A rich man looked at all approaches to his life and
found every one of them particularly daunting. Dispirited, he examined all
routes from his person. Each held the dreadful promise of his extinction. He
shuddered. A veteran of many of life’s excruciating struggles, he decided on
remedial action. He, therefore, consulted oracles and diviners, sorcerers and
stargazers, astrologers and palm readers, marabouts and prophets.
At the end of his inquiries he got a distinct message
from the spirit world. His problems were complicated but not impossible to
surmount. He only had to abstain from sex for six straight months and his
deliverance would be automatic. The man smiled. He had spent more than half his
life kicking the can of sex around. He had fathered children in more places
than he cared to enumerate. Surely, after an almost endless stretch of sexual
freedom, he could manage abstinence for six month, a mere 180 days.
Fortunately, he had only one wife. Explaining the lay
of the land to her posed little difficulty. As for the army of consorts, gold
diggers and freeloaders who masqueraded as a part of him, they could go to
blazes and burn to ashes. His wife made a useful suggestion. She said that
sleeping in separate rooms thenceforward would prevent the flesh’s weakness
from throwing a spanner in the works. Given that the man was no hater of the
bottle, he could come from a binge any night and, finding himself on the same
bed with the wife, pounce on her. The man agreed. But he was the kind of man
who liked the spectacular. Instead of a new bed in a separate room, he built
the wife a duplex, tastefully furnished and fitted with combination locks she
could operate even by remote control, to thwart all intrusions.
Abstinence began in earnest, with the man blocking his
phone from the calls of vixens. He got home early everyday, performed the
prescribed rituals and hopped into bed, without giving in to the temptation of
watching blue films. That could lead him to masturbation and the prohibited
outcome of spilling semen all over. The first month passed rather quickly. All
correct. The second month was even more fleeting. As for the third month, it
seemed to have lasted only a fortnight. However, the fourth month came
scowling. He noticed a kind of glow on the wife’s face that suggested a
disagreeable development. But he kept quiet. When, however, he espied the wife
spitting indiscriminately, he was perturbed.
“Darling, you can’t possibly be pregnant, can you?”
“Whosai? That’s as impossible as the earthbound
crushing the airborne.”
“Thank heavens.”
There were many other things to thank as time went on,
including the fact that no pregnancy could be permanently screened with a
basket. It soon became obvious, even to the blind, that Madam was pregnant. Whodunit?
