By Banji
Ojewale
Kotei chewed on the flameless cigarette between two fingers on his left hand, regretting it was the last he took from the pack. He wished the manufacturers could load more into the paper box. He wouldn’t mind the cost, as long as it reduced the frequency of his visits to Handzin Ayen, two streets away, for the stuff. This would also ensure he would not run out of the stuff too early. But there was a bigger worry: for years he had always failed his New Year resolution to quit the smoke.
Instinctively, Kotei holding a pack of cigarettes, would recite the legend: I promise not to smoke again. I won’t ever go to Handzi Ayen for the cigarettes, even if she asks me to come for them for free. I’m now going to smoke these ones as a parting shot. Thereafter it’s bye-bye. They go away from me. Depart with the departing year. You won’t go with me into the new one. So, help me God!
But Kotei never stood by his decision. He would exhaust the pack he summoned as witness to his vow. After a few hours, not days or weeks, of abstinence in the New Year, he’d return to the divorced love. He would say his business as a fisherman that exposed him to the cold waters of the Atlantic coastline of Accra was the tempting culprit. He would argue that he needed the lit sticks to warm his system as he braved the chilly waters for his livelihood. And all the year, the two would be inseparable, the man and his tobacco. The caution of early death for consumers was phantom. Kotei was forty-two years; he was still alive after embracing the brown-end paper stick for more than two decades. It was difficult for him to remember the exact circumstances that brought him into the practice he sought to disown now.
Not so for his move into drinking akpeteshie, the local liquor. It was Kotei’s second companion. The fisherman clearly knew the date and time of their union. One evening, a man he knew in their seaside neighborhood was in a pub when he saw youthful Kotei walk by. He asked the lad to buy him kenke and its accompaniments of fried fish and pepper. Returning, the boy dropped the food and the change of a few pesewas. But the man would not let go of Kotei.
“Let me appreciate you,’’ he said. “I won’t give you money.’’ He asked Kotei if he had ever drunk alcohol. “No.’’
“I can see you’re a good boy. I’m going to give you a little
drink to prepare you for life. Only a sip. You need only a little now. Once it
gets into you, it will create a world of its own to join yours for a lasting
bond. It will look for you. And you will look for it.’’
Kotei took it. And, as his new-found adult mentor predicted, he entered into a long-lasting link with the home-grown gin. He didn’t plan to become a fisherman; but when he did, he ran straight into the waiting embrace of a prophecy.
Somehow, drinking wasn’t a gnome he feared like smoking. He could not bring himself to seeking its ban in his life. He believed he wasn’t addicted to the bottle like he was to smoking. He could tame the urge to drink. Tobacco was the troubling evil genius he’d pay any price to outlaw. He sometimes wondered what it would have been like if he had also admitted wee (marijuana) into the mix. He felt the triad would have destroyed him, given the heavy toll only a duo was already exacting on his time and finances. He wasn’t reckoning with the health impact, yet. It hid in the patient future.
Now, it was cigarettes that stalked him. At home. When eating. In public places. At sea. In bed. In toilet spaces. When taking a walk. It was all round him. They were married.
Once, he joked that if he got a wife, it would be a tough task deciding who owned the home: the fumes from his tobacco or the smoke from the kitchen with his wife busy preparing food for the family. Well, women wormed their way in. But none, four of them, stayed. Three, five, six, eight months of being live-in partners, they were gone.
Nobody knew the real reasons for the brevity of these unconsummated relationships. Only the fourth, packaged for him by Auntie Korkor, spoke of her days with Kotei.
“I couldn’t continue with him because I can’t live with a spirit. I believe he’s a spirit. He leaves the bed deep into the night to smoke in the toilet. Sometimes, I hear the doors of the house opening and closing. He heads for the shores to smoke facing the ocean waves. I think being a spirit, Kotei communes with fellow spirits...I had to run from him. I feared he might one day return with sex-hungry papa water friends denied the act by their angry mammy water spouses.’’
She left when Auntie Korkor was discussing arrangements to get her and Kotei marry formally. She was shattered. But what could she do to stop a woman scared of living with a spirit-being poised to share her with kindred spirits?
Kotei claimed the four women just left without informing him,
before or after their exit. He always came back from work to meet an empty
home. They checked out the way they checked in: a roomy Ghana-must-go-bag, with
enough space to add new clothing a doting husband might decide to offer a new
bride. Kotei found none of his belongings missing upon the women’s flight.
Some were even generous. They left him his favorite dinner: banku (corn meal), enmomi flor (okro soup) with crab, shrimp and fish.
