Diary Of A Deltan Kuffa

Chapter Five

BEYOND WHAT YOU SEE. The rust-burnished roof, peeled walls. A step closer and it's a mushroom of people sharing noisy laughs, talking in exaggerated tones, their spirits, sky-high, and their different accents-a reminder that they were plucked from all ends-formed meshes of solacing sounds. This place. Would he last? "Hi, welcome, otondo Kuffa," a guy says to him, hands pointing to a doorway. Peaking through he could see a handful of others, some lying on what looked like flattened beds that terrace the floor. But he wouldn't stay. He couldn't or didn't want to try.

The torn window net hung loosely like a curtain cover, the opening at the bottom, Just enough for a human-sized rat to crawl through. This can't be my home he thought.
"You can come in," the 'older kuffa' gestures him in, "but drop your luggage there."
The president of the so-called 'common room' steps forward, he looks around momentarily, the congestion staring back at him. "You'll just manage this space ehn" he points to the spot where two mat-like mattresses adjoin. "You got to be kidding" he quipped, his lips barely moving. He drops his backpack and settles in. Just for now he thinks, if he needed one thing, it had to be a miracle, sadly the darkness of the now diming room greets his pupils.

That night, his eyes yearned for sleep like a day old baby but found naught, only reflections of time at camp and all the friends he would never see plighted his memory. Just after they got their posting letters, joy and desolation spread like wildfire. Asaba, Warri and the likes, were the cities that came with the exuberant display of accomplishment. And the other's...well they caused a teary pool that lined eyelids. His friend, Ghandi, was posted to a different location when he last called they were still on the road. And Longjohn was posted to a firm in Warri, and the trio that was forged by the journey down to, and during, the orientation camp would be stringed apart by the letters in their hands. A thousand selfies would not compensate, but they had exchanged over a thousand. The sweep of buses(the small, the big, the mighty), vans, SUVs scattered across the once open field, the air foggy with broken friendships and goodbyes, it was the end and yet a new beginning.

And now the reality of that beginning itched harder. In the few days to come he would try to buy out from the new home that clung to him like second skin, he would make sketches and scheme's, he would call home as though he was stuck on the moon, and like a phonograph on replay, his dad would reply, "son, you just have to adapt, you're now a man..." and the very sound of his last words, MAN, would make his eyes glisten with doubt and uncertainty.

The person lying on his right was dead asleep, his nostrils, unabridged, blowing off sonorous tunes, and on the opposite end, an echo, but not much of one would return the chorus a key lower. He tugs the guy by his right slightly, as does sleep to his eyes. His eyelids collide for the last time and not even the mosquitoes would spring them back open. Nor the unsettling darkness, nor the beds that were nearer to the floor than a mat. Beyond this chaos was the dawn of the morning and that alone: TO SEE A NEW DAY, was a big enough miracle. He realized this. And so for the first time in a long while, he wouldn't have the bugle to his ears. He was...free?