Chapter 3
I remember the day we beat up a nonsense man silly, for having the guts to come inside our zone to sleep with Eloho and tried to escape without paying. After dealing with him, we sold his handset for 3000 naira.
Iya Pato’s bar was our zone, our safe space. As much as competition existed, we sort of liked each other.
There was sisterhood, fellowship and hierarchy. Iya Pato was our mother superior, followed by Vero, the grand patron, wise and experienced. Kpeme, Ose and Lilian were the mamas in the game, oldest and perhaps the most frustrated.
Aunty Kpeme was the oldest of 5 children born to a professor father and a nurse mother, I know you have started wondering about what I am saying and if my medulla is not missing some vital knots. Kpeme was born and raised in America to two well to do parents. Her life’s problems started when her family came back to Nigeria to bury and pay last respects to her paternal grandfather.
Uselu, a small, tiny yet vicious village in the remotest part of Delta state, one long boat ride away from upper Oluku. It was there a wicked neighbour casted a juju spell on Kpeme which made her go missing. After several efforts by her family to find her, they had to return to America without her.
When the spell wore off, Kpeme returned back to Uselu to learn her parent had travelled back to America and her grand mother, the only contact link between them had been dead for bout 2 years.
What could a young girl do, how would she live, eat or survive if not in Lagos. The city that they claimed flowed with milk and honey. Kpeme started to work from 15 and now she was 45.
Ose and Lilian had similar stories, some would say it is greed that would make a woman leave her husband house to live on the street, others believed it a curse. Ose was once married at the early age of 13 to one of her late father’s friends. A smelly sweaty and greying matter of 75 years. It was a thing of joy to all his wives when he died of a heart attack shortly after his 76th birthday. Ose and Lillian, sister wives, bound by a common struggle. Cast offs in their homes with a vow never to return and a great need to survive. They had to escape before the burial where they would be inherited by their late husbands brother, Calistus, whose penchant for young, nubile, virgin girls knew no bounds.
Iya Pato’s place was a no judgement zone, she accepted the girls without question. She would urge the girls to broaden their minds by watching DSTV “ashewo na work, no mind wetin ‘them’ they talk” she quipped whenever she noticed extreme frustration, fatigue or discouragement creeping in.
Some days at Iya Patos were very bad. We could go a week without a single horny soul walking through the beaded curtains. They would sit in the bar with their ugly overweight girlfriends and guzzle plates of peppersoup, shouting loud at a group of twenty-two men kicking a round leather ball on the TV. Those were days of extreme frustration and dry pockets. It was mostly those days that the ‘them’ preachers seemed to come in droves, like they had an invisible alarm they used to notify them when the seed of discontentment has be down by bad business.
The Jehovah Witness’ own where too much. Despite Iya Pato’s stern warning, stiff face and angry stares. They still managed to sneak their way into the bar just as the day was fully breaking. Whichever way, they were better than the police men. The Jehovah preachers would bring tracks and pamphlets and stories, engaging in lengthy conversations and arguments. Sometimes with any unsuspecting man in the bar at that hour, but I know they came mainly for we the girls. The came in pairs, a man and a woman or a woman and a young boy, they never brought a young girl here for fear of her being corrupted.
It was the usual conversation of a better life and death for unbelievers, sprinkled with lots of argument, self righteousness and confidence. But it was the sum of these things that made life at iya Pato’s really exciting.
“Do you believe in paradise on earth? A new heaven and a new earth?” Vero would mimic them, her coarse voice sounding like the rustle of freshly emptied cement bags.
Chukulee 