Sands, Stones and Stuttering Rhythms (1)

   

         

Two days before he was turned into crispy bits of melting coal, Òdé came into the classroom with a smoothed linen trouser supporting a pair of lax suspenders in a fashionable tug-of-war. A panama hat sat steadily on his clean-shaven head as he pranced delightedly like one with uneven feet. The comedy of the teacher's attire was long lost to me. Same with my comrades who wore matching uniforms and sat in rows, carefully arranged like match sticks, behind the rectangular boxes which formed our desks. We were instructed to do so if we hope, as they have said, to strike into the future, forming its bright tainted enclaves.

The colour of Òdé's voice was unusually forced as he mounted himself on his rocking table, as well as the two canes he had been carrying for two or was it three weeks? The long wooden canes and the teacher's posey outfit shared a clear familiar relation - unused, impotent and heralding a storm, not worthy of the compound grace of a sneeze. 

I knew what was coming. We all knew. A recital of a quote, which he "discovered" during the weekend while giving no sign of reverence to its author. That day's quote was on death. I inferred that when the sufferings between his Adams apple and his gullet began. An interesting thing about Òdé was the uniqueness in the way he conversed. A careful eye would observe the lingual intercourse playing in his heaving chest as the words are conceived; the faint heartbeat of the letters as they harmonise into groups of twos, fours and countless, the quiet labour that foretells its birth and the plain sufferings of his gullet as the Adams apple encourages it to "push" with alternation, unbridled like a juiced up robot. 

That day's quote was on death, a three-worded phrase that displayed the fragility of man's thread as it dangles over hell's fire. 

"Write your biography", he dictated firmly.

It was not Òdé's. A quote like this is way beyond his reasoning, but the candour he displayed dared me to challenge his coveted right to use it. He was never one to work hard for anything, not even to keep his job. You could tell from the way he evaded questions on elementary subjects and transfigured them into assignments when he has used up that lifeline. The town's lore tells of a time when young Òdé attempted to study into the night while preparing for an exam that would have gotten him into the University. He had fallen asleep and almost gutted his parents house with fire. The truth behind this story is uncertain but no one could defend its falsehood. 

Òdé dished out quotes every Monday morning, save that he did not believe in them. He was an unremorseful conformist. A man who saw the saving up of cooked up garri, so it will be more suitable for the palate, as an act of foolery dressed in the habit of wisdom. A man who was slick, and smart, some might have said. A man who was caught in the flames of a tanker explosion while skimming death's fuel from the street's drainage. No one is blessed with permits to scorn the dead, but by and by, the lifetime of a man lives to mock him long after his soul has departed. For Òdé, it did not take too long. The news reporters painted him and his dead fellows as a band of hungry, poverty-stricken Nigerians, toiling in the mouth of death while displaying their charred remains like effigies of the nation's sorrows.