Entangled Hearts

Returning

        

                    

                   Jinna returned to campus on Sunday afternoon instead of the earlier planned Monday morning, in conjunction with the lectures as planned. Home was too sad to stay in, it now seemed to suffocate every iota of happiness that had remained in her. Her father was sick and her mother had become very bitter with everyone, everything, even her sick father. She knew she couldn't blame her mother for being bitter. She knew that her bitterness was not completely her fault, that it was bound to be there with all that situation.
            It didn't bother her either, that her mother wasn't surprised when she decided to leave for school that morning. It was as if she had expected her to, that she didn't blame her for deciding to leave so quickly because she knew why. Or perhaps that she was still fighting her lonely silent war.
           The lonely war she fought with herself and not with Jinna because Jinna always ignored her and instead bottled herself into her room as long as her mother's mood lasted. As long as her ranting lasted. She didn't recognize there was a war neither did she see any need to fight one, yet the war revolved around her. It was solely about her and because she had chose to study architecture instead of the earlier proposed medicine and surgery.
            Her mother had always wanted her to study medicine and surgery. That was what she had wanted to study at first. What everyone had expected her to go for.
            For her mother and everyone else, medicine and surgery was a very noble and well serving career that came with a well paying job and most times very fat pay cheques. If Jinna became a doctor, people would overlook her father's sickness and focus on her success instead. Money problems would then become a thing of the past since her daughter was going to become a doctor with a fat salary and most probably secure a husband with deep pockets. However, all that was in her mother's head and not hers. Her scholarship arrived and Jinna ventured to do her dream career, architecture.
            Jinna could remember the disappointment that etched across her mother's face when she told her about her ambition after the scholarship came. The news that clearly didn't go down well with her, neither did it go well when Jinna told her why she wanted to be an architect. Of her desire to become the first female minister of works in Nigeria. Her mother had only asked her a question, one that burned to the back of her mind.
  " Who is going to give you the job to lead over men?",and Jinna had gone silent.
             She had not yet thought of that. That she needed some one to appoint her as a minister. She looked to the three sitter chair where her father lay, shaking his feet. He too was disappointed and too sick to react. He was disappointed that she had not chosen any of the so-called high paying careers, but then she didn't care, she had stopped caring long time ago. It was her scholarship, one she had worked for, prayed for, spent sleepless nights reading for. Then, She too was also disappointed at him to care about his opinion.

                  The motor park was far less crowded than it had been on Saturday with most of the state buses barely full. It was a Sunday and people did less travelling unless it was very important. As a result, transport fare was much more lower and affordable.
            Jinna had no trouble getting into one of the state buses because there were no mad crowds milling into it and so, she did not have to hold her bag tight or brace herself for any hard impact or even squeeze herself in.
           The motor park touts and the area boys were present but no one had to be too wary of them.  There were no large crowds that made it possible for them to steal. Besides, it was a Sunday and a day of rest for everyone including them. Most of them had left for church and the few remaining were just not in the mood for any of their gimmicks. They just sat limply in their make shift spaces either sleeping or watching the environment like lizards basking in the sun. The rest who weren't sleeping or idling away, actively sat around arguing about everything that revolved around them. From their food to their earnings, a football match or their lottery winning that always seemed to cut short by a number or a wrong move, denying them their instant riches.
             Jinna settled for the backseat again as always but this time, she was going to be one of the last people to alight the bus. She had only one seat mate this time. A dark girl in multi coloured braids that reminded her of Fikemi but apart from the braids she was a totally different person by her skin colour and personality, the way she stuck to the edge of the bus seat like she was on quarantine mode. As if she did not want to make human contact. Fikemi would have said hi by now. Most probably would have tried to engage her in a conversation but then she was grateful that she didn't turn out like the loud munching man, who was equally as noisy as his chewing while he slept.
             The bus ride seemed much more peaceful and faster because there was actually very little traffic on the way and even lesser check points. Jinna didn't sleep. Not even when more than half of the bus population, even the girl that shared a bus seat with her caught the sleep flu.  She kept to the window watching the trees chase the bus as they drove past the express road with the thick landscape of green bordering the sides.
             An old feeling brewed in her, in the manner of one of her most favourable memories, one that happened in the innocence of her childhood, when she had once thought that the palm trees chased the cars on the road, chased the people inside it.  A belief she stuck on matter how much her father or any one tried to convince her. One she now thought of as silly.  She smiled with nostalgia and a bit of sadness as the voices of her and siblings chanting to her father to drive faster and over take the other drivers floated above her head, in her mind.
             She temporarily took her eyes off the scenery to the sleeping population in the bus, to the driver in his seat, where he sat glumly with the steering wheel in his hands. She wondered what would happen if he let go of the steering wheel or perhaps if his eyes shut temporarily in sleep.
            What would happen if the bus brakes lost control and the bus took a swerve into the deep valleys by the sides of the road, rolling down in skids then somersaults before eventually bursting into flames. The probable backstory behind every charred accident vehicle that got towed out in these parts. The ones with people burnt to crispy remains. Burnt beyond everything except the recognition that they were once people.
             She wondered what it felt like to die. What it would feel like if she died. If she did not get to her destination. To campus, to Fikemi and friends. What it felt like to leave all that youth and everything in front of her. To become food for the earth, like in the random poem she had stumbled across in the library. The one that spoke about death like it had seen it, felt what it was like to lose some thing important to death. What it felt like to be the earth who gave all to the food to the humans, everything that had life.  For them to give back to return, this time as it's food. The dead people that were comitted to earth, the rotting squirrel she had seen in one of the small bushes around the hostel. The leaves that fell on the ground. Everything that had life, had to give back to the earth, to God. To whoever they believed in. Whoever created them.
           She wondered why she was thinking about death, why she rarely had positive thoughts. Why she rarely thought of optimistic things. Why her mind was never at rest. Why she couldn't be as happy and as rosy as Fikemi. If Fikemi ever got sad or thought about death too.
            Her phone beeped on her hands and she hurriedly sat up from her thoughts to check it. She hoped it was Fikemi, not her mother calling to tell her that her father had passed. She sighed, here again with the negative thoughts that had enshrouded her. That had become one with her.
            Her face lit up in a wide smile when she saw the text. It wasn't Fikemi or her mother. It was something much more better. Shell had paid their stipend and this time it was thirty thousand naira. Her heart hummed happily as she did a ten thousand naira transfer to her mother. She had always done that whenever they sent their stipends, sent a part of it to her mother to help. Her mother never thanked her for it. It seemed like it was expected of her to do so , like it was some entitlement.  But then again Jinna did not care , she never cared about that .  Not even now that her lips had widened to an elasticity she never knew that they had as she looked at the alert on her phone and at the same time keeping the demon that was giving her the urge to do an erratic cockroach dance on the bus to express her happiness at bay.
  
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