The Second Path

Chapter 1

The above picture was the previous cover of this book

Chapter 1

ALMOST TWO YEARS LATER...

Life would take you to other roads when you're focused on one path. We make plans but they do not work. If they worked, we're never grateful.

Mama and I had plans.

Big plans.

She would skip primary 5 to join me in secondary school. I would graduate and wait for her to graduate a year later and then we enter university together. I would become a lawyer and she would become a doctor. We would get married, have 3 children each, live next to each other and we would live happily ever after.

Those were just my fantasies of life. Now, I was all alone to face reality and be opened to whatever came next.

It has been almost two years since Mama's death. Nothing was the same without her. Some days I would sit down, think about Mama and fall into deep depression and guilt. Other days I would be in denial that she was gone and feel like she would casually walk into our room and just lie down on the bed beside me. Grief was a pain that could not be explained, only felt.

I sighed and lay on my bed as I looked outside my room window, while trying not to think too much about Mama as I just stared at the November's pre-harmattan weather.

It was a bright Wednesday morning, but not bright enough to make you happy. Why? Because the useless strike in my school has begun.

Today was the first day of strike in all public secondary schools in Kaduna, including mine, because the teachers complained they were not paid enough by the government. The worst part was that we could never tell when the strike would be over. Who knew, it could be in 2 years time, meaning I might not get to graduate at the right time.

So in order to get the frustration off my chest, I stared at my peacemaking view; my room window. Well, it was not exactly the best 'peacemaking' view but it was the only place where all the frustrations of Nigeria could not get into.

Through the window, with the widely torn mosquito net, I could see more than half of the large front compound of the house, as well as the house gate. I could also see outside the gate and the main thing that always caught my eyes every time I looked outside the window was the blue house opposite mine.

The house belonged to Mallam Audu, my history teacher in school.

His house was a duplex house which was light blue in color, an unusual color for any house in Mansur. The paintings on the walls were chapped as a result of heavy rains and probably poor painting materials. It was not like my grandmother's non-painted bungalow house was any better, but I would rather live in this non-painted house than one whose painted walls were chapped and disorganised like Mallam Audu.

Unlike every other house on the street, the house did not have barb wires or broken bottles that could be used as barb wires. They just left their fence empty and free for any intruder to jump over.

The worst and final part of the house was: there was never light in that house. When I say never, I meant NEVER. Even if NEPA, the only electricity company in Nigeria, gave us light for free, which never happened and would never happen, that house would still not have light.

There was just something strange about the house and the man himself but i couldn't figure it out.

He was just an odd Hausa man. He usually talked to himself in class and nobody in my history class could comprehend what was wrong with him. Neither did anyone in the neighbourhood knew much about his life.