You will never realize how loud, how noisy and how choking it all is. The pipipi of motorcycles. The popopo of cars. The vroom of their engines on the roads. The vuuu of planes in the air. The wiwoowiwoo of ambulances, police vans and government convoys. The dumdukedum blasting from music speakers. What about the “CMS Apongbon CMS!” of conductors, the “Owa!” of passengers, the “Allahu Akbar!” from mosques and the “Alleluyah!” from churches? Then there is that gidigidigidi of generators after a blackout, that nwiiiu that goes off when power is restored and those shouts of “Up NEPA!’ that follow. I am tired.

Sometimes, I just want to stick my fingers in my ears to block out all the noise, all the music and all the madness. Sometimes, I wish it were possible to press a mute button or to put the world on flight-mode. I wish I could buy one-minute silence like a one thousand naira recharge card. Thankfully, ten thousand naira is what it would cost me to board a bus and journey from my city home in Lagos to my rural home in Obodo Esatọ during the holidays. Ten thousand naira is my ticket to two weeks of relative peace and quiet. Right now, however, I close my eyes and disappear.

I am walking behind Mama. We are heading to one of her farms somewhere deep inside the forests of Obodo Esatọ. We have walked for about twenty minutes and my sixteen years old mind already feels lost in the seemingly endless maze of trees. Mama needs no GPS and no Google Maps to navigate here. She knows the path like the back of her hand and the lumps in her palm. A few moments later, we are finally descending into something like a valley. There is a stream coursing through the middle down there. Mama pauses at the edge of the stream just before her feet touches the water. She pauses to greet someone. I pause behind her too. I wonder who Mama is greeting because I know how she greets people; she never greets younger people the same way that she greets her peers and elders. A younger person would certainly have greeted her first and I was sure that I had not heard any voice before hers. A peer or elder would certainly have responded cheerfully to her greeting and I had not heard any response yet. All I can hear are the burbles of the stream, the coo of doves, the whistles of other birds, the squeaks of squirrels and the chirp of crickets. No body and no mortal could respond to Mama’s greeting with silence. It was considered an insult here. If you mistakenly ignored her greeting, the Mama that I knew would greet you a second time, louder than the first. You must hear her second greeting and must respond with your own. If you were still deaf and she greets you the third time, her anger would be louder than the greeting. At that point, your response would be met with her angry silence. That is why I am confused by Mama’s unanswered greeting. I scan the area with my eyes to check if I can see who she had greeted. I cannot see any woman near the basket of abacha that is floating at the corner of the stream. I cannot see any man tapping nkwu-ocha or cutting down igu from any of the palm trees around here. I cannot see anybody plucking fruits from any of other trees as well. I am beyond confused when Mama, the Mama that I knew, does not greet the second time. Instead, she moves slowly across the stream. Her steps are the measured steps of an old woman who is moving slowly not because of rheumatism or arthritis but because her feet are enjoying the coolness of the water.

My eyes follow Mama’s feet and flip-flops gliding through the stream. I bend down to roll up my trousers. My eyes search for and count the stones that I want my own feet to step on without getting wet. I see one big stone. I see two. I see three and four. These four stones must have been placed there by people like me who don’t like to dip their feet in the water. My eyes finally meet Mama’s eye on the other side of the stream. There is no sign of anger on her face. She is suppressing a laugh.
“Mama, who were you greeting?” I stand, demanding an answer with my most serious face.
“Iyiachana,” she explains, while motioning with her hand for me to cross the stream to her side.
“And who is Iyiachana?” I ask wide-eyed as I carefully step on the first stone with my right foot.
Mama smiled a mischievous smile. She must be smiling because she knows that I know that the name of the stream is Iyiachana. She must be smiling because I know that she knows that the real question I want to ask her is: Why and how can you be greeting the water?

I step on the second stone with my left foot and on the third stone with my right foot again. I am about to stretch out my left leg when I notice something strange about the fourth stone. It looks a bit like… Like a shell. A tortoise shell! In a split second, I shift my left foot away to avoid stepping on it and my two feet land with a splash in the water.
“You should have greeted Iyiachana,” Mama says bursting out in laughter.
She quickly brushes past me to lift what I thought was an empty tortoise shell out of the water and place it at the edge of the stream. It is now I realize that the tortoise must have come for a drink. Or maybe it had come to play one of its countless mbe tricks on me like it does in all those folktales I had heard many times.
“You were greeting mbe?” I ask, pointing at the tortoise.
“Waa!” she laughs harder this time, shaking her head.
“Eh?” I exclaim a second too fast before I quickly remember that ‘waa’ is our people’s way of saying ‘no’.
“City boy!” she teases me, in her usual way, pinching my left cheek playfully.
“Village woman!” I tease her back, tapping away her hand from my cheek as we both march up from the valley.