“I’m half-married to my dinner. I can go without breakfast. I can do without lunch. But never without dinner’’, the fisherman would tell every new arrival. “I’m home every Tuesday and Sunday, so I’ll take all the meals on those days, except I decide otherwise. But home or not home, I must have the food in the night, even if I come home late. If you comply, you’ll take over completely from the other woman, my dinner.’’
He told concerned friends and relations: “We didn’t quarrel. I don’t recall any misunderstanding prior to their departure. I never maltreated any of them. I gave them money. I never cheated on them. I played my role as a man. You all know me. Am not a womanizer like some of you. So I don’t understand this spirit-being matter Auntie Korkor’s woman is bringing up.’’
He said those who came and went away weren’t the ideal ladies for him. They lacked the temperament and discipline to subject themselves to the likes and dislikes of the head of the family, as demanded in the African tradition. The right one would come and find him a perfect partner. He would stay with him to set up the happy home of a man, his wife and children.
Kotei didn’t seem to be missing these women. He could go shopping himself; if that failed, he had girls and boys in the community he could ask to do the market runs for him. Cooking? He was a chef himself. He picked the culinary skills from Mama Sarah, his mother, now aged and living at Tema, another coastal city several kilometres from Accra. He also took some great tips from Auntie Korkor, his eldest sister living with her family at Mamprobi, a suburb of Accra.
Her two children often came visiting Kotei at James Town. He would take them to the beach, showing them the Light House and the story behind it. Then they would observe the sprawling Ussher Fort and ask questions.
“Ussher Fort was built hundreds of years ago,’’ Uncle Kotei told the boys. “It became a slave dungeon in the days of the slave trade. The white men came from Europe and stole our people to work under very harsh conditions in plantations in faraway America. They first kept them in chains here before shipping them out of Ghana. But later, Ussher Fort was converted into a prison. Let me shock you. Our founding president, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, was imprisoned here. It was while here that he won the election and he was freed. He became the prime minister and later the president of Black Africa’s first independent nation…So you can see you’re stepping on the grounds of history here in James Town.’’
Kotei wasn’t a fisherman tethered only to the marine world. He didn’t go beyond the secondary school. However thanks to the forward-looking system of education in the country in the early years that followed Independence from British colonial rule, what Kotei got was sufficient to give him some foothold in life. He could read and interpret or analyze the political developments around. He read the newspapers, listened to the radio and watched the TV to stay informed. He read the popular novels of the era written by Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, James Hadley Chase etc.
His fishing friends were sometimes awed by his broad outlook to life. They would wonder if he was in the right company. If they asked why he didn’t go for more education, he’d tell them it was a tale for another day. Two young fishers who fondly called him ‘professor’ said they would continue to be a thorn in his flesh until he told the story. They’d spend a night or two with him, hoping the man would unveil the secret; but the older man would lure them into silence with dinner, gin and cigarettes over a long night leading into an unstoppable dawn sneaking up on them and whipping them into a longer day for a battle with fishes on the high seas.
Once, they planned to get him through his stomach. They left the beach early evening, telling an unsuspecting Kotei they were summoned home for a short family business. Hours later close to midnight, Kotei arrived home to meet the boys waiting in front of his apartment.
“Why are you not home? Any trouble after the family meeting?’’
“Welcome back, Ataa
Kotei!’’
“Yes. Thanks! Why are you here?’’
Helping Kotei unpack and open the door, they said, ‘’Let’s get
in first, please. Then we’ll explain. There’s no problem at all.’’
A few minutes after changing from his fishing gear to the home
wear, Kotei asked his guests to speak while he prepared dinner.
“No, onukpa. We
brought you your signature dish.’’
“Why? I’m your host. I have enough to go round. And by the way,
who says you can do the staple better than the eater?’
“We’ve put in the modern touch.’’
“I prefer it the way my old mother and Auntie Korkor mentored
me.’’
“Ataa, we’re setting
the table for a delicious deal. Enjoy it.’’
“OK! I will. But you haven’t told me why you’re here and the
outcome of your family meeting earlier this evening.’’
As he ate and gave his young guests what he called ‘’half-pass’’
marks for their effort, he asked again, ‘’Why are you here? Is it about the
family meeting.’’
“Ofai ne, ‘it’s nothing to do with the meeting. There was no meeting! We came to get the story you promised through your bowels. We believe that when your system is satisfied with our meal, it will release the treasure we have desired for long. This is the day.’’
“You are relentless seekers and adventures! You don’t want to accept my terms that the time isn’t ripe for the story. And you think bribing me with atroma will move the gateway of the food to convince the memory to bring out its frozen deposit when its time to be thawed is yet in the future?’’
After that statement, the three were again visited by their
past: they ate and drank and smoked and slept...
