Purple Bougainvillea

Prologue

In a certain village in the western part of Nigeria, a girl lived there. Her name was Jumoke. She also attended a secondary school around the area she lived.

She was not a very bright student but she could hold her own through every exam that she wrote every term.

She had always thought of how life would be if she lived in the city. But she knew it wouldn’t happen very soon because her parents didn’t have enough, all they prayed for each day was their daily bread; which was often more than not very little to last them three square meals.

Her parents were farmers and when they were not at their farms, they would be in the market, right there in their tiny shed which determined whether their night meal was secured, or not.

She had seven siblings, four elder brothers and three little sisters. She wasn’t surprised how they were poor, when there were many mouths to feed you couldn’t really do much.

She knew exactly what would happen if she failed any exam, she would drop out of school. After all the money for repetition of classes wasn’t there since her other siblings would have to go to school.

Unfortunately, her two elder brothers had already dropped out of school so that others can have a taste of it. They were now both in the city of Abuja working as houseboys for a very rich businessman. When each of them reach SS3, they stop- just like the two other ones before her- because no one was talking about the university at all.

She wished her mum had taken a break on giving birth earlier, but then again she would not have been born. She waited for December, when her cousins would come home for Christmas. Apart from the wonderful gifts they always brought, they also brought very interesting stories about the city.

They always told her of the city, how fine the boys were and how unbearable the girls were.

She yearned for an opportunity to see the city for herself and that opportunity presented itself soon enough.

It happened on a very wonderful day, a day she would not easily forget. It was five days after Christmas and her mum was talking to her aunt about education and how hard it is to raise them. Then her aunt took it up from there and talked about how she needed someone to stay with since her only son had moved out and her only daughter was never home.

So in the end her mum convinced her aunt to take Jumoke to the city to stay with her and her youngest daughter, who was 17 years old.

On the way to the city, Jumoke saw different things that she had never seen before like the Udi hills as they passed Delta state and other things like the anthills that were built every year by hardworking ants and termites that never went to rest. Since she had never been out of her village these things were thrills and her cousin added to it by telling her all she had heard about all these places.

A family of six had disappeared about last four years on a particular road in Ijebu- Ode and Vera didn’t miss telling Jumoke this story too. She spiced it up when she got to certain parts and put Jumoke in suspense to make it more interesting. And that was the case until Jumoke found out that the family was never recovered.

Jumoke believed that it was a very sad story indeed and as she slept that night she dreamt of it. But in this case it wasn’t the other family; it was hers- the whole eight of them excluding her two brothers, who did not live with them, that disappeared. And they didn’t appear in a scary shrine like the story went; instead they appeared in their house in the village.