An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  “I have told you to stop chewing things like a goat: nyum-yum-yum. Tufia!” she said, snapping her fingers in the air, laughing.

  But he ate on, bobbing his head and darting his tongue about in his mouth.

  “Well, maybe one day we will go abroad together.”

  “Abroad? Why?”

  “So you can see things, naw, and stop this bushmanliness.”

  “Ha, okay, Mommy.”

  He started the engine, and they hit the road. The van had just left the city when he began feeling uneasy. His stomach gave in to wild sensations, and he farted.

  “Jesus! Nyamma!” she cried. “Nonso?”

  “Mommy, sorry, but I am—”

  He was silenced by another release. He pulled hurriedly to the shoulder of the road.

  “Mommy, my stomach,” he gasped.

  “What?”

  “You have tissue, tissue paper?”

  “Yes, yes.” She reached for her bag, but before she could get the papers out, he grabbed a handkerchief from the pocket under the door handle of his side of the van and raced towards the bush. Chukwu, he nearly tore his trousers open once he was within concealable distance of the forest, and once they came off, his excreta slammed into the grass with an unaccustomed force. I was alarmed, for not since he was a boy had I seen this kind of thing happen to him.

  When he rose up it was with some relief, his forehead wet as if he’d been in the rain. Ndali had come out of the van and was at the mouth of the bush, holding the half-used roll of tissue.

  “What happened?”

  “I wanted to shit badly,” he said.

  “God! Nonso?”

  She burst out laughing again.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  She struggled to speak. “See your face—you are sweating.”

  They had barely driven for fifteen minutes when he rushed out again. He had the tissues this time, and with so much force did he defecate that his strength was expended. For sometime after he was done, he knelt down and clung to a tree. I had never seen anything like this happen to him. And even though I had learned to gaze into his viscera, I could not find exactly what was wrong with him, even though he was convinced he had diarrhea.

  “I actually have diarrhea,” he told Ndali when he returned to the van.

  Ndali laughed even harder, and he joined in.

  “It must be that ugba. I don’t know what they put inside.”

  “Yes, you don’t know.” She laughed even more. “This is why I don’t eat anyhow for anywhere. You are doing African man.”

  “I’m feeling like tired.”

  “Yes, drink water and my La Casera and rest. I will drive.”

  “You will drive my van?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  Astonished though he was, he let her drive, and for a long time after they resumed the journey, he did not feel the urge. But when it came, he pounded his hands on the dashboard, and when she pulled up, he flung himself out the door and tripped into the creepers. Then, picking himself up, he dashed into the bush as if unhinged. He returned to the van drenched in sweat, while she struggled to contain her laughter. He emptied the big Ragolis water bottle into his mouth and clung to the empty bottle. He told her a story his father had once told him about a man who had stopped like him to shit in a wild bush on the highway, and while at it, got swallowed by a python. His father used to play the song someone sang about it, “Eke a Tuwa lam ujo.”

  “I think I have heard the song before. But I’m afraid of all snakes—python, oh; cobra, oh; rattlesnake, oh; every snake.”

  “It is so, Mommy.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “Fine,” he said. He hadn’t gone for nearly as long as it would take to break five full kola nuts in four places, and they were almost in Umuahia. “Almost thirty minutes now, I never go. I think it have stopped.”

  “Yes, I agree. But I have laughed all my energy out, too.”

  They drove past thick forests on both sides for some time in serenity, his mind splintered between thoughts. Then suddenly it came upon him with the force of a gust, and he dashed into the bush.

  OSEBURUWA, she tended to my host until he was whole again. She went to the university the following day. When she returned, she joined him on the bench in the yard, plucking a sick fowl with bare hands so it could get some air into its skin. An old tray sat between them, full of feathers. He held on to one leg of the bird as he worked. She did this duty—the oddest thing she’d ever done in her life—with a curious mix of equanimity and laughter. While they worked, he forced himself to talk about his family, how he missed them, and the need for her to reconcile with hers. He spoke with great care, as if his tongue was a wet priest in the sanctuary of his mouth. Then she told him that her parents had come to the school to look for her that day again.

