Resh House

BLOOMING ON THE BRINKS OF BLUES

This time yesterday, I had begun traversing the day. My itinerary was strategic, I had two appointments on the Lagos Island. One of the last sun shines of the rainy season, shot brilliant twinkles on every edge of my car windshield, as I drove on the Third Mainland Bridge.

Fela Kuti was hitting again on my alertness with his 'International thief ' thief' number; and the one hundred and twenty kilometre speed of my car suited the beats quite utterly. It was always a pleasure listening to him. His words galvanized my consciousnes. His delivery was smooth, even though it was slightly made raspy by the faulty sounds of my car speakers. Replacing these speakers had been an item on my plate for some months. They cried under the punishment of overuse, Just like my car tyres, shock absorbers, and even bedroom mattress back at home.

One morning out of five each week, usually had me waking with a back-ache. The effect of sleeping on an ignorantly purchased, sub-standard Mouka mattress, was just as exciting as having to remain stuck in the Ikorodu Road traffic with not much choices of getting out.

Optimism climbed my heart each time I remembered that by latest the last weak of December, which was only two months away, I would be at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, for an onward journey to Canada's Toronto. I had been offered a space for the 2009 academic year, in one of its universities to pursue a post-graduate diploma in Journalism.

In  that time, I would not have to bother about a three-year old, nagging car that in the past months had incurred such bills that left my purse and self lean - emotionally lean that is. I mean, I had never been a slim person, not since 2007, when I started giving in to the beckoning calls of the Mr. Biggs' doughnut and consequently started a progression to the size of a hips 44. They would have been too tasty to miss if Toronto snack bars did not abound with variantly flavoured doughnuts.

So I munched on one, and descended the bridge, en-route The Stock Exchange House in Marina were I had my first errand to run for Mummy. She had become in exactitude of the word, in loco parentis, since the respectively dated demises of my parents.

With Mummy, there had been no reluctance to help my sisters and I; she had been best friend to my mother through her tumultuous years of widowhood, never had i known another friend so true.  In the aftermath of of my mother's death, she still kept the friendship alive, stepping in as mother to my sisters and i.

That was why it was no bother risking the thug littered streets of the Lagos Island; mingling with scores of pick-pockets on Tinubu and Kakawa Streets and mounting the stairs of the Stock-Exchange building, were the lifts remained epileptically functional.

I  completed my business at the financial house in less than thirty minutes and walked back to my car. I had earlier found a parking space in the side walk on Campbell street.  The space ought to be part of a pedestrian path. However, in the day-time, It was used by the association of the area boys,as a parking lot for cars. who could challenge them? In Lagos, they were the lords of bedlam streets like these. True. The one who navigated my packing for a fee of two hundred naira was dressed in a sooted t-shirt and face cap with the face of the present Lagos State governor. He looked like one of the touts used in the recent election. In his athletic six-footed frame, scarred face and brutal mien, this agbero may have made up an intrinsic part of the ruling party's, campaign arsenal.

Before getting in the car,I took a moment to wipe the murky water on my shoes, with a piece of rag i kept in my boot  for such purposes. Despite the working presence of the state's street cleaners, the roads looked more grimy than the last time I walked them months before. Even the the thugs around seemed to have darkened in complexion. I was sure the public bathrooms had become permanently dysfunctional or that light-skinned men might have been ostracised from this dreggy fold.

It was not a busy hour to proceed from Marina to Victoria Island were I went to keep an interview appointment with another financial company. It was in need of a free-lance writer who would manage its public relations unit.

It was an insufferable conversation with three members of the management unit, obviously skilled in slave-labour. The interview ended with their request that I returned the next week, to resume working for a derisory remuneration of five thousand Naira, per by-weekly press releases. I liked to dash the hopes of unreasonable people and I was sure they were going to engage in a futile wait for my return.

I had been able to cope for nearly a year with an irregularly paying writing job, clothe-making and interior designing, it was so no task up a hill, tarrying two more months for the Canadian High Commission to issue me a Study Permit. Only one month before, I had sent the stipulated requirements to the embassy. My maternal uncle had offered to be my sponsor for the program. I knew that the copied details of his chubby bank accounts, which I had equally sent the embassy, would give me a high chance of being granted the permit I earnestly awaited.

A few years ago, these same bank details had ensured a British visa for one of my two sisters, and she had since rounded up her masters degree Business Administration . It was the same which had helped my cousin Somebi, when he got a study permit  to do a post-graduate degree in Human Resource Management, at the Manchester State University.

Creative writing was my calling - well that was beside clothe designing; and I was sure an internationally priced, added certificate in Journalism would way-pave me into that field of career I longed to work in.

I could hardly wait to get out of Nigeria for a while, to a country were the roads were wider and the traffic jams saner. Where homes were free from armed robbery and one did not pay for power bills and still remain in bouts of outage; where the fire service promptly acted on a single emergency call without the excuse of being out of water supply.

