Soulmates, page 1
KANCHANA UGBABE
Soulmates
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Soulmates
Testimonies
Blessing in Disguise
Golden Opportunities
Jaded Appetites
Legacies
Survivor
Greener Pastures
Borrowed Feathers
The White Rooster
Rescue-remedy
Louise
Exile
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
Soulmates
Kanchana Ugbabe was born in Chennai and educated in Australia. She is currently a professor at the University of Jos, Nigeria, and has participated in the Iowa International Writing Program.
Kanchana lives with her family in Jos and actively mentors young Nigerian writers. Soulmates is her first collection of short stories.
To
My loving parents
Soulmates
There was an inevitability about his departure. Just the way it was meant to be. It had only been a question of time. Not that it came at the end of some dramatic event or mind-boggling discovery. That would have suited his personality better. He would have spun out an excellent story from it for the next dinner party—a story about broken glass, bruised egos, insults and abuses. This was a quiet, uneventful exit, an anti-climax, a being-told-in-no-uncertain-terms that he had outstayed his friendly association with the family. Anita poured the tea out of the navy-blue enamel teapot and looked up to see Uncle Wahab outside the window, boarding his car, suitcase and all. There were no goodbyes.
Uncle Wahab lived in his car, a smart, white Toyota Camry with a hood that could be pushed back depending on the weather. It was as self-contained and as fully equipped as any holiday caravan, his clothes on hangers, books, magazines, cutlery and china, the toilet items, and finally his cat. It was a well-fed female cat with large green eyes and streaks of brown and white across her back. She sat beside him, her tail encircling her in a furry ball, and took long rides across the length and breadth of the country. Serendipity she was called.
He was neither a demanding man, Uncle Wahab, nor a difficult guest but it took Anita several years to sum him up. He created a stunning first impression wherever he went. He got noticed. People generally fell over each other to greet him, serve him, answer his calls and attend to his needs. He was always dressed in immaculate white agbada, the heavy embroidery starting at the neck and trailing gracefully over his shoulders and sleeves, with an embroidered cap to match. He was clean shaven, wore leather sandals in original designs and carried with him a leather fold-over purse which contained his driving licence and other documents, and his tinted sunglasses. His car keys dangled from an engraved, circular metal disc which said ‘Gemini’. His parfum d’homme lingered long after he had left the room. He looked like a politician on the crest of a wave, the managing director of a flourishing oil company, a successful barrister, or a close friend of the military head of state. His speech confirmed your first impression of him.
Uncle Wahab was a highly educated man, thoroughly polished in his register and demeanour, well informed on every subject that might come up in conversation, with an unparalleled wit to top it all. He was a smooth talker. He usually started by saying something personal to flatter you, and you could not ever doubt his sincerity. The surprising thing about a man so irresistibly attractive and eligible was that he was a bachelor. You could imagine yourself his girlfriend, mistress, lover or partner, Anita said, but not his wife. He was not the marrying kind, she said, even though he was well into midlife.
Uncle Wahab was ahead of his time even as a fifth former in the 1960s. While the other boys in the missionary boarding school ‘pressed’ their old shorts by placing them under their pillows at night to iron out the creases, he wore fancy long trousers that looked as if they had just come from the drycleaners. He was the proud owner of an electric iron. While his friends were driven to distraction by the legs of the English mistress, Uncle Wahab, being mature for his age, had had sexual encounters with one or two of the teachers at school and sat smugly back with privileged information, watching the rest make fools of themselves. He was a class apart. He was neither the most brilliant nor the most hardworking in the class but he regularly found himself at the top, simply because you couldn’t help being impressed with his maturity and sophistication; he was macho before the word got bandied about his circle of friends. At university, the students would pile into dangerously overcrowded buses and battered old taxis, while Uncle Wahab cruised around in his pale-green Opel Rekord. Heads turned and girls made feverish plans to hook him for a husband. The called him ‘Tycoon’.
He made his entrance as a family friend into the household. Anita was so taken with him on his first visit that she invited him to Sunday lunch. She was in a flurry preparing for the august visitor—the pestle hit her on the head as she tried to pound the yam, and the hot yam spluttered from the mortar and scalded her. Everything went well in spite of it all. Uncle Wahab looked sporty that day in his blue track suit. He picked at the pounded yam and egusi stew with a fork; he was a small eater. He entertained the family with jokes fresh from the Golf Club. When Anita offered him a drink, he smiled impishly and said, ‘Anything as long as it comes out of a green bottle.’
He was a businessman, Anita was told, a prosperous one obviously, she surmised, among the numerous men of that profession who drove in and out of government ministries in the daytime, and out of clubs and hotels at night. Occasionally she heard him discuss contracts and payments with her husband. He could be counted on to keep an evening pleasant. His anecdotes were outrageous but extremely funny. He got quite carried away when he fantasized about his women—the German girl he had made love to with the help of a dictionary, the African-American girl who had accompanied him to a bar on 52nd Street in Manhattan and had then produced a dagger from her innocent-looking suede handbag. Chicks he called them (with total disregard for political correctness), like they were a whole brood of identical, feathered creatures. He had a return ticket to Miami, somewhere in his car, he said, which he must try to use sometime. He picked up stories as he went along, embellished and exaggerated them and made them his own. He could turn the intimacy of your dining room into a classic anecdote for the club bar. There was spontaneity and absolute honesty about the way he delivered them—he got under your skin effortlessly. Women seemed to feature more in his conversation than in his life.
