Ogechi’s Breasts – the Reason.

When Ogechi said, “I have lost my period.” I effortlessly understood what those words meant, yet, they had sounded strange to me at the same time. I equally knew the time had come to unfasten the lust and sexual cords by which we were together, tightly joined, and also get lost like Ogechi’s period as fast as I could, or wait for all the hell that would eventually break loose if this new wave of unexpected reality gets to the notice of my impatient and prideful parents.
Who could blame the way I reasoned? Ogechi and I were not in the same league.

I was jobless, living off my poor parents, and she was a hairdresser who practiced her craft alongside her mother in the veranda of her house—the same house where my parents and hers were both living as tenants.
We were definitely not in the same league—she had a job, I did not.

Mother had nearly caught us while we were at it, behind the large water-storage tank at the backyard, one evening, when she had come to get water from the place which had also served as our rendezvous spot.
My senses were as sharp as a tack. They amplified the quietest of whispers and the buzzing mosquitoes’ ministrations of vampirism around my ears, and the chirping crickets in the surrounding wall crevices, and the other sounds by co-tenants in their various apartments, in the small, yellow-painted, one-story-building.
On sighting her, Ogechi had dropped her gown, which she had previously rolled up her waist, and up went my trouser, which my laps had expertly held in place at the base of my buttocks which had been moving in a pattern behind hers before mother surfaced.
Mother’s nearsightedness was no match for our good eyes, we had seen her from afar, even in the very dim light, and I still remember vividly, there had been no electricity that evening. Mother had held a hurricane lantern as she approached and probably would have found us there if she’d had no light to guide her path or had quietly shuffled her feet as she walked towards us.

“Stay away from that Ogechi girl. Stay away from the Igbos in this compound,” she’d always say. “Awon omo ibo yen o ni lari.” Those Igbos are not well-mannered. It was her usual slogan whenever she discussed with father, who also strongly shared her stereotypic views—he hated the Igbos too.

I had no reason to dislike the Igbos. I had Igbo friends at school and also sang about peace and unity in the National anthem too. How could I have joined my parents in hating them? If father and mother had only been sent to school by their parents, maybe they’d have been just like me, and I hoped for them to repent of their very conservative and tribal mindset. I longed to see them change.

Obviously, I also loved Ogechi or maybe it was her breasts I loved. It was the first thing I had noticed about her when they had newly arrived at the house. Good Lord! I was impressed by their size.

So, I watched father’s disgust filled face and mother’s hateful stare, without an ounce of remorse for whatever ill they had felt towards Ogechi’s parents, who sat with us in our very small parlour to eventually discuss what was next as regards their daughter, whose skin now looked very much lighter, and her body, fuller, and much more beautiful than I had ever seen them look, as she sat on the couch, cowered in some sort of fictional shame beside her glumly looking father.
I could have taken her into my parent’s room and have another go at her huge balloons, if the environment were to freeze its ever moving frame, but exclude just the both of us in that moment of awkwardness. Such was the extent of my lust for this sixteen-year-old girl, who I was barely a year older than back then.

I had become a father at seventeen, and a young husband at nineteen, to a younger wife, in a ceremony which took less than forty five minutes in Baba Ogechi’s parlour, with no extended family or friends in attendance, save a priest from Ogechi’s Catholic Church.
His presence got my protestant parents angrier than they had been about the idea of my union with the Igbos and the joke of a matrimony we were having at that point—an idea conceived and executed to almost perfection by the bride’s big-footed mother, if not for my parents, who flawed the beauty of the ceremony with their frowns, and probably the crusted bread and pure water that was served for refreshment.

I had injured their ego by making them sit and break bread with the people they detested. They didn’t smile, not even once did they appear to want to, during the formality.
Both parents, Ogechi’s and mine, didn’t ask Ogechi and me whether we loved each other. They acted as if it really wasn’t their business, if we did or did not.
After all, Ogechi and I, now had a baby, so, why bother to ask us about affection?
Even if they had asked us, I’m sure that neither Ogechi nor I would have said we did or didn’t love each other either. We were young and confused, much more confused after the birth of the baby, because it was only then, the reality of our past carnality, like strong jolts from lightning bolts, began to strike at us.

