I’m soooooo frustrated! Feel like leaving this heartless place called Lagos.
He sold the building to some other person to facilitate his permanent relocation to the wonderland that is full of milk and honey: AMERICA!!! He and his entire family won America Visa lottery and his souvenir to we his tenants for rejoicing with him is to render us homeless by selling where so many of us have called home for so many years. Well, I have began the hunt for another place but if I don’t get one before the expiration of the two months notice given us, I will go to the magistrate court to get an order of stay to allow me stay there to buy time in getting another accommodation. House hunting in this Lagos could be like waiting for gold to rust!
I started my house-hunt by going to a housing-agent. I was referred there by a Pastor friend in my church. He claimed the agent is his church member and very godly. My visit to that poverty-stricken agent’s office will forever remain green in my mind because I never knew there were grades in the lineage of poverty until I met this agent. His office, a narrow space located in the ground floor of an almost collapsing building was without a window. How he managed to sit tight in that office is still a source of amusement to me because that cubicle is suitable for bread still on fire. No ventilation, thus the place oozed of only God knows what. The sickly looking young man was so comfortable in his unpainted space which decking spat sandy particles at intervals. Not quite three minutes of entering the oven, I was sweating profusely. It then dawned on me that I am not poor as I always thought. Poverty is not a physical thing. It’s a mindset.
I had barely introduced myself when this obviously hungry fellow immediately told me “registration fee is N1000”. He hadn’t even introduced himself and I was also yet to tell him my mission to his oven-space. He appeared distant though his eyes were locked with mine. I swear, he was physically with me but every other part of him was elsewhere. Amadioha strike me dead if I’m wrong! But when I brought the N1000 note out, there was a 360 u-turn in his presence of mind. I never knew he could smile. Mr. Arokoyo as I later discovered is his name couldn’t wait for me to leave his presence before conquering his stomach. He snatched the money from me, practically screamed “Moooodiiinaaatu”!!! And a young girl not more than 13 years old surfaced from nowhere. Her arrival seemed rehearsed.
She stood at the door step because the space in the oven, sorry, I mean office, couldn’t take the three of us conveniently. Ordering her with a pleading note he yelled in a treble-clef “so fun yeye re ki won ta ewa N50 ati buredi N50 wa. Ki osi mu pure-water meji si”. The young girl protested in a very rude and aggressive manner that her mother wouldn’t sell the N50 beans, N50 bread and N10 pure-water except he parts ways with money. He gave her the N1000 note I had just given him. Imagine such impunity!!!
After Modinatu dashed off to sort his order, he was startled seeing me and offered me a seat smiling shyly. Bad manners! Mr. Arokoyo brought a tattered looking file from the drawer of his thwarted unpolished table, opened it and gave me a dead-looking sheet of paper to fill my details in. It was a Herculean task doing that because the pen he gave me required force to make it write. That was the beginning of another sad song. A song which I would have titled “tenant in the city”. Certainly will make the Grammies if judged based on lyrics alone. I’m not a bad singer. I sing very well in the bathroom and in a group of God-using frustrated church attendees.
(…to be continued)
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