Soulmates by Kanchana Ugbabe

Author:Kanchana Ugbabe [Ugbabe, Kanchana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184755787
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Greener Pastures

I must have dozed off as we passed the little villages, the huts shaped like huge umbrellas resting on the ground. I marvelled at the way the thatched roofs ballooned out in perfectly conical shapes and sat gracefully, with just strips of the mud walls showing. The mango trees were weighed down with that huge variety of mangoes, each succulent fruit a meal in itself.

When I woke up next, the round huts and mangoes had been left behind. This was rectangular country. I mused over an anxious student’s research into the ‘curvilinear’ African culture. There was nothing curvilinear or circumferential about this part of the country. Rectangular mud-houses with thatched or zinc roofs were tucked away amongst bananas, palms and other dense foliage. The women carried basins of yams just harvested on their heads; the men, the occasional radio or water cooler. Everything was balanced effortlessly on their heads. There was a church every few kilometres proclaiming salvation, also a rectangular mud-structure with a corrugated iron roof, distinct with its crooked spire and iron cross at the top.

It was the green, and the late-afternoon sunlight on it, that made me squint. The road wound around gently rolling hills of green, the terraced slopes covered with rubber and palm trees. They were private estates, plantations in neat symmetrical rows that disappeared into a green glow in the distance. I had no idea how far we were from the coastal town, Calabar. The milestones were buried under the tapering anthills and the grass that grew tall and lush by the roadside.

I met the Americans in the petrol station where we got off the taxi to stretch our feet, having been packed six to the back seat. Jim and Bryan hopped about looking for the washroom. ‘Head for the bush, my friend,’ said my fellow traveller, ‘the nearest hotel is in Calabar.’ It was late evening when the taxi driver dropped me off at the centre of the city, at a motor-park that was being rapidly cleared of travellers and touts.

‘Anything to eat around here?’ I asked.

‘They eat snails and periwinkles here,’ the taxi driver said, ‘and leaves and things.’

I had a strange sense of adventure and discovery, a feeling that the place was waiting to be explored.

The easiest thing to do would have been to check into one of the hotels—the Hilton, the Metropolitan or the Sea View Hotel—and enjoy the comforts of a musty, carpeted room, a cosy bed, and a crackling television set, complete with a quasi-European menu. But I chose to look for the lady I had been given an introduction to, in the hope of finding hospitality there, before I ventured out in the morning. The lady in question, I was told, was a curator in the local museum, a widely travelled and enlightened woman of some distinction.

‘She’ll put you up for any number of nights. We were schoolmates in Benin. Just mention the fact that you are my colleague,’ my professor at work had said casually.

I

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