Both parents were proud in their cultural, moral and religious domains, and we had hurt their pride by trying to harmonize those realms with those jumpy sex hormones of ours which we should have kept in check. To save face in the community, where both had set high moral standards even angels would have found difficult to attain, getting us married and sending us off to somewhere far away, was probably the right way to placate their hurt.
My parents were particularly relieved that we were leaving.
We had done a lot.
I had done enough.
It was time to go.
It was the way they reasoned. Who could blame them?

Oluwafemi or Chidozie, (It depended on which half of the family called our baby’s name) at three, had perfectly reflected my lean frame, his mother’s glowing light skin and her beautiful face. I don’t think his thinly skeleton was actually hereditary, although there was no fat person I knew in my family then. His was a bad gift bestowed by the poverty of his parents, who were now living in an even poorer shack in one of the ghettos on the outskirts of Lagos.
Our parents had given us a few change to start our independent life, but I knew if I didn’t get a job soon, our situation would become rife and unlike the prodigal son in the Bible, I wouldn’t be able to go back to my father‘s house. He hardly gave second chances.

Ogechi’s mother visited and brought rice, beans, garri, palm oil and other condiments from time to time. Her father never visited, but he used to reach out to us through his wife.
I realized my parents had actually been wanting to get rid of me, otherwise, why had they shrugged me off and not come to see me? I wondered. They hadn’t asked how I was doing in six months, and a few times, I struggled with the perception that maybe I had hurt their pride so much to not merit their visitation.

I soon found a job in a yoghurt producing factory as a store keeper. The supervisor was impressed with my work ethics and my detailed accounting skills. He saw to the increment of my wages by five hundred naira, after six months of earning four thousand and five hundred naira on a monthly basis.
Ogechi continued with her hair making, to augment the little I was earning, but it wasn’t enough for upkeep. It wasn’t even enough for Chidozie’s belly which was already catching up with our incomes, and both his mother and I, strongly desired beyond any other matter that he be properly fed.

After paying my rent and the electricity bill to my crazy landlord who used to stare at Ogechi’s breasts, whatever was left was never enough to adequately meet our needs. We lacked a lot of things, but yoghurt was always abundant. I had mastered the art of going to the work place every day with my large Eleganza cooler, to scoop yoghurt left overs—ones not packaged for sales during production. The company allowed its workers to do so.

Whenever we had no food to eat at home, we took lots of yoghurt to feed our hunger. Our mouths smelled yoghurt. It was the same story with our bodies. Our room scented vanilla or strawberry, depending on whatever flavour I had brought back home from the work place. Our son dreamt about yoghurt filled castles, we all sneezed and coughed it; we sweated, farted and shat it too. We lived on our small wages and yoghurt for almost two years, before the yoghurt company got bankrupt and decided to lay all of its workers off.

I wore my hand me downs, pressed them neatly, such that the sharpness of the creases on my shirts and trousers could effortlessly cut through a metal, and got out every morning to no destination in particular. If my WAEC certificate could only find me something else…anything worth doing at all, I’d do it, and I strongly hoped it would.

Outside my shack, I was a role model to the other tenants, a very young husband, who dressed well, worked hard to make his money and also catered for his family, but how long could I keep up these appearances? I was penniless and we were faithfully broke.

No matter how long a log stays in water, it would never turn into a crocodile.
I heard father’s voice minister to me, in my moment of desperation. I needed to try something else. Change can be a very difficult process.

Ogechi tried her best. She provided from God-knows-where sometimes. She’d say it’s from her hair making business whenever I asked, and a few times, I had my doubts, but I’d let her be, and that was that.
Some days, Chidozie would clutch at his tiny stomach and cry out of hunger. I’d stare at his face, carry and sing to him, until the crying sapped his strength or the hunger made him sleep. Ogechi’s breasts which should have provided a bit of succor had long forgotten how to lactate to our baby’s wailing. They had however not lost their usefulness in tying my gaze down towards them—as well as the landlord’s. I didn’t mind the man’s lecherous stares, and as long as he didn’t touch them, I was fine.
They were mine. My wife’s breasts were absolutely mine.