  “Nonso, I don’t want to see them. I just don’t want.”

  “Have you thought of it very well? Do you know this is even making the situation worst now?”

  She’d started to twist a feather from the leg of the bird when he said this. She drew back and sat on her legs on the raffia mat spread on the ground.

  “How?”

  “Because, Mommy, I am the one. It is because of me this is happening.”

  The hen raised its freed leg and dropped a blob of feces on the mat.

  “Oh, my God!”

  They laughed and laughed on until he released the hen and it hopped towards the coop, cackling plaintively. Egbunu, it might be the laughter that softened her heart, for when he explained afterwards that her action might make her family despise him the more, since it was for his sake this was happening, she sat in silence. And, later, as they lay in bed to sleep, she said, suddenly and over the rattling of the ceiling fan, that he had spoken the truth. She would return home.

  Like a water-filled calabash sent off with an emissary to the land of a provoked enemy, she went home the following day, but returned three days later as a calabash smoldering with fire. Her father had sent out very many invitations for his upcoming sixtieth birthday party but had not invited him. Her father had said he was not qualified to be there. She left the house, her resolve firm that she would not return. She said this with feral rage, stamping her feet and shouting, “How, just how can he do this? How? And if they refuse to invite you,” she said, “I swear to God who made me”—she tapped the tip of her tongue with her index finger—“er, I swear to God who made me, I will not attend myself. I will not.”

  He said nothing, busied with the soft burden she’d laid on him. He was seated at the dining table, where he’d sat picking dirt and pebbles out of a bowl of white beans. Bean weevils escaped from the unpacked beans, crouched on the table, or perched on the adjacent wall. When he finished picking the beans, he poured them into a pot and set it on the stove. He took up the flashy invitation card from the chair on which she’d dropped it and began reading the words to himself.

  This card is to invite mister and miss and your household to the birthday party of Chief. Doctor. Luke Okoli Obialor, the Nmalite 1 of Umuahia-Ibeku kingdom of Abia State of Nigeria. The event shall be at the Obialor compound on July 14, at Aguiyi Ironsi Layout…

  She had gone to his old bedroom, where the wall was defaced with his childhood drawings, mostly of the God of the White Man, his angels, his sister, and his gosling. She’d chosen this room as her study, where she read her books while in the house, and she slept with him in the bedroom that had once belonged to his parents. He read the invitation aloud from the sitting room so that she could hear him.

  “Fourteen, at Lagos Street on the July 14, 2007. There will be food in abundance and music by His Excellency, the king of ogene music, Chief Oliver De Coque. The party will be held from four p.m. to nine p.m.”

  “It is my turn, me too I will not care.”

  “The emcee of the occasion will be none other than the inestimable Nkem Owoh, Osuofia himself.”

  “I don’t care; I will not go.”

/>   “Come one, come all.”

  IJANGO-IJANGO, the early fathers, wise in the ways of humanity, used to say that the life of a man is anchored on a swivel. It can spin this way or that way, and a person’s life can change in significant ways in an instant. In the batting of an eyelid, a world that has stood can lie prostrate, and that which was flat on the ground just a moment before can suddenly stand erect. I have seen it many times. I saw it again after my host returned from an errand one afternoon a few days later. He’d gone out not too long after they had lunch to supply four of the large cocks to the restaurant at the center of the city while Ndali studied. He’d become increasingly troubled by the gathering storms in his life, fearing again that something was watching him, looking for a time when he’d be happy enough to strike and steal his joy and replace it with sorrow. It was a fear that had lodged itself in his mind from the time his gosling died. This fear—as is common when it possesses a man’s mind—convinced him with all the force of a persuasion that Ndali would be pressured to leave him eventually. And as much as I flashed thoughts in his mind continuously to contest it, it held firm. He went on fearing that, in time, she would give him up rather than lose her family. So biting was this fear that, as he drove back to the compound after the errand, he had to play Oliver De Coque’s music on the van’s cassette player to prevent himself from slipping into despair. Only one of the speakers was working, and sometimes, overwhelmed by the loud street noise, the music lapsed. It was those times, when Oliver’s baritone voice quailed, that the weight on his mind came bearing down on him.