I wanted to experience a system different from that in Nigeria, where the ruling class did not fed the dogs fat on the educational system of its country and then turned up their noses in disgust at the decadence, before sending their children to sterling school overseas.

My head filled these thoughts as i connected the Cater Bridge on my way homewards. That was when i heard my mobile phone indicate the receipt of a text. I succumbed to the indisciplined urge to read it while driving at a slow pace. Immediately I read  the message, my eyes looked out for the next available exit back to the Island. I could not spare a moment to collect my parcel from the fedex courier office at Ikoyi. After six weeks of processing my visa application, news had finally come from the Canadian Embassy. I drove on, trying to reason out the modus of telepathy. Just that morning, the fleeting thought had come in, that I would sooner hear news from them.

I tore the plastic bag in feverish hurry as soon as I got back to the car from the airtight, courier office. Even in the chill of my car's air conditioner, I still felt the perspiration in my under-arms.

By the time I wheeled my car out into the main road heading back home, I felt sweat dripping from my plaited head, down the sides of my face. They seemed to also drop down my cheeks. It was strange that perspiration dropped in the middle of my cheeks, from my forehead. It was unusual, I blankly noted, subconsciously tasting a drop close to my mouth. It had the salt of disappointment and the indescribable colourlessness of pain. They were tears afterall. They gushed down in torrents like an avalanche, destroying the settlement of dreams and a chain of years-old, preparations.

I moped as I drove home. Moped even when a Danfo driver pelted curses at my not indicating trafficator lights before making a turn. I still moped when I discovered I had punctured a tyre from climbing on a nail but almost slapped the vulcanizer who repaired it, for erroneously giving me fifty naira less of my change.

I flopped heavily on my bed the moment I reached home, but not before looking again at the Deficiency Sheet that dealt the numbing blow.

The rude dismissal of my application and foreclosure to administrative appeal, typed there, was irking, the hand that wrote my name on it, scrawly. It looked like that of a confused four year-old. I could bet that immigration officer had never sat inside the walls of a tertiary school.

What was more proof that I was a bona-fide student of the Sheridan Institute of Arts and Technology, than original copies of my admission letter and that of acceptance which I had tendered on request to the embassy?

What was more cynical than disbelieving my appendage in the questionnaire box which asked for a ticked 'yes', if I was sincere about leaving Canada when my one-year program ended?

What was more insulting than a person calling me a liar; a white man for that matter, whose forefathers after telling mine stories of a universal God who saw the equality of mankind, went ahead to call them monkeys and natives while stealing their artefacts and mineral resources?

Their response was breaking, but it led me to a serendipitous discovery; the Canadian immigration officers were not exactly intelligent people. A Canadian immigration official could pick imaginary holes in genuine documents, but found it impossible seeing beyond his broken nose, when phoney ones stared boldly in his sardonic eyes.

Two weeks ago, my neighbour relocated to Calgary  with his brother's Canadian passport.

That brother had ten years earlier, left these shores with the passport of his look-alike friend. I imagined the Canadian official must have heaved a satisfied sigh when he finished looking through his documents, oblivious he was laying bare his ignorance. My secondary school classmate went to settle in that same country last year. He got married to a Nigerian who had naturalised there. If the embassy's official had been sharp-eyed during the interview, he would have picked that facial resemblance between the couple, glaringly spoke that they were identical twins.

Dusk crawled in as I remained deep in broken sobs. Life had haply been the best of the world's own jesters. It had its style; it worked with time, it's tools remained the dices of fate. It was best at mocking plans.

My dreams seemed to lie in a waste before my mind's eyes. The remnants of its broken chains dangled on the rope of disappointment.

My house rent was due in a month's time, it was a little more than affordable- especially in this my peculiarly hamstrung times. I needed to urgently to seek more rewarding sources of livelihood. Was God a remotely familiar being whose potency was over estimated? I still ached with this question in my heart and tasted the tears in my mouth as I drifted to sleep, closing puffy eyes that felt peppery from hours of anguished weeping.

However, when this morning woke me up and the weatherman on channels' Television predicted a sunshiny day, I felt the beam also spread through my gut. I knew it beamed through, to assure I was still the same on whom was bestowed gifts surpassing human limitations.

The skies in the distance held a brightness inimitable. That was when I saw it, the chains of my dreams stretched out in a strong line across the distant blueness, they had become mended with resilience. The hills of my plans stood there too. It had a staircase hinged on a soldered determination to move on and fortitude to focus on its top.That was when I felt the lightness in my heart and the song bursting out the chords of my throat.

I knew it then; a Canadian university had lost its chance of being the citadel at whose feet a forthcoming icon developed her inimitable artistic mastery of world acclaim.