We had a bed and lots of opportunities for the baby-making-process in our shack. We indulged when our hunger wasn’t too severe to permit our indulgence.
If I had only zipped up with a condom or mastered the withdrawal skills, ‘coming’ in the right place, so, her periods could keep coming, Chidozie would have been a story for the future. Ogechi would have still been plaiting hairs alongside her mother, and I would have been an ordinary admirer, staring at her breasts on the veranda or in the worst case scenario, we’d both be pleasing our flesh behind the water-storage tank at the backyard of our parents’ house, still.
Even then, as far as I can tell, on that day, I had done my extraction superbly, or maybe she also had done something to thwart my effort at the other end. I never asked. She didn’t tell. I won’t be asking because Chidozie has landed.

Among these three, I’d pick Ogechi’s breasts first, Ogechi and then Chidozie, in that order. Yes.
It was the way the preference scale in my mind worked, or maybe the way poverty made me think. I loved them all—Chidozie was just the least loved, and he wouldn’t have been born if I had created enough space in my head to pack more wisdom into my brain.
I had to rightly suffer for him as he was wrongfully suffering with us.

I have quit pondering about the way my heart should have loved. I have stopped arguing with my conscience about the way my mind should have worked.
The same heart had still loved them all, albeit preferentially, and the same mind had thought it unwise to bring another child into the condition we were in.
What could be saner than this from a married twenty-one-year-old man, who was also jobless as well?

I have had enough time to carefully think about poverty beyond an English word.
For me, it was a feeling of disappointment at my lack, and the lack of ideas to make that lack become lacking in my situation at that time.
It was disastrous.
It caused me physical and emotional diseases.
It was nigh deadly.
It broke my spirit to pieces.
It made me beg one or two friends in order to feed my family.
It hurt my pride and also shattered my confidence greatly.

“Why are you poor daddy?” My smile slowly turned into a half grin as I heard those words fall out, one after the other from Chidozie’s five-year-old mouth. I immediately wanted to repeat my favourite line, albeit playfully, that Ogechi’s breasts were responsible for where we were, but then held my tongue as I remembered that she wasn’t too far away from where we were, on the veranda where she was plaiting Iya Wale’s hair, and where Mama Vera was also waiting her turn to get her hair plaited.
I was pretty sure both women also heard what Chidozie had said. It hurt me because both were good at gossiping, and would discuss this with their other friends.
Talks had ways of spreading very fast whenever it was vomited from both women’s mouth and I hadn’t completely forgotten, although I had forgiven Mama Vera, for making a joke about our ice cream scenting shack barely two years back.
I still hadn’t developed a tough skin for her subtle abuses and jests, especially when they were targeted at my family: “Chidozie’s clothe is not covering his stomach again o…he has drank too much yoghurt, can’t you see his mouth…” “Mama Chidozie, which detergent are you using… it is fading your skirt, buy another one now…” “If this your koko shoe comes back to this life again, it will not pray to get into your hands…” “Baba Chidozie, is your boy sick? Why is he looking like this? Give him some milk now…”

Whenever those jokes were made entirely in vernacular. They always sounded raw, much more offensive and also had ways of rapidly eating at the edge of my somewhat gentle façade, all through to its core.
I hated my state,
I hated my existence.
May God continually bless the poor.

Chidozie’s muttering was borne out of the innocence of his heart. He had said what he had seen, and unlike some of our politicians who have forgotten how to speak the truth, he did not refer to black as white. He had harmlessly expressed the harm that my irresponsibility had caused his physical and mental well-being, but how could he have known the sleeping giant he would wake in his father’s soul?
He was ignorant of the attitude of his mother’s customers, and his parent’s hurt pride, because of what had come out of his mouth, but also unaware he would, through that utterance, from poverty, literally save every one of his family’s lives.

I got up the following morning with a new wave of energy, after I had cried for most part of that night. Iya Wale and her friend shouldn’t have held their willingness to laugh for that long, because, it wouldn’t have hurt that much if their laughter hadn’t come out with such scornful force.
The continuous movement of their mid-sections and the cackling of their gutturals had also forced me indoors, and I could only imagine how Ogechi felt while she plaited those lousy women’s hair.

