Identity Theory, Poetry and Writing, Word Catalyst, St. Something, Splash of Red and Glint. She is working on an MFA in creative writing, and her first novel.
Herm Card, Poetry, Rebecca Benedict, Illustration. From the Syracuse Poster Project, 2010.