  When he got home later, Ndali was sitting in the backyard, watching the fowls feed on the corn she’d spread on a sack, reading a textbook on the bench under the tree by the light of the rechargeable lamp. She had changed into a blouse and shorts that made her buttocks prominent. She had her hair oiled slick and now wore a bandanna over it. She stood up once she heard the net door opening.

  “Guess, guess, guess, Obim?” she said.

  She clasped her hand around him, almost stepping on one of the chickens, which fled frantically, its wings spread out, cawing.

  “What?” my host said, surprised as much as I was.

  “They said you can come.” She pressed her hands around his neck. “My dad, they said you can come.”

  He had not expected this at all, and it was thus with relief and mild incomprehension that he bellowed, “Oh, that is good!”

  “Will you come, Obim?”

  He could not look at her, so he did not look at her. But she inched towards him, in slow steps, and took his jaw and lifted his face to face her. “Nonso, Nonso.”

  “Eh, Mommy?”

  “I know what they did to you was not good. They disgraced you. But, you see, these things happen. This is Nigeria. This is Alaigbo. A poor man is a poor man. Onye ogbenye, he is not respected in the society. And, again, my dad and brother? They are proud people. Even my mum, even though she does not support my dad very much in this.”

  He did not speak.

  “They may be ashamed of you, but I am not. I cannot be ah—” She held his jaw and peered into his face. “Nonso, what is it? Why are you not saying anything?”

  “Nothing, Mommy. I will come.”

  She hugged him. And in the silence, he heard the sound of the nocturnal insects emptying into the ear of the night.

  “I will go with you to the party, for your sake,” he said again. And as he spoke, he saw that she’d closed her eyes and would not open them until he’d finished speaking.

  7

  The Disgraced

  EGBUNU, the old fathers say that a mouse cannot run into an empty mousetrap in broad daylight unless it has been drawn to the trap by something it could not refuse. Egbunu, would a fish see an empty metal hook sticking out beneath water and cleave to it? How would it unless it is enticed by something on the hook? Isn’t this similar to how a man is enticed into a situation he would not have liked to be in? My host, for instance, would not have agreed to attend Ndali’s father’s party had they not shown repentance and her father signed an invitation card with his name on it: “Mr. Chinonso Olisa.” Although I will acknowledge that he was persuaded in part by the determination to make Ndali happy at all costs and by a desire to see Oliver De Coque perform live, he was cautious even to the end. He decided to attend the party with only a part of him attuned to it, merely dragging along the other intransigent half. And I, his chi, had been unable to decide whether he should go. I feared that from what I knew of man, a feeling such as that which they had shown him—repulsion—does not easily expire. But I had seen the healing and equilibrium that this woman had brought into his life and desired that it would continue. For it is abominable for a chi to stand in the way of his own host. When a man affirms a thing, and if his chi does not desire this thing, all it can do is persuade its host. But if its host refuses, then the chi must not attempt to compel its host against his will; it must affirm the thing. This is again why the wise fathers often say that if a man agrees to something, his chi must agree too. The second reason for my ambivalence was because I had developed a strong faith in Ndali’s love for him, mostly after encountering her chi, and I strongly believed that if he married her, he would become complete, as the old fathers often say that a man is not complete until he marries a woman.

