I did not know the couple were childless. I had assumed they were recently married. And so when I got the mild rebuke to stop being friendly towards the children on the compound, it made no sense to me.
“This is my spiritual father. He came all the way from Mali to attend my wedding.” the man told me one evening as we both were glancing through their wedding photos.
It was during our conversation that evening that mentioned that the wedding was a year ago, and that he and his wife were trusting God for a baby.
Perhaps, they overheard the gossips their co-tenants passed around in the neighborhood about their childlessness. He being a pastor, they probably doubted which kind he was since he couldn’t cure his marriage of sterility. No wonder he limited his interactions with his co-tenants, and advised me to stop playing with the children in the house.
I like children a lot. And can’t imagine turning them and their innocent smiles away when they approach me without any malice or hatred in their hearts. But I understood the condition of my host, and the discomfort and strain my love of children put on his young marriage.
“Only the couple in sixth room from ours are good people. The rest are hypocrites.” he told me.
He was referring to a retired police officer and his wife.
Their compound looked like one giant loaf of bread divided into two, from one horizontal end to the other, with the spaces in the division widened enough for the outstretched arms of a man to touch both ends at the tip of the fingers. Each door along the corridor led to a bedroom, living room, kitchen and washroom housing an entire family.
Because my host didn’t have an additional bedroom, I was supposed to sleep in the living room. Instead, we shared the same mattress in his bedroom. He must have felt awkward letting me sleep on the carpet in the living room, but I felt uncomfortable sharing the bed of a couple although his wife was away on a journey.
The mattress was old and worn out, and I wondered how his wife felt reduced to starting life with a man from such humble beginnings.
He sounded like if he had a chance, he would have married someone else, although I could see that his wife was the reason a roof was over his head and food was on his table. He passes comments about fair women which makes it easy to guess that he has a soft spot for them. His wife wasn’t fair, and didn’t look like the models and mannequins he seemed to adore. I wondered what she thought about him each time she heard him talk like that.
One time I asked if he cooked whenever his wife was off to work. He was mostly at home all day, studying his Bible or reading a Christian book. He said he didn’t know how to cook.
“But when you were single, how did you eat?“ I asked.
“I lived with my parents and siblings. My sisters cooked.” he explained.
I remained silent. I thought the question alone was enough for him to see what I was driving at.
Each time I remember his wedding pictures, I say to myself, “He’s so lucky to have found a woman like this.”
For by his looks, structure and status, he probably wouldn’t have been able to afford such a woman of worth. Few women these days buy into the cliché of “I have a great future, come let’s hustle together.”
When he later told me his church helped him settle by talking to the woman on his behalf and helping him with the wedding arrangements, it made sense to me how they met.
I’m usually not used to sitting indoors all day. I long for fresh air outdoors. Besides, there was this chemical they used in washing the bathroom. Its odour diffused into every space in the house, and seemed to settle on even our skins, making me want to throw up.
“I’m sitting outside.” I told him, taking along one of his books and a plastic chair.
He didn’t like the idea of me sitting outside, and perhaps interacting with tenants in his house he didn’t see eyeball to eyeball with. But I hadn’t come on such a long journey to claim enemies that were not in my name.
While sitting outside, I enjoyed the view, and the breeze, and the conversations around me. Life in this new environment was like waking up from a nightmare, my eyes slowly adjusting to the post trauma, although still struggling to distinguish between dream and reality.
I wanted to learn the language spoken in the town, and this was my chance. I listened hard to the conversations around me, some words were difficult but using the context of the conversations, I tried to guess their meanings.
The retired police officer asked me a few questions. Where I was from, what I had come to do. And if I were a relative of my host. They told me a bit of their country, he and a colleague police officer that was also on retirement.
My plan was to stay at my host’s end for a few days, look for my own apartment and relocate. Things didn’t turn out as expected. I ended up staying for more than a month, till the return of my host’s wife, much to his displeasure.
And the interval between the discomfort and the time the tides began to turn, all I could do was feast on the mini library in my host’s living room.
Mowabites Worldwide 
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