During one of his prolonged visits to the north, Uncle Wahab was a regular visitor at Anita’s home. He was like a member of the family, really, only he didn’t bring his suitcase upstairs. He booked into the Sheraton from time to time and became a member of the hotel family as well. He knew the waitresses by their first names, the bar was his personal lounge and the cook gave him a preview of the day’s menu. Even the janitor saluted with familiarity at the sight of the Toyota Camry, gratefully accepting the fifty-naira note tucked in his palm.
Uncle Wahab seldom had his meals at the hotel. He preferred home cooking. Anita set a place for him at the table every day, beside her husband. After dinner, he and Anita’s husband, Bayo, would go out for the evening. Bayo occasionally commented on his friend’s tightfistedness, particularly when it came to women—the rows he had had with the local women—but the accounts didn’t seem to match what Anita saw of Uncle Wahab. Mind you, he never brought anything, she said, not even a token gift, a packet of biscuits for the children or a bunch of bananas when he came to visit. He had on one occasion brought some mangoes into the house and had then sat down and eaten them all. But then it was not something you could hold against him. His flirtatious smile and otherwise gentle spirit made up for any deficiency.
It was the fasting period just before Ramadan. The market came alive with a riot of colours. Anita haggled with Aliyu the fruit seller as he tried to cash in on the season. He dusted his pineapples and sat them up on the enamel tray. The pale-green oranges were arranged according to size in pyramids, the blemishes facing the inside. The bananas sat fanned out, and glistened in the evening sun. Aliyu stood over this fare with an orange in the palm of his left hand, easing the top skin off it gently with a razor blade. Sometimes he would bring out his feather duster and dust his fruit. Towards late evening, he sprinkled water over them, sliced the pineapples and arranged them on a bed of curly orange peels on the enamel tray.
Anita set the fruit salad on the table. Bayo was on the prayer mat, saying his evening prayers. Uncle Wahab washed his feet outside, with water from the blue plastic kettle and prepared to break his fast. He had a new joke for the occasion. It was about a man and his wife in bed, watching a televangelist preaching his message after the late-night news. The preacher invited his audience with health disorders to touch (with faith) wherever it hurt most, while he prayed. At the end of the session there was promise of miraculous healing. The man grabbed his crotch. His wife looked at him and said, ‘Don’t be silly! The reverend is talking about healing the sick, not raising the dead!’
‘I thought your mind would be pure, considering the season and all,’ Anita said.
‘May Allah forgive me,’ Uncle Wahab replied with mock seriousness.
He was gone for months and the family had periodic phone calls from the Lagos Sheraton that he was negotiating a deal in the aircraft industry. He always surfaced at an extraordinary hour—11 p.m. or thereabouts, when the padlocks had been put on the ga
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said with his usual charm, ‘I drink only Guinness these days.’
That night they got into a lengthy argument about which were more erotic, Erica Jong’s books or Playboy magazine. Uncle Wahab defended Playboy with the fiercest egotistical arguments. It was art, he said, not pornography. Erica Jong, on the other hand, turned him off, she was too surgical about sex. He talked of Hugh Hefner as if he were a long lost friend, and of renewing his membership with the Playboy club in London. Other big names were casually dropped in the course of the evening.
He had been stationed in India briefly during his period of training as a diplomat. The Playboy magazine addressed to him had arrived by post. The following day, Uncle Wahab was summoned for questioning by the officious local police chief. His reply was to produce a picture postcard of erotic temple carvings in south India.
‘Which is pornographic?’ he had asked the sub-inspector with oily hair leering at the topless female in the centrespread of the magazine. ‘This, or my Playboy?’
‘Very nice,’ grinned the police chief, shaking his head in an irregular direction.
Anita got progressively more tired as Uncle Wahab split hairs and entered into midnight logic, spurred on by the White Horse whiskey at his side. She went to bed.
That night he implored Bayo to let him stay the night. The guest room was full of cobwebs, the bed hadn’t been made but it was better than sleeping in a parked Toyota, with Serendipity the cat. When he stepped out the next day, all in white, who could tell he hadn’t spent the night in the executive suite of the Sheraton?
The cracks in the plaster first showed when Bayo came home late from work one day, and said he had been at the police station trying to bail out Uncle Wahab. There had been a series of car thefts at the Sheraton over a period of six months. The Central Investigation Bureau had been contacted. Workers at the hotel were interrogated and a surveillance unit had been set up. At 6 a.m. one morning, the police zoomed in on Uncle Wahab and arrested him and the girl he was with as they drove into the hotel.
