Entangled Hearts

four

          Jinna

 
                  The motor park was crowded as usual, pouring out with people and different scents.  With an air that smelt of many things.
          Jinna held tight to her bag. One could easily lose these things in such a milling  large crowd with all the pickpockets, Agbero's and area boys milling around, doing their perfected stealing with the aid of the large crowd of unsuspecting innocent people.
        Also in the crowd, young boys with crates of soft drinks and gala, the popular name for packaged sausages hovered around looking for their customers. Girls and women with trays piled high with either plantain chips, roasted bread fruit and coconuts packaged in transparent nylons or just local fruits called excitedly to their prospective customers, chanting, singing their products and some times, annoyingly pulling on their customers if need be . She stopped to buy gala and soft drink before getting into the  bus so she wouldn't have to plead with the driver to give her time to buy food if he decided to impatiently take off.
        The state buses were there but they had become few now with people rushing into it, every now and then as she had predicted. She held her bag and braced herself for any unwanted impact as she struggled into one of the buses.
         Getting in wasn't as hard as she had imagined or was used to. She had settled for the last seat at the back, in between a lady that occasionally sipped satchet water before staring into space and a man that chewed his roasted corn kernels noisily. At the far end of the seat a girl sat at the edge towards the window, typing furiously on her phone.
          The vehicle had fully loaded and had started moving by the time she had finished eating. The typing girl had now huddled herself closer to the window with her phone placed close to her ear as she talked in hushed tones to whoever it was on the line.  A smile lay plastered on her face as she talked . Obviously, the person she had been typing to had called.
         The corn man was now sleeping with his back fully resting on the head rest. The way a bag of beans would have been, if it was also resting on the head rest. Even in his sleep, he was as noisy as his munching and if not even noisier.
         She regretted sitting at the back.
         The staring woman was rather half asleep or sleeping on alert because each jolt and bend the bus took woke her. Her eyes would snap open, prance around and then close back again.
        The bus had also become less lively with more than half of the bus population sleeping. She had started to feel sleepy too. Sleep had become communicable, like a flu.
        The corn man had started to slip from where he sat snoring with half his eye lid open. It was just wonderful how people slept so comfortably in buses and so deeply too. Her eyelids had started to feel dull and heavy again, she decided to succumb this time. Crossing both arms into her bag handles, with the zipper side directly launched on her chest, she leaned onto the head rest. Now she could sleep, knowing her things were safe. The typing girl was still on her call, her smile un- tampered and present. Jinna shut her eyes, allowing the sleep to take over.

