LarrySun: I love your sense of description. Where have you been all these while? Please come and update, please.

Ishilove: I love your style and sense of description. It sort of carries the reader into your world and one finds oneself visualising everything. I could almost smell the kaikai on Mama's breath, her hands on Old Soldier's trousers, the men tittering from the benches. I could feel, smell, taste...

Absolutely lovely. Please do update

Please take note of these:

"Today as we drag our feet to her stall, [/b]me and Bobby[/b]: It should be ''Bobby and I". There's a grammatical principle for this but I forget now. Larrysun please help me out here.
" stiffing my neck each time the tickling": what do you mean by 'stiffing?" Do you mean tensing your neck muscles? I really don't understand. Larrysun, can you help us out here?

“Well get my meat ready” I reply, my neck stiffing": Again

"not Ibo like": Please note that there is no such word as 'Ibo'. It's Igbo. The colonial masters don't have 'gb' letter in their alphabet so they can't pronounce 'gb' which is a bilabial sound, so they simply turned 'igbo' to 'ibo', which is
right up their alley. You, Mr Abosi31, on the other hand, a full blooded, broad nosed native Nigerian negro who can pronounce the 'pk' 'kp' 'gb' sounds etc, so you have no reason to write 'Ibo' like a foreigner

"also run out of
stuck."- Stock, not stuck.

"her right hand is gripped on a sickly man’s belt around his waist and he stands there, helplessly." - Larrysun, the bolded doesn't seem right. I'm not sure. What do you think?


That said, I think you are a fantastic writer and I look forward to more updates.

Abosi31:
Thank you Ishilove, really. I am excited you could smell the kai kai too lol. About the 'stuck' thing, I noticed it but it was too late as I already posted. Thank you anyways, you're the man.

Ishilove: I love your style and sense of description. It sort of carries the reader into your world and one finds oneself visualising everything. I could almost smell the kaikai on Mama's breath, her hands on Old Soldier's trousers, the men tittering from the benches. I could feel, smell, taste...

Absolutely lovely. Please do update

Please take note of these:

"Today as we drag our feet to her stall, me and Bobby: It should be ''Bobby and I". There's a grammatical principle for this but I forget now. Larrysun please help me out here. (I intentionally overlooked the grammatical oversights, but here I am again; all thanks to Ishilove Okay, 'me' is an objective pronoun and should be used in the objective case; therefore 'I' instead of 'me' should be used in that construction. but it is still wrong to write 'I and Bobby', because when the personal pronoun 'I' is joined with another subject by the conjunction 'and', the other subject should be mentioned first before the pronoun. That is why it ought to be 'Bobby and I' )

" stiffing my neck each time the tickling": what do you mean by 'stiffing?" Do you mean tensing your neck muscles? I really don't understand. Larrysun, can you help us out here? (The word 'stiffing' does not exist in the English lexicon. It may be you mean 'craning my neck...', or you rewrite the sentence in a clearer English expression)

“Well get my meat ready” I reply, my neck stiffing": Again

"not Ibo like": Please note that there is no such word as 'Ibo'. It's Igbo. The colonial masters don't have 'gb' letter in their alphabet so they can't pronounce 'gb' which is a bilabial sound, so they simply turned 'igbo' to 'ibo', which is
right up their alley. You, Mr Abosi31, on the other hand, are a full blooded, broad nosed native Nigerian negro who can pronounce the 'pk' 'kp' 'gb' sounds etc, so you have no reason to write 'Ibo' like a foreigner

"also run out of
stuck."- Stock, not stuck.

"her right hand is gripped on a sickly man’s belt around his waist and he stands there, helplessly." - Larrysun, the bolded doesn't seem right. I'm not sure. What do you think? (This expression is guilty of two charges : Passive voice construction and Ambiguity. Saying that 'her right hand is gripped...' implies that she is not the performer of the action, it shows that the action is being performed on her. the expression is not different from 'her right hand is grabbed...by someone else'. And I'm certain that is not what you mean. To avoid being accused of jejune writing style and swimming in the cesspool of passive-voice constructions [which should be avoided as much as possible], revisit your post with a critic's pair of eyes and correct the obvious slips of the pen. Those words can be thus rephrased: 'she held the sickly man's belt with a firm grip of her right hand', yes, although the expression seems a bit puerile for an accurate grammatical style of writing, it is still written in the active voice...which is quite clearer for the readers to assimilate. )