Anita was appalled. How could the police? In this country, you are guilty until proven innocent, she protested. The thought of Uncle Wahab in his white kaftan in a grimy police cell brought tears to her eyes. Don’t doubt his integrity for a moment, she went on. You know he keeps late hours. Sometimes he is out all night and then drives into the hotel at sunrise and sleeps till midday. That is his way of life. He just happens to be one of those people whose mind works best at night. It is unfortunate …
With Bayo’s help and his own connections, Uncle Wahab got out of the police case that time. He dusted the experience off his white kaftan like it had never happened. He went away for a while to live with an old acquaintance, a local traditional chief, in his palace. He accompanied the chief on his ceremonial duties, participated in his traditional outings, and was a self-appointed overseer of the chief’s farms and property. The polygamous chief sent his quarrelsome wives to live in the town house as Uncle Wahab became his minion, a Gaveston to Edward II. It added to his charm, Anita said. He now carried a peacock-feather fan, sported coral beads, and a gold band encircled his Citizen watch. He seemed to know all about soil science, the fluctuations in the rainy season, and about growing maize and guinea corn.
By the end of the rainy season he was back in town minus the peacock feathers and coral beads. He looked considerably thinner and entirely listless. When he said he had been doing crossword puzzles out of the tabloid papers, Anita felt a surge of sympathy within her. He looked hungry and didn’t refuse the tomato omelette she offered him.
‘Have you been ill or something?’ she enquired concerned.
‘Not enough sleep,’ he replied, ‘and not enough to drink.’
Anita avoided the green bottles in the fridge and brought him a bottle of ginger ale instead. His kaftan, which was unfailingly bleached and starched, now looked somewhat unwashed and crumpled about him. Bayo was pleased to see him back.
Uncle Wahab had also resorted to writing for the local papers. With great ceremony he brought out of his bag an article he had written and showed it to Anita. It was something about the ideal society being one without the motor car. It came as a shock to Anita when she found out that Uncle Wahab had come in a taxi and that he had sold his car. ‘Cash flow problem,’ he explained vaguely, in typical business jargon.
After a few days of Anita’s pampering, and outings with Bayo, Uncle Wahab’s swagger and bravado returned. The Economist and Financial Times reappeared in the living room. And so did the green bottles. Uncle Wahab knew every detail in each survey in the business papers. He had the inordinate capacity to digest information and bring it up again for use, in a bovine sort of way, when needed. He borrowed Anita’s books to read, and always made perceptive remarks when returning them.
He had a fresh dossier on his return, of stories concerning traditional rulers. When a traditional chief died, he said, in some parts of the country, the chief’s first wife and several young men were buried alive with the body of the chief. The idea was that he would be served in the other world as he was in this. In those days it was the slaves attached to the chief, but nowadays any wayfarer or stranger in the territory got thrown in! Another story concerned the son of a chief who had taken it upon himself to bury his father’s body in the dead of night because custom demanded that the successor to the chief cut out the heart of the dead man and eat it! Uncle Wahab didn’t need much prompting. He had an uncanny knack for sinister stories to which he added a personal touch—the man in question was a friend or the woman in question an ex-lover.
His visit lasted longer that time and before Anita realized it had run into several months. She wasn’t sure when the good times ended and the bad times began, but between the blurred edges of the harmattan and the rainy season, she watched Bayo and Uncle Wahab get into a tangle of messy friendships and unproductive business deals. Uncle Wahab’s jokes soured on her—they were too well rehearsed. She wearied of his chauvinism and finesse. Her home was gradually turning into something of a ‘beer parlour’ and Bayo was into special brands of men’s perfumes. Further Uncle Wahab had eased out whatever privacy there had been in her marriage. She and her husband discussed the day’s happenings, they fretted over their financial problems, they made plans for the future, and they quarrelled and made up—all in Uncle Wahab’s presence.
In the half light between night and dawn Bayo started the argument. ‘How could you do that to my friend? You chased him out like a goat or a leper. He has done nothing …’
Anita couldn’t explain Uncle Wahab’s departure. Only a mounting chaos in her mind and an inability to cope.
‘Can you lower your voice?’ she said quietly. ‘It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. You’re going to wake the children.’
‘You listen to me … I am capable of any abomination on my own volition. I don’t need Wahab to goad me into it,’ Bayo convulsed with anger.
‘But he gave you that seal of approval.’
‘It’s your imagination … Wahab is not perfect, but he is a friend.’
‘Your friend …,’ Anita started and swallowed. Among other things she thought of the imported toothpaste, the eau de cologne and the minty breath-freshener left on the dressing table in the guest bedroom. She hadn’t intended that things should turn out this way but circumstances seemed to have a momentum of their own.
Uncle Wahab sat up till the early hours of the morning in front of the television set. He went through the Cosby shows, then Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and didn’t seem to be very discriminating, though previously he would have dropped names of famous actors and directors in conversation. Now he took in anything that appeared on the screen as the hours kept ticking and the night wore on. At sunrise he crawled into bed in the hotel room with puffy eyelids and stayed there till late afternoon.