I knew it was time to not only desire success, but also try my best to become successful. I had to take responsibility for every of my mess and stop blaming my parents’ supposed hatred of me and my Igbo wife and handsome Yoruba-Igbo son. I had to quit faulting a curse by a village deity mother had once told me about, whom Courts in America would have, for animal abuse and other lists of punitive damages, fined to penury, if he, like Jesus, were to take the human form, and then move West-ward to perform his fetishes.
I had to stop paying people for prayers and enriching prophets with the token I had, so that my condition could get better.
Most importantly, I also had to stop the lie I had consciously tricked my mind into believing, and change the narrative about how farther I’d have gone in life, if it hadn’t been my initial lust for Ogechi’s breasts.

With my tie and second hand shirts and shoe, I walked the streets again, but slightly changed the dynamics. I started knocking on peoples’ doors, like their continuous survival depended on the message I was carrying.

“I can help do your laundry and wash your dishes, I can wash your car, take your kids for lessons…I also write and sing,” I was really in their faces. I eulogized those lines off hand, like I use to recite the Benediction after church service. I acquired an even tougher skin at the way they laughed and scorned me. Some persons kicked and slapped my face, while others slammed their doors shut and gave me no attention.
What else could a beggar do? I was a beggar, and rightly so, my begging was not for food or money, but for any job I could do to make money and properly cater for my family.

I’d think about Chidozie’s words again, and everything that followed next on that veranda. They fired my nerves up to scream and bang on more doors, and eventually, I started to get offers which made me work on my feet, bend my waist or go on all fours.

I scrubbed for the Igbo man, who said I was worth more than I was doing for him, but couldn’t pay an extra for the truth he had spoken.
I washed the Yoruba woman’s car, who heard my story and showered soothing words and prayers, after she had scolded and scalded the stupidity of my teenage years.

“You are punny,” Alhaji Ahmed used to say, every time I try to make him correctly say the word ‘funny.’
“You this boy you like to flay with me ko?” He’d sometimes jokingly ask whenever I grinned, and then give me money for the English tutorials he was getting from me.
I needed to feed my family properly, my smiles were a means to encourage the movement of his hands, in and out of his pockets. I wasn’t playing, and I believe he didn’t know how badly I needed his money.

The Calabar Gatekeeper got me a bit worried one morning, when he smiled and said “Oga, you face is growing o.” Then, he compared my face to the rising sun and I figured it out.
“Thank you Akpan, your face is glowing too,” I replied, before his boss handed me her dirty laundry.

Little by little, my money started growing, and we had more food to eat, and new clothes to put on our bodies. Ogechi’s complexion toned brightly, and was back to that of the sixteen-year-old girl I used to know.
We soon left our shack and the landlord to deal with his lust and the abundance of all he had captured with his eyes and sent to his imaginations, all by himself, during our absence.

Money is sweet to spend, but making it wasn’t getting easier for me. I was ageing faster than normal, the stress was telling on me. I washed here and taught there, scrubbed rugs and mopped floors. I used to get very tired every time before I got back home. I could not play with my son or Ogechi the way I used to anymore.
I knew I had to look for my dark goat in the day-time because it may become impossible to look for it at night-time.
So, I began to save more than I expended, and started making plans to add to my secondary school knowledge, because the collage of jobs I was no master at none was robbing me of the joy of inner fulfillment.
I channeled my meager resources into getting educated, after I had prepared on the easel of my mind, a canvas, to paint the life I actually wanted, with the brush of patience, and that of resilience; that of persistence and also that of determination.

I failed at one, two and many other trials, fought my fears with the kind of tenacity a raging bull, throws off its vaqueros in the game of Rodeo, and hoped that one day, just like these fearless bull riders, I would be celebrated for my balance and resistance to pain.

Then, mother and father visited, and they hugged me and my Igbo wife, and their dual-tribe grandchild, whom father also called by his Igbo name, Chidozie. Both apologized for their years of intentional absence, and who were we not to forgive and quickly move on with this new chapter of our lives?
Mother plaited her hair at Ogechi’s new salon and I also heard that father had started consulting his Igbo In-laws on family affairs. That was good news too.