Kotei had long made up his mind that one Christmas Day he would get the young fishers for a special dinner. It wouldn’t be for any adesan about why he didn’t proceed to the tertiary institution. It would just be to honour the boys for their loyalty. He had not been able to do so. This year he wasn’t going to. Instead, he planned a quiet evening with himself and his dinner and his bottle and his tobacco.
So, on Xmas Eve, the fisherman stayed away from the sea, dedicating the entire day to purchases. He ruled out any outing on Christmas Day, except briefly at dusk to collect a gift sent him by a friend from Kumasi. It would be dropped at the King’s Palace, just a few minutes’ walk from his residence.
For the Xmas supper, he prepared a large stew of fish, snail,
crab, shrimps, wele, beef and liver
and kidney. They would go with banku,
konmi or fufui. He didn’t have to
pound the fufui; Serwa’s Chop Bar
nearby offered the wraps aplenty, with or without soup. They reported fresh,
for takeaway or on-the-spot action.
He often stored them in his refrigerator, public electricity not a concern in Accra. Supply was almost all-day, all night.
As the fisherman got busy in the kitchen, he sang and danced, thrilled by the aroma the cooking exuded. It spoke of the great taste on the way. It wafted out into the streets; passers-by asked if a competition was taking place to pick the cook of the year.
Kotei resisted the urge to fly outside and tell them that there was activity in his kitchen beyond cooks assembling their works before judges for assessment and expecting grades and prizes. He wanted to tell them that the gods themselves had descended into his apartment to offer him ambrosia, the special food reserved for their clan. But who would believe him? A fisherman hosting the exalted gods when they could gone to the homes of kings, presidents, top politicians, chiefs etc.? Did they miss their way and ended up in the humble home of a lowly earthling?
Well, Kotei consoled himself, did not the birth of the Child Jesus the whole world was celebrating take place in a despised setting? Did not Jesus Himself have a poor background? Was not His earthly father a carpenter, an occupation hardly reckoned with by the arrogant of society?
Perhaps, Kotei began to contemplate, he should invite some of the elite in the area for the master Xmas dinner he was preparing so they would know that something good could come out of a local fisherman. If they experienced his comestible skills, their persuaded and pacified palate might recommend him to chef the president and his family. Yes, it can work. But, he concluded, the strategy should be for a later time in the years ahead. He didn’t plan for this grand idea this season.
The fisherman ended his work in the kitchen at the time darkness was about swallowing the day into its bosom for complete control. It had taken him several hours of labour in the hot scullery. He used to drop the joke that the cookhouse was a kind of hospital labour room, where the pregnant entered to return with a bundle of joy. What’s more delightsome than those bouncing little babies you bring forth after going into pangs of labour following nine months of carrying them in the belly.
It was time to fetch the package in the palace. But first he set the table, not wanting to do so on his return. All he wanted to do on coming back was to pounce on the food, to feast like a king. After all, would he not be making a trip back from the home of a royal personality?
Kotei had drinks at home. But he stopped by at Apollo Joint for
a few shots of local gin and some banter with friends. The background of Xmas
carols from the big loudspeakers in the small salon hardly allowed the equally
noisy patrons to hear each other. Kotei left, whipping himself for going there.
Back home as he made to open the door and enter the apartment, he lacerated himself more, asking why a person poised for regal relish should ruin the prospect by lowering himself into ear-deafening depths.
The fisherman was plunged into a worse abyss with the scene that confronted him in the sitting room when he switched on the lights. The plates of banku and stew had been overturned. There were pieces of meat, fish, intestines, snail etc. floating on water mixed with akpetesie on the tiled floor. Shards of broken glasses littered the room. Cigarettes had dropped from the pack to rest on the still rivers of water close to the door where Kotei stood, petrified, unable to make any sense of what was going on.
Then his left eye caught a movement towards the small kitchen. He shifted his attention there. It was a large brown cat. It had a big fish in its mouth. It was motionless, watching the fisherman to determine its next move. Kotei too was calculating: to attack or not to attack the source of a scene that looked like a battlefield? The fisherman was wondering where the animal came from and how it came in.
Kotei finally decided that perfect justice would only be served if he made the cat his dinner. That way, he’d not only get back his dinner in the animal’s stomach, but also he’d get cat itself as food, to complete his revenge.
But the cat, seeming to read the mind of the fisherman, attempted a flight into a cane chair beside it. Kotei flew at it; he missed the creature, which then lunged over Kotei to make an escape outside through the doorway, left open by the fisherman.
The furious fisherman pursued it into the streets. He didn’t
know where to look this dark Christmas night he had been denied a dinner he
described the dinner of all dinners.
*Ojewale is a writer at Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria.
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