A day to the day my aunty would be arriving, something quite amazing happened. My guardian entered the house and told me I had some visitors.
“Who?” I asked eagerly.
“Come and see her,” she said and pulled
me up, smiling. When
I got to the door, it was an incredible
sight staring at my face—
Mrs. Oyindamola and her husband. My
right hand slid over my
face three times, but the guests remained
there. I knew it was
for real.
I surged forward and gave her a very tight
hug. She almost got
knocked down by me. Mrs Omotayo
understood the whole
emotion—I had told her earlier about my
class-teacher who
was one of the first persons that made
me know that I am able.
She meant the whole world to me.
Mrs. Oyindamola scrubbed my hair and
then did sign language
over my head. I turned my face up and
caught the last word
‘mother’. I knew she was asking for my
mother. I burst into
tears.
Mrs. Oyindamola stepped back a bit and
asked for her again. I
shook and wept. She was scared, perhaps
taking my tears to
mean that she was dead.
“She is—” I paused and wept on. The
woman swallowed her
spittle and asked me critically, “What’s
wrong with her?”
“It’s a long story,” I said at last. Indeed it
was; trying to tell her
my life story from the day my mother and
I returned from
Abuja would be quite a long story to tell.
Mrs Omotayo invited her in. She got in
with her husband and I
followed them. When I told her the whole
story, she shook as
if she was going to faint.
“Jesus!” she screamed with her mouth
and signed it
synchronously.
Mrs. Oyindamola soon got over the shock
and got ready at
once to get into action. She said she
remembered the address
of the court location very well—Agidingbi,
Ikeja.
When she beamed at her watch, she
banged hard at her knee.
It was already late. The court would have
closed for the day.
Mrs Oyindamola and her husband were to
lodge in a hotel
initially, but the woman begged her
husband to stay in the
house with us while her husband left to
the hotel.
“Why did you come all the way from
London?” I asked her,
because it was such a surprise to me
seeing her in Nigeria
where they hadn’t built a house, having
sold the one they had
earlier.
“I could not sleep at night because I was
just thinking about
you and your mother. My mind kept
thumping hard to see
you. I could not rest, such that my
husband began to get
scared.”
“Since when have you been having such
disturbance?” I asked
her, just to confirm something.
“Over a month ago now,” she said. “I
sent a letter to you to ask
for your well-being and also included my
home address in the
letter so that you could reply my letter
and tell me how you
were faring. Didn’t you get the letter?”
“We didn’t get any letter?” I told her. “It
was only Aunty
Rachael’s own we got.”
“Rose, I’m happy that I could set my eyes
on you again,” she
said happily as she began to yawn. She
was very tired.
I looked at her as she laid her back on
the bed in the visitor’s
room. I smiled as I remembered Moses’
statement that day
—‘God’s way is not our own way and his
thought is not our
own thought. He knows the thought that
he thinks towards us
—the thought of peace and not of evil to
give us our expected
end’. My expectation was to get a way of
getting to the court of
law through which we could locate the
prison, but now more
than my expectation is here. I estimated
the time she said she
began to have that feeling of coming to
see me in Nigeria and
found out that it was around the time I
prayed to God to show
me the address of the court of law
through a vision. My prayer
is definitely answered in another
dimension, I thought.
In the morning the next day, Mrs
Oyindamola went to her
husband after calling her with a device
which I later knew to be
cellular—it was strange to me, since I
hadn’t seen it before—a
wireless telephone. The ones I had seen
were landlines and not
mobile one, though I hadn’t used any and
I would never use
any, since my ears wouldn’t pick a sound
from the earpiece
and my mouth wouldn’t be able to voice
out words into it.
Mrs Oyin returned to our house and then
we began to get
ready to visit the court. Just then,
Rachael my aunty came to
the house with her husband. I hardly
recognized her.
To be continued