I realised that just like me, they had developed themselves. They had moved beyond their reasons to marginalise these beautiful people, graduated from their inability to tolerate their Eastern neighbours, and somehow, had also gotten this necessary kind of education, outside the walls of a building called “school.”

“Baba Chidozie! I can’t believe this,” Mama Vera nearly embarrassed me as she shrieked in the banking hall, a few years later.
I’m sure she couldn’t help but glare and wonder, when I corrected some errors on her withdrawal slip, counted and gave her her money, smiled, waved her off and said “Next person please,” from my work station.

Later on, my wife, Chidozie and I, travelled to our parents’ house to visit and catch up on old times. The welcoming we received was epic. Our parents’ cooked Fried and Jollof rice, and also made Pounded yam. They cooked Melon, Efo riro, Ukazi and Ofe achara soup. We also had the luxury of feasting on chicken, beef and red wine. Both grandparents chatted and laughed. The Priest who had united Ogechi and me in ‘Holy’ matrimony, came around, and my father jokingly made the sign of the cross with his fingers towards his face, shoulders and chest.
I had witnessed some form of religious acceptance and it made me smile as they both hugged and shook hands.
The merriment continued until evening. Indeed! It felt like a new beginning.

Ogechi and I went to the back yard. We stood beside the old water-storage tank and she ran her hands around its body. I took that position behind her, the same way I had taken it years ago, when mother had nearly caught us fornicating.
I held her waist, we locked gazes and kissed, and this time I didn’t care about any sound or whoever was watching.
As if controlled by the same flicked-on light switch, we started to shake like we had electric currents, coursing through our bloodstreams as we laughed and beamed wide grins. It wasn’t because we were making love, although it formed part of the topic of discourse as we both stood there, reminiscing what used to go down years back.
That same evening, there had been no electricity, but soon we were reminded of an alternate source in the hum of the generator we heard as we finished our talk.

To re-capture some of the moments we had once experienced, on our way home the next day, we journeyed to our previous shack.
The landlord was happy to see us both. He also inquired about Chidozie, who had preferred to stay with his grannies than journey homewards with us. The old man wished on our behalf, many good things, and prayed for us for very long. When he ended his prayers and subsequently said that he missed our presence in his house, he stared at Ogechi’s face and her breasts. I have breasts too…why isn’t he looking at mine? I pondered.

Iya Wale came around and danced around our car.
‘Mama Vera told me you are now a big boy,’ she said elatedly, ‘Mi o gbagbo…I cannot believe this,’ she also sang, and hugged us like she’d seen long, lost members of her family.
Coincidentally, Mama Vera also came around, and they joked about days of old—my wife’s faded skirts and her one worn shoe, as well as the days of Yoghurt and the rest.
I laughed really hard as I watched and heard both women’s chatter with my wife. Nothing had sounded funnier than their description of those days of misery and struggle.

Before we left, we took some pictures, a memorabilia to remember they had also been a part of our success. I can only imagine what would have happened if they had not been on the veranda and scorned us with their laughter that day. I wished my son had been captured in that photo too. Chidozie was the real hero.

On the day Chidozie clocked twelve, Ogechi said she was pregnant. I had no reason to doubt her words. They had sounded strange, but had also gladdened my heart very much.
I knew the time had come to cherish, even more, the love and sexual cords by which we were together, now very much united, and remain her husband, and count down until Chidozie’s younger sister arrives, and drool in the imagination of the ground swelling celebration that would eventually ensue through our united families if this new wave of much expected reality gets to their notice.

Then, I promised I would write my story, design and make it fit for celluloid, so that one day, we’d sit together, my wife and children and I, munch pop corns and sip sodas in front of a very big screen. We’d laugh and scream and also cry as the movie scenes flip on the screen and also in our eyes, and make more money as other people see for themselves, the results of what I had started with a pen and a paper.

I am still very much in love with Ogechi. I still compete with our little daughter for her breasts, and shall continue to lust after no other woman’s until the day I finally rest.

Who could blame the way I reasoned then? Who could blame me now or would have thought from the beginning that this was how the story would end?

THE END.