The deep fresh forest breeze of Western Nigeria blows across the board and it was a cold December morning, we are sited in an 18 sitter bus and everyone is in a joyous mood our parents doing a tell it-all of how their year had gone by so quickly like little children who had just seen each other after a very long period.
Just like our parents, we are excited about spending the holidays with other family members, especially with our grandfather.

Grandfather was no ordinary man; just think of the local hero, they respected him in the community. He owns a local drugs dispensary: there were stories about him on how he rescued people in the town from strange ailments and diseases. And not just for this alone, he was also a revered man in the church.

Here we are galloping on the one-way track to Omu-Aran in Kwara state. A little background, I was born in Ilorin but I remember growing up in Omu-Aran, not the usual modern space we grow up in these days, this was in the early 1990s it was a very trade-cultural society with the Masquerades and the festivals, I remember Egun- Elewe and Paraka. Growing up, I remember been chased by Egun-elewe one festive evening and I hid under the bed for over an hour.

I was a set-up that evening by one neighbor. He paid the masquerade to fetch me; It terrified me to death when I saw the masquerade roaming the living room, and there I was hiding under the bed. Then suddenly I felt a pull from behind the masquerade dragged me out, I screamed so hard I lost my voice. He was standing right there with his big scary yellow mask and heavy voice; I had felt this powerful urge to urinate and I could not hold it anymore and I urinate all over the masquerade. I heard it a taboo to urinate on any masquerade, it was going to take away all its supernatural powers.

So here I am standing with this enemy and I felt I had disarmed him, so he picked me up from the floor and removed his mask and smiled, so he was human after all, who would have thought and we strolled outside together with a glimpse of smiling our faces. It was later I realized people volunteer to masquerade during the festive period.

So here we are going back to this memorable town, with my favorite cousin Ododoade. She is the light in everything growing up. She brings creativity, joy, and energy to everything she does, and I am looking forward to spending the holidays with her. This time we are spending the holidays at grandpas’, and this was where I met Mr. Saruna for the first time.

Mr. Saruna is not human, a brown wooden carving sitting on grand pa’s window with his wife Mrs. Sauna, an exemplary teacher of life skills and Ododoade’s kryptonite. The first night I met Mr. Sauna, it disappointed me because this was all they both had to talk about all day. When she’s doing something wrong, Grandpa would quickly say “Ododoade, Saruna Would not like this” and I was very disappointed that the highly publicized Mr. Saruna was just a graven image, a house item with no trace of life. Where did all the LEGENDS come from, his emergence into this great t man we all look up to?

To be continued..