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| Sunday, 4 July 2004 |
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Short Story : The midnight search by A. F. Dawood This story happened in Sokoto State, one of the nineteen states in Nigeria, nearly two decades ago when I served in a Teacher Training College in this bush state, where one could see the brown semi desert seemingly meeting the sky. One evening in the month of Ramazan after breaking the fast, I was reclining in the hall browsing through the day's papers, when someone tapped the front door. He was my colleague in the Training College, an Agri-Science lecturer.
He appealed to me to take him in my car to the village where his wife had visited that morning to make inquiries. By then it was 7.30 in the night. African countries being noted for cannibalism, I was reluctant to drive with a negro, a Christian from a different state, to an unknown village in the night, nevertheless, taking cognizance of a husband's sentimentality to his wife, I had no alternative but to concede to his request, overcoming a strong sense of repugnance that rose within me. Faced with a Hobson's choice, I clicked the engine, took the car out of the garage but little did I realise the ordeal that was in store for me. Driving I left home with the negro teacher, leaving my spouse and siblings-a daughter of eight and a son of four, both in slumberland by that time. I was driving along a narrow and rugged road in the night of impenetrable darkness, as generator powered electricity had been switched off by that time in that area. My blue Volkswagen swallowed kilometres of darkness and even after ten kilometres, my colleague could not locate the intended village; soon the road became narrower and narrower incapacitating my driving. "You said it's one kilometre away, now where're you taking me?" I questioned him with a feeling of remorse. He asked me to reverse the car and doing that exercise in pitch darkness was as difficult as searching a needle in a hay stack, I diverted the car to a narrow foot path, almost not motorable, and moved at a snail's speed bumping and bobbing on the uneven surface of the foot path for about fifteen minutes, and came to a dead halt. Why? There was a mass of wild buffaloes huddled together, some browsing on the available foliage, some wallowing in the marshy land and some others remained right on the foot path, stubbornly stationary and totally indifferent to the tooting of the horn and the flashing of the head light of the vehicle. Charge There was no chance of getting out of the car to chase these animals away for the dual reasons that those ferocious animals could charge at the intruder or that there could be vicious snakes hovering about in those dark places, as Sokoto State was infested with a variety of vicious snakes. My next move was to reverse the car, indeed a Herculean task, and then drive slowly at snail's speed along a foot path taking turns this way and that way, we were soon lost in a maze of footpaths and were unable to recognise our bearing in that ghastly darkness. Nevertheless, I drove on until I came across a massive flock of camels right in the middle of the footpath. Again the car was reversed and diverted to another footpath, which was better than the first two; I drove along this and suddenly came to a hoggy stretch ahead and jammed the breaks; beyond this place it was not motorable and a split second of my being not alert would have bogged the car and rendered us to marshy graves. It being two a.m. in the morning the entire place was deserted; silence reigned supreme but this was pierced intermittently by a cacophony of sounds of nocturnal beasts. Nearby owls hooted ominously; wild dogs barked furiously piercing our ears; hyenas screamed and howled horridly, the nocturnal predators, interspaced by the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of bulls. In times of such predicament there was neither chance of getting out of the vehicle to inspect the footpath with the aid of a torch or attend to a tyre puncture. Thanks to our stars my vehicle did not incur a tyre puncture but the fuel tank meter foreboded danger. It registered less than half a tank, although the tank was full when I left home the previous night. Hopeless We stopped and stared hopelessly and an eerie feeling took possession of us as we gazed at nothing but a blanket of darkness, that surrounded us; we resigning ourselves undauntedly to this fate, I turned the car, on my colleague's request, to another direction as now we could not identify between a footpath and an open field, and drove slowly along a bumpy stretch, whilst the car was jolting up and down each and every second. Having driven like that for about one hour, we came across a small light; reaching the spot, we saw a man in a hut with a bush lamp. His compound was teeming with sheep and goats. My colleague got down and spoke to him. We learnt from him that we had been driving over the ridges of harvested fields. On being advised by my colleague, I turned the car and drove again over the ridges of the vast field. Now my colleague was not looking for the village where his wife had gone but was asking direction for Bakura village where the Training College was situated, from one or two bushmen we met, perilous though it was to stop the vehicle in that horrifying, desolate place where the power of the evil was exalted. While driving like that, we nearly fell into a well that lay along the field and two deep caverns, from where earth had been dug to build mud houses else where in the area. After what seemed a tortuous travel of one hour from that hut with the bush lamp, we came to another small hut with two bushmen, only their loins covered, singing songs in the dark hours of the midnight; there was a bush lamp dangling from the thatched roof. My colleague went towards them as they were singing in a language he knew and I could hear him speak "Barka deh, sabongari ena ko Bakura." Later he told me that he asked the direction how to get to Bakura village. From there onwards we drove along bumpy footpaths and rugged roads but our chance of reaching Bakura was very remote, as the fuel tank was lesser than a quarter. In the meantime, my wife who expected me in an hour's time had become panicky, when I had not returned by midnight. She had come out of the house and sat in the open verandah contemplating my fate, disregarding the risk involved in coming out of the house during the midnight hours; thereafter, exposing herself to the evils of the night, she had walked alone to a Sri Lankan lady's house, about three houses away from mine; the houses were quite far apart form one another. She too was a lecturer at the Training College. Later she and my wife had gone to the principal's house, which was behind my house, and alerted him of the situation. He viewed the matter seriously and saw no reason why an expatriate teacher should remain for about eight hours in the interior jungle of semi-desert, where the most barbaric, beastly mannered negroes inhabited in small isolated pockets. Then it was three a.m. He felt something fishy and had decided to go to the police at the first streak of dawn, although he did not divulge his pessimistic view on my disappearance to my wife at that moment. He had only pacified her and advised her to pray to God for my safe return. It was after the morning Azan (call for prayer), nearly six in the morning, the dusty, mud spattered blue Volkswagen entered the gates of the Training College. I reached my quarters with the negro colleague, sleepy, puffy-eyed and famished. Till then my wife and the Sri Lankan lady had remained in the verandah waiting for us like waiting for the return of the war wearied warrior. |
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Even before I greeted him, he poured forth his tale of woes that his
wife had left for the market in the morning to vend some victuals, with
their only child. It was a common sight in that bush state for the wives
of teachers to tie their young children on their backs and visit the
adjoining hamlets to sell some consumer items to supplement their
husbands' income.