               Jinna felt sore in the hips, when she woke up. The result of sitting in a place for too long. Her tongue felt bland like paper, she had almost arrived her destination. Just another bend and they would be at her street.
         It was three thirty on the dot, when the bus stopped in front the billboard that had the name of her street emblazoned in rust letters. There were still very much people in the bus and she was one of the few alighting and the only one coming all the way from the last seat at the back.
        Her heart groaned when it dawned on her that she would have to stomach all the grunts and sighs from other passengers that sat in her way. The ones that either had to stand or shift so she could pass. One of the men had already declared his distaste for some foolish people that sat at the back , knowing fully well, that they were going to be the first to alight at the first bus stop.
        She ignored the man, not being in the mood nor having the strength and capacity to start a row. It would be unethical to do so and even though, she was the silent type that stomached everything till it got to a high extent which people rarely crossed.
          After the bus had gone and there was no sign of any transport tricycles," the keke". She decided to walk home instead.  
          Home wasn't that far anyways. A fifteen minutes straight walk and she would have gotten there. It was even better because she could save the transport money for later.
        Walking seemed easy, after a refreshing afternoon sleep in the bus and besides it was an exercise too, in fresh open air that wasn't campus ground but made up anyways but in a different way.
        She walked home humming silently and watching little children running about in their pants without any care in the world, occasionally breaking into sherieks and giggles,past the incomplete football teams of young boys playing football on the road. Boys who scattered to safety whenever a car passed by. Then the loud road side beer palours with heavy beating, polyphonic music and then to her annoyance the hisses started to come.
         She increased her pace frowning as she did. Totally determined to avoid getting approached by any of those randy half drunk men from the beer palours or any of those annoying randy boys the street was pouring with.
         A sort of relief came to her when she came to the black ornate gate with the white one storey building nestling behind it- her home but then the relief had quickly left when she got close enough to see the rolled up wire, near the electric pole in front of their gate.
         Her heart sank
         The light had been disconnected from their house.
          She groaned deeply in her mind before turning to the smaller part of the gate. The side that had a single door big enough to allow one person at a time.
            She did not need to knock because the door was slightly opened and so she pushed it open. Walking through it before closing it behind her and this time sliding in  the bolt. Since the gateman left three years back when her father's illness started and  her parents could no longer afford to pay him. She and her siblines had taken to checking on the gate since then and now her siblines had left for boarding school, the gate was going to be ajar most of the time.
            Her father lay where she expected him to be, on the long three sitter couch in the palour. He looked much more paler than before, his once rich yellow skin was now a mottled brown with sickness and age.
            She dropped her duffel bag, running her left palm on his face softly and then, on his cheeks feeling his face to check if he was running temperature. Thinking about the times he was still himself, when he still had his wealth. She had been so terribly proud of him then, proud to be associated with him.  When people filled the now empty seats in the palour. Her eyes felt moist but she blinked hard to keep the tears at bay. He was sleeping now and she didn't want to wake him.
          Jinna hadn't been this emotional in the first months of her father's sickness. She had been angry and disappointed at him, for everything. For loosing all that money, being reckless with it. For allowing them to become broke. For not being able to fully communicate his needs. For depending on every body for everything. His feeding, his bathing. It was very annoying then.
         Then, she used to shout at him, sulk and complain. She even insulted him. Now, she knew it wasn't totally his fault, that he talked gibberish and depended on them because it was all he could do. That he had partial stroke and it had affected a part of his brain, as a result he could no longer do things for himself. It was even a miracle that he still walked.
         Her room had the same old air and still gave the small feeling of contentment. Everything still looked the same, the way she had left it but only dustier. She hadn't been home for a long time, this was the first time she was returning home in two months.
         Hanging her duffel bag by the crook of the chair facing the reading table, before sitting by the edge of her matress, she inhaled, willing the little girl feeling take over her but it didn't. She only got a lung full of air but not the little girl feeling or any feeling at all. All that was in the past and gone. Her stomach croaked.
        For Jinna eating at home was different from eating anywhere else. She could eat at other places for the taste but at home, she ate to fill her stomach for satisfaction. Her mother cooked only with the necessities and as a result the food tasted like it's flavours had been extracted. Like poorly made relief food.
        The kitchen was dirty with flies buzzing over an open pot of spoilt watery soup on the kitchen island and on the used food encrusted plates that lay packed up and unwashed at the sink. Worse there was no food or foodstuff any where in sight. She didn't even bother checking the fridge because she knew that there was nothing there.
         There was no food, her father had not  had lunch and she wasn't going to have any either.
       She left the kitchen in a huff.
       Slamming the bedroom door she threw her self  on the bed and turned to face upwards with a pillow she had propped against her head. Her stomach rumbled again as she looked at the faded white ceiling boards. She decided to think to push out hunger but all she could think about were sad thoughts, irresistible sad thoughts.
        She was even more annoyed thinking about the past when food wasted in the kitchen and the stew and soups were disposed with the meat in it. When she used to run around, chubby and happy. In her innocence. When her room not just had the little girl feel but reeked of it. When her parents spent nights quarrelling about the money her father distributed to the people that came to the house.
         It was even more annoying thinking about that than the present . Here and now. The glaring fact that there was no food at home, that her room now lacked all the innocence it had, her life too. That she had become rigid and unhappy in the long run. That her mother had to leave her trophy wife life to hustle for their food, leaving her sick father at home and alone.  The more glaring fact that they were now broke and everyone could see it. Her father's friends, the neighbors. Everyone.
         Perhaps that was why the girl from the morning incident had slapped her because like others she had seen through her. How inferior she had become because of a simple mistake her father made, a mistake that could have been avoided if he listened to her mother.
         She knew things would go way worse if he died. There would be way more people to slap her, beat her if they wanted because she was a fatherless girl. She knew her mother couldn't cope fighting for the little properties left. She knew she couldn't afford to lose him, now losing him had become a probability. After all, he  had partial stroke.
         She huffed again looking up at the ceiling , her vision was starting to turn cloudy because of the water forming in her eyes. She took in a deep breath and let them out. Let them flow in their torrents.
          Somewhere, her phone rang but that was the least of her problems. It was letting  off the burden on her chest and crying came out top as the best way to. The only thing she knew she could do apart from nursing her dreams. The only thing she could do at the moment and so she did it.. she cried and let the tears flow in their torrents.

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