The girl is here again. She is talking to the boy under the flame tree. The boy often sits there with a book during his thirty-minute lunch break while fellow workers congregate behind the kitchen to chat up the young cooks, smoke cigarettes, and swap gossip. She is wearing a print dress with multicolored petal design: the petals explode in brilliance under the Lagos sun. From the window, Etenga can see her face clearly: she can’t be more than twenty. He wonders who she is, what she is to the boy. He wonders who the boy is—a student most likely, trying to make some money over the break doing odd jobs.



Unusual neighborhood. Etenga chose it deliberately. Lowbrow, even by Lagos standards. He chose it so he can be close to people like these kids, ordinary people, the salt of the earth. From his bedroom window on the left, he can see into two separate streets—one going north, the other going north-east. He has never failed to be amazed by the bustle, the energy that seems to radiate off the people: the mothers with their kids strapped to their backs, the children kicking a ball in the schoolyard, the hawkers and bus conductors and commercial bikers, and the policemen stopping them for bribes.



The bedroom window on the right opens onto a more sedate street, Ikorodu; here he can see bus stops and a few offices facing a bendy, tarred road running south. It’s deceptively peaceful: twice he has witnessed a fight break out from nowhere with men jumping out of cars and facing each other and pointing fingers. Soon, fists and objects flew. Passersby, almost on a whim, then rolled up their sleeves and hit out at random. That too is why he wanted to be here, in the heart of the city.



Why would an ex-minister, from a foreign country, choose to live in a Lagos slum? The reporter asked him this when he moved into the neighborhood last year. Why not Victoria Island, or Ikoyi, or the ultramodern, ultra expensive Victoria Garden City, where he could live out his years of exile behind tall walls, safe and listening only to the sound of the waves?



He looked at the reporter’s simple face and saw how his mind was already formulating the next question, his recorder thrust into Etenga’s face. He wanted to ask him if he had ever heard of the myth of Anteaus, the hero who was said to renew his strength by lying on the ground—and when in a fight he was thrown to the ground, it only reinvigorated him.



—I am a man of the people. It makes me happy to be so close to the ordinary people.



—But you were kicked out by the “ordinary people” of your country. The masses rose up against you after thirty years in power.



Crafty. Not as stupid as he’d appear, after all.



—I left when my leader left, we resigned voluntarily. Get your facts right.





Damned journalist. If he were back in his country and back in power, he’d have this buffoon whipped to within an inch of his life. Then, such a buffoon wouldn’t even be allowed within a mile of him. But that is all in the past: now he is an exile, dependent on the Nigerian government’s charity. They took him in when every country, including his own “mother country” Belgium, turned its back on him and the president. The president, the illustrious father of the nation, is now in some tiny Caribbean country, alone. And the minister, once tagged as the president’s successor, is here watching through windows just to kill time.

In exile, nothing much happens, not even in Lagos. He spends most ....................please click the link to read completely.
https://bcsquareblog./2016/02/05/a-man-of-the-people-a-short-story-by-helon-habila/