That was over ten years ago before she died. My old village grandmother must have decided that there was no use trying to explain why she had greeted Iyiachana to her young city grandson. Oh! How I miss Mama!

There was one evening that I stood at the balcony of my father’s house in Obodo Esatọ. It must have been 7 or 8 pm that evening. It was a year or so after my grandmother had died. I stood there absentmindedly; thinking about Mama. I was thinking about how home no longer felt like home without her. I stood there lost in thought till something flew and hit my right cheek. I assumed that it was a bat but for some reason I can’t explain I didn’t react to it. Did I even rub my cheek? What I remember is that I stood where I stood for about one more minute before I walked calmly into the house. Maybe the usu did not want me to keep grieving over Mama. Maybe it could sense my loss and wanted to comfort me in its own usu way.

I reappear in the present back here in Lagos. Ten times ten times ten times ten thousand naira cannot bring back my grandmother. I miss that her one eye. She had been one-eyed for as long as I could remember. She had lost her left eye while dragging a knife with her sister when they were still kids. To me, it was no loss because I could swear that Mama could see better than me and other people with two eyes. I miss the way she would laugh at me whenever I wore a long-sleeved shirt, trousers and tied a cloth around my ears because I wanted to protect myself from those tiny bloodsucking insects we called kpishikpishi. They were far small than mosquitoes and bit in the afternoon unlike mosquitoes. I miss how she would sometimes call me her husband because I was named after her husband, my late grandfather. I miss those her delicious mushrooms that tasted like spiced meat; she was the first and only person to prepare it for me. I miss the way she would shout “Huaaa! Huaaa!” while waving her arms to scare away the egbe whenever it swooped down to carry one of the chicks of any of our okuko. I even miss the way she used to scream “Tufia!” and spit on the ground whenever she heard about an abomination.

The last time that I journeyed back home to Obodo Esatọ, I took a walk to Iyiachana. There is a bridge constructed over it now but I pretended as if the bridge was not there. I descended down the valley, pulled off my shoes and left it on the sand. I pulled off my shirt and my trousers, quickly folded them and placed them neatly beside my shoes. I stood there in my boxers and walked into the stream. Then I planted my feet gently into its sands and greeted Iyiachana. It felt as if I was Mama herself standing there. That was when I finally understood why my grandmother greeted Iyiachana that day over ten years ago. I now understand why I should always show respect to Iyiachana, to Ishinwangene, to Ojorowo, to the umu egu where we drink from and even to the small mmiri uju that gathers in hollow fallen tree trunks where small animals drink from.

Tuu… Tuu… My phone vibrated inside the pocket of my trousers where I had dropped it beside my shoes. I heard it but I chose to ignore it. What I couldn’t ignore, however, was the uneasy silence around Iyiachana. It sounded a lot like Mama’s angry silence after she had greeted you three times without getting a response. Its waters still burbled as it flowed past. Its waters still felt cool on my feet. But I could hardly hear that kwuukwu-kwulu-kwuu-kwulu bird sound that I loved to mimic so much. There were fewer trees, fewer coos, fewer whistles, fewer squeaks and fewer chirps. It felt as if Iyiachana was mourning the impending extinction of its animal friends and the bleakness of its own future. I dropped to my knees when I noticed how dirty Iyiachana looked now with the empty plastic bottles, biscuit wrappers, pure-water sachets and the torn polythene bags floating at its corners.

Iyiachana had greeted me more than three times since I was a boy and I had never responded to its greetings till I became a man. Iyiachana has greeted us with its refreshing waters every minute, every hour, every day, every month and every year since time immemorial. How do we respond to Iyiachana’s greeting? I imagined that my grandmother’s grandmother had greeted Iyiachana years before her and that her grandmother’s grandmother had also greeted Iyiachana many years before them. When I try to envision my grandchildren greeting Iyiachana years after me and their own grandchildren greeting Iyiachana many years after them, the vision is blurry and agonizingly hard to see. All I can see in that future is soot and exhaust smoke. All I can hear in that future is the pipipi of motorcycles, the popopo of cars, the vroom of engines, the vuuu of planes, the wiwoowiwoo of ambulances, police vans or government convoys, the gidigidigidi of generators, the dumdukedum blasting from music speakers and the gbowam of a nuclear explosion that threatens to end it all.

https:// ganfuwa. wordpress. com /2022/06/18/iyiachana-by-chibueze-ngeneagu/