That said, I think you are a fantastic writer and I look forward to more updates. (I so much agree with her; you're a good writer. I like how your imagination works. Your description is smooth. And, lastly, I noticed that there were some places where you place your quotation marks before the punctuation marks that are related to the expressions in quote. It is wrong. Your punctuations [full stop, comma, question mark] should come before the closing quotation mark. This is one of them: [s]“Abeg”, Bobby implore Aunty Aremu. “Do you know exactly where she is? Who did she go to meet”?[/s] It should be written correctly as: “Abeg,” Bobby implores Aunty Aremu. “Do you know exactly where she is? Who did she go to meet?" Did you see the difference? There are even some that lack proper punctuations, but I don't need to go into details. God bless you...whoever you are. )

Ishilove:
Thank you sir.

I might be hairy, but I aint a man

Keep it up sir, ayam following you 'bumba to bumba' (as they say on NL )

LarrySun:

Abosi31: It is a long walk from our house to the market, where Mama sells cigarettes and kai kai in small glass cups to old men she would smile in front of, but curse them once they left her stall; but it is a longer walk to our football field near the abandoned primary school: yet we preferred that journey.

Our field would easily pass for a mini-soccer pitch with space for our cheering girlfriends to stand on while we play to impress them, but the circular shape it has makes it look like a baseball court. It is rectangular in shape, but vegetation drew an arc along the rectangular edges, carefully avoiding the interior of the square. I always imagine God holding the little compass from my Maths-set and carefully making an arc inside the square, being encouraged by my Mathematics teacher, Sir Abdul; who would not shout into His ears in correction, because God was bigger than him. The final product of this work will be our football field, our Baldhead: because from afar it looked like the heads of those old men Mama laughs at when they left.


Today as we drag our feet to her stall, me and Bobby, we discuss about the game we would play later in the evening: last Friday evening we were in the same team and had won only one of our numerous matches we wagered on. It was Izu that caused most of the goals that sacked our team, and he kept shouting at us all because he was the biggest boy in Baldhead and no one could stand up to him even if we were all losing money.

“If Izu tries rubbish today again, I will fight him”, I say, bending down to pick a brown piece of paper from the sand.
Bobby laughs mirthlessly. He is used to me saying this, even in the house, when we eat garri from stainless plates. Then he would laugh until Mama, from the kitchen, would yell at him to shut up or go to the closest Prayer House for deliverance.

I take a glance at him, my handsome younger brother, fair-skinned and without blemish but for a scar that ran from his temple into his hair; a reminder of the accident he had when he fell from the bed as a baby. He had laid there; Mama would tell us, without making a single sound until she walked into the parlor from the bathroom and rushed to pick him up, blood rushing from his forehead, before he blurted out an ear shattering cry. I was vindicated not because I was three at the time, but because I was at school, probably peeing in my shorts for the third time in two hours.

“If you can talk to Izu”, Bobby replies, “I will give you the meat in my soup this night”. It is a challenge; he does not say it with the cunning smile as he would when he challenges me to talk to a new girl in school. Then he adds: “Me, I’m tired of his behavior, abi na him own bad pass?”

I had cut the paper along its edges and folded it into a thin spaghetti-like cigarette and now I clean the inside of my ears with its pointed end, stiffing my neck each time the tickling sensation got too severe. The road is calm today; Kano is always calm on Friday afternoons after school, maybe because the majority Muslims are in the big mosque on their knees facing Mecca, their foreheads on the dusty ground.

“Well get my meat ready” I reply, my neck stiffing. “Because I will show Izu that he is as much a stranger in this land as I am.”

Bobby sighs. He is thinking what I am thinking. It was true. We were all strangers in Kano. It was just that there were several unnecessary categorizations: here, Hausas were the ‘major’ majority, Ibos were the ‘minor’ majority, Yorubas were the ‘minor’ minority, and everyone else was in the ‘major’ minority class. Mama had lived with Our Father in Benin until three months before they had Bobby when he said he was travelling to Cotonou but never returned. Rumours flew that he had left for Europe with an Onyibo woman old enough to be his mother whom he met in Lagos. Mama left Benin two years after for Kano, when the jeering from her family members who had warned her about our Father became unbearable. So she brought me and Bobby up telling us about him, but stating firmly each time that we were Benin people, and not Ibo like our coward father.



