I stay on the Island with my Dad, at 1001 Estate.
His day job involves managing a plastic factory on the Mainland for some heartless Indians whose Visas had long expired, whose stay in Nigeria is now illegal.
He doesn’t pay workers, even if he did: he’d slash their money. Because he knows that his factory workers are illiterates and none amongst them could do anything about it, at least they made 800 Naira every day and used clean toilets and bathrooms without extra charges, without restrictions.
Some of them didn’t have houses, they slept under the bridge at Cele-Express, and of course Dad knew. So why should he pay them at all? Isn’t he their demigod? He calls it discipline, that he is grooming them for the future and you’d laugh and laugh and admire how smart mouthed your Dad was, is still.
On Sunday mornings, he’d assume his self-righteous, too holy role as a pastor in a Pentecostal church in Victoria Garden City (V.G.C) Ajah. He preaches to big men like himself, big bellied men of Lagos who were simply brutes. Who sway and sway in church, at every church anyway, in the name of worshiping on Sundays.
Who take advantage of poor hustling boys in Lagos, made money off their heads, and yet, left them poor. Who wear designers to church as if without designers, God wouldn’t answer prayers any longer.
My name is Tamaramuiebe. I am a student of the University of Lagos (Unilag) studying Law in my 5th year.
I am not even sure I like Law or liked justice at all.
Life hasn’t even been fair to me; how would I then be just?
But my father isn’t really a good man and someday I would have to defend him, as he is the only family you have now, after my mother and two handsome brothers died in the Sosoliso air crash.
So I didn’t mind, didn’t protest over his arrangement of my admission.
In his mind his manipulations and arranging of destiny worked. But in my own mind I just wanted to get away. Plus, it was Unilag, the positively crazy Unilag.
Because I love him so much, I stifled the urge to tell him to say the truth. To act more like Jesus, the Jesus he preached every Sunday. To embrace the reality that he’s just like the other big men.
Meanwhile, there is a boy I like in this factory. He’s very handsome, but weird. He reminds me of Odenigbo in Half of a Yellow Sun, when Adichie describes Odenigbo as the kind of unattractive man who would easily be noticed in a room full of attractive men.
Well, this boy I liked isn’t unattractive like Odenigbo, but he is Odenigbo like. He also reminds me of the boisterous 15-year -old boy I saw at Falomo, who bragged and bragged of his suffering and how he’d end up successful because he had seen it all. And I looked at him and winced. Someday, he would learn about men like your Dad who used and dumped strong, little-minded boys in Lagos.
So that very moment I saw this boy standing in front of a CMP machine, that day I and my girlfriends visited Dad at the factory, I knew he was different. Because all the other workers stared at I and my pretty friends, fought to be noticed, but he barely raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know if it was love or something like love, I just liked him, wanted to be close with him. And when I told my friends about this boy, about how I felt, they hissed and told me that he is simply another of my blind choices, that technically I have spiritual problems with making good choices and chorused ‘we’re bloody used to that.’ I laughed along with them, but in my mind, I knew the real deal. They too were among my blind choices.
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