Return by Adesiyan Oluwapelumi

Return | Adesiyan Oluwapelumi

You arrive in the heart of the city, teeming with lorries and trucks transporting a supply of farm produce stocked in large sacks in transit to warehouses in the metropolis, the city welcoming you with the same hands you abandoned; hands pushing carts bearing purchases of market women from Sango Ojunrin market, where your mother used to sell tubers of yam, haggling with buyers who would slap prices to a ridiculous height; hands wiping beads of perspiration in the scorching sun on Oke Aare’s Hill, where your father had leaped to his death. He was a poor man with expensive dreams. But you swore yourself to the gods of The Western people to bring prosperity to your lineage. Had you known the outside world grew thorns along with its roses? 

At Mokola axis, notorious for its persistent traffic gridlock, you board a yellow-rust Danfo bus overload with passengers. The stench of cigarette from the conductor fills your nose who calls you Alakowe and charges you an exorbitant fee. 

In transit, you reflect on the city and observe how nothing has changed. The roads still sunken with potholes; its kerbs sullied with refuse and sewage; plied by motorcycles and rickety Micra motors, infamous as the instruments of kidnapping ritualists. You remember your friend, Tade, who had board a Micra in the night two years ago at Iwo road highway and how he was found three days later on Ojude Ade street, skull split and limbs dismembered. 

From the radio inside the bus, King Sunny Ade’s Mo Ti Mo plays in retrospect. The song ends and a newscaster comes on air to read the headlines. Crisis as fuel prices hike higher. Your sighs punctuate the air alongside other passengers’.

The bus passes across the State’s Library where you had often come to bask in the world of Mbari, Transition and Black Orpheus. You return to days shelved with memories when you consumed Okigbo’s epics and Soyinka’s elegies. In the storeys of this building, you had written the first drafts for the sample works in your MFA application. 

The bus continues towards Jericho road where you hear a muezzin’s call to prayer from a mosque nearby. Allahu Akbar, you mimic him as you had often done when you were younger. You did not understand the words but that didn’t matter. God hears his creations in all the dialects of their yearning. You remember weeks of the storms on the ship sailing the Caribbean Sea where God was a thin thread you hanged on for dear life. 

You raise your eyes pregnant with tears and tales towards the city’s sky, a country of egrets flying in the air polluted with greenhouse gases from oil factories. At a T-junction in Akinyele, you alight from the bus handing the conductor your fare. He tells you there’s no change. You know it is a lie. But in the end, you forgo it.

Your mother, with hands that you have once abandoned, runs to meet you.

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