We are almost at the market and naked children of beggars run up and down the street; indifferent to the plight of their parents who sit and sprawl on the road, waiting for generous gifts from worshippers from the nearby mosques. I wonder if they too would not go in to pray for their benefactors, or even for their healing as most of them were either blind or cripple. My ears tingle excessively and I enjoy the sensation.


Mama is not in her stall when we arrive. I greet her neighbor, Aunty Aremu, asking after her and she tells me Mama had gone to collect her money from a debtor customer who would not pay. I and Bobby share a knowing look. Mama had gone to fight, again.

She always gave out her wares on credit to her customers but would not hesitate to disgrace them if they took too much time to pay. The last time I had come to her stall to meet her hands on a man’s threadbare T-shirt demanding for her money else he would pay it to the nurses who will wake him up from the coma she will put him in. All her explanations to passers-by who tried to pacify her started with “See me, see trouble o! I try to help these good-for-nothing men when they come to my little stall for one shot, and now they cannot pay me, is it good like that?” The passersby will ask her how much the money was and then reprimand Mama for taking a little amount too seriously. I imagine Mama tying her head tie firmly around her waist as she stomped away to look for this unfortunate debtor, who could not settle a cheap bill.

“Abeg”, Bobby implore Aunty Aremu. “Do you know exactly where she is? Who did she go to meet”?

“I’m not sure, sha, but I know she went to the timber area”.


Mama had not always been this aggressive. Maybe it is frustration or just anger at our squalor that transformed her into such a Shylock. She even stopped lending salt and pepper to neighbours and told them she had also run out of stuck. One day she just walked into the house from the bedroom and snapped about how Bobby ate noisily like a barbarian, almost slapping him but for my intervention. I was forced to whisper, in-between titters, that maybe she had started taking the kai kai she sells.

We hear Mama’s loud voice at a small shop near the sawdust dump. When I see her, her right hand is gripped on a sickly man’s belt around his waist and he stands there, helplessly. His friends are seated on a wooden bench few meters away probably enjoying the show. The victim today is Old Soldier.

Old Soldier told all who cared to listen that he fought on the side of the Federal Army during the Biafran War; and that he was a commander in charge of fifty men. It was, of course, a big lie. He looked just fifty years old even if he was only in his early thirties. And now as Mama’s shakes him violently with a firm grip on his waist, I cannot help but imagine his long arms loading a rifle and giving orders to fifty men.

“Look Woman”, he said, he was obviously drunk because his speech drawled and his feet were unsteady “You are holding a Civil War Vet. I am not sure you even know what that means – civil war!” He laughs raucously, the kind of laugh the evil bosses would have in American movies before they kill some helpless man because he cannot tell them where the protagonist is.

Mama shakes him again, this time with both hands. She obviously has not noticed me and Bobby: if she had she will raise her voice – sort of asking us to join in the harassment.
Bobby greets her first and she turns, eyes glowing like coal. “You won’t help me get my money eh? Is it when he falls and dies that you will come?”

The market is getting crowded again as the Friday prayers have finished and some people stop to watch the drama for a while before going their way. I am getting very embarrassed and the laughter from the men on the benches is louder now, as loud as Mama’s voice.

I walk to Mama and grab her arm: “Let’s go, Ma. Please let’s go home”. She looks at me as if I was the crazy one, and I smell alcohol as she exhales deeply while Bobby gently removes her hands from Old Soldier’s loins. She crashes into my arms and I see a tear trickle down as we walk away, Bobby behind, saying sorry to Old Soldier. Bobby hurries to Mama’s stall to lock up, while I take her home.


No one went to Baldhead.


That night, she catches a fever and as I serve her dinner in her bed, she sobs uncontrollably, wiping her nose with the back of her palms. Then just before she sleeps, she tells me: “You see, the last time I went to the main market, I saw your father. At first I did not believe it was him, he was in the backseat of the new jeep whose driver wanted to buy my chewing sticks. He called me and when I saw it was him, I ran away. I couldn’t believe he is still alive. My mother’s spirit should have struck him dead.”


******* ******* *******

“You see, the last time I went to the main market, I saw your father. At first I did not believe it was him, he was in the backseat of the new jeep whose driver wanted to buy my chewing sticks. He called me and when I saw it was him, I ran away. I couldn’t believe he is still alive. My mother’s spirit should have struck him dead.”