  The day before the party, they went to buy greeting cards for her father at the big supermarket near the Oando filling station. At a roadside clothes store on Crowther Street, he bought an isiagu tunic. Although Ndali had pointed out that the ones with the black lion-head prints were better looking, he was drawn to the red ones for some reason he could not understand. They had emerged from the store and were walking towards a shopping complex, the speakers of a church blasting from an upstairs block on the complex, when he saw Motu in front of an open mechanic’s workshop. She stood between a pile of motor tires and a mechanic who, dressed in blue overalls and large dark goggles, was firing a rod with something that gave off radiant, glittering sparks of red flame. She was dressed in a flowing gown, the green one with red leaf prints, which he’d removed a few times before making love to her. She had just finished selling groundnuts to one of the men, and she was bunching a piece of cloth into an aju to place on her head before balancing the tray on it. It felt, Egbunu, that for an instant, he’d slipped from the hands of his present world like an oiled fish. He stood there, undecided as to what to do, wondering why she had left him. But Motu did not even turn. She put the tray on her head and walked in the other direction, towards a crowded market. He thought to call out to her but feared that she might not hear him over the great noise of the welding machine. His heart palpitating, he turned towards Ndali, who had continued to walk on without knowing he was no longer in tow. He had not realized that while watching Motu, he’d also focused on the fire from the mechanic’s welder. And when he stirred away from it, his vision had become blurred, and for a moment it appeared as if the world and all that was in it had become covered in a thick, silky veil of yellow.

  CHUKWU, Ndali did not return with him to his house that day. She went to help her parents prepare for the big next day. Aside from attending to a sick hen who had started to sprout a nacrelike substance on the sides of its beak, dabbing it with a clean towel soaked in warm water, he spent the rest of the day thinking of Motu. He wondered what had happened, whose hand it was that had stretched out and grabbed her away from his fold and stolen her away from him. He would have spoken to her, had he been alone. He thought long about why she left him, without warning, without provocation, when in fact it had seemed she loved him and he’d been firmly planted in her heart. Children of men beware: you cannot put your confidence in another man. No one is fixed beyond being blown sideways. No one! I have seen it many times. He was still deep in thought when his phone buzzed. He picked it up, tapped the message box, and read, They really want u to come Obim!!! even my brother. i luv u, gudnyt.

  He arrived at her family’s residence the following day to find that
he was the first person there. Ndali came to meet him and asked him to follow her into the house. But he would hear none of it. He sat in a plastic chair under one of the two tarpaulin-covered pavilions erected for guests. Another pavilion stood separated from these two by a raised stage platform with a floor covered by a red rug. It was the High Table, where the party hosts and other dignitaries were to sit. There, the seats were arranged behind a long table near the stage, which was covered with embroidered cloth. A group of men soaked in sweat set speakers in place beside the table while two women dressed in identical blouses and skirts decorated big cakes with the molded effigy of Ndali’s father holding a staff.

  He picked up a copy of the program placed on his seat and was starting to read when he felt a chair behind him rattle. Before he could tell what it was, or even look back, a hand tapped his shoulder and a head bent towards his side.

  “So you came,” the head said.

  Things had happened so quickly that he was incapacitated by the ghastly thrill of sudden fright.

  “You came after all,” the man, whom he now recognized to be Chuka, repeated. Chuka spoke the language of the White Man with a foreign accent similar to Ndali’s. “Some people, some people, they just have no shame. No shame. How can you—after all popman did to you that day—come here?”

  Chuka placed his arm on my host’s shoulder and pulled him closer. I heard the voice of my host’s head shout, Was he not close enough? A sound in the upward direction in the distance caused him to raise his head and catch the sight of Ndali on what must have been the balcony of her room.

  “Wave at her, tell her you are okay,” Chuka said. “Wave at her!”

  She was saying something he could not hear but which I made out to be a question as to whether or not he was fine. He obeyed the order he’d been given, and she waved back and blew a kiss into the air. He had thought her brother was concealing himself behind him, but now Chuka shouted, “Your man and I are having a sweet talk!”