28 Mar 2008 |
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Barrister Alaha W. Abuo left the
A man of versatile education and worldly experience in Nigerian women affairs, he was only too happy to snatch up the all-expenses-paid invitation to
As an expert witness, Barrister Abuo’s testimony was expected to be along the line that Nigerian women are unlikely to murder their husbands for any reason; that they have no history of killing their husbands for infidelity; and that they are more likely, than Western women, to remain with their cheating husbands without even thinking of filing for a divorce. In short, that the accused did not murder her husband. And so, on Monday, he boarded a flight from the
He caught the train from
Being a hostage of Professor Olufemi’s book, he was just barely attentive to his surroundings when the train stopped at the Carstairs station to pick up more passengers. As he sat in an aisle seat, outside his private quarters, vaguely conscious of the existence of any other humans, reading his book, the annoying voice of the train operator, through the intercom, ruffled his blissful state. The operator, who had been virtually quiet through the earlier stops at the Watford Junction and Carlisle stations, was now being quite solicitous: he exhorted the new passengers to ensure that they were on the right cars, that they were comfortable, that they were this and that, and to check this and that. He hated the distraction. As the train made its sonorous exit from Carstairs, with Barrister Abuo’s head still lowered into Professor Olufemi’s world of narrative bliss, he saw, from the corner of his eyes, a pair of female legs standing two inches close to him with a whiff of the sweetest, most feminine, fragrance that his nose had ever encountered. Out of a gentlemanly desire to avoid being rude, he fought a powerful impulse to look up at her face. Although he did not look up at her, he could feel that the lady was sneaking glances at his book. He glared at her shoes: black, four inches off the ground, and polished to a shiny glow. His eyes became fixated on the outline of her small feminine toes, her narrow feet, and how they fit so snugly into the rich leather shoes. He had seen those shoes in magazines with prices of $300 and more. So, with a mixture of interest and curiosity, but with care to avoid being disrespectful, the Barrister looked ever-so-slightly up above her feet. As he looked, he saw the narrow and straight ankles, adorned with glistening diamond anklets. His eyes traveled up a little toward the naked knees. As his interest overtook his gentlemanly duty of courtesy, some manly desires inside him were awakened: the glowing smoothness of the distance from her ankles to her knees had planted some ideas in his head; ideas of the nature of what was hidden slightly further up. He should never have looked away from his book, he thought, as he noticed that suddenly he was perspiring. He no longer had any interest in the book he had been reading. Slowly, like a thief, his eyes, again, rode slightly up above her knees. Barrister Alaha W. Abuo, a man who had dated women of all shapes and nationalities and had never been jealous, suddenly discovered a strange side of himself: he never thought a man could be jealous of a piece of clothing until he saw how perfectly the lady’s white jean skirt wrapped around her tiny waste and her ample behind. This was the luckiest skirt in the world, he thought, as he raised his eyes slightly higher at her flat belly. Now this was getting even stranger, his breathing coming faster, as his eyes kept moving up. He noticed, above her belly, hidden in a white cashmere V-neck sweater, were two generous endowments on her chest. These gifts of nature, these dual sources of male entrapment, these double-barreled guns that often reduce grown men to breast-feeding infants, accentuated the already sensual figure of the mystery lady so much that his jealousy of the sweater went beyond his physical self and began to gnaw at his soul, his heart pounding. With a serious effort, he tore his eyes away from her chest and looked slowly up. He saw how the elegantly strung, glitzy pearls, all black, fit so perfectly around her neck that, for a long moment, his now-hot, staring eyeballs, fanned by his flapping eyelids, struggled, in the presence of such perfection, to keep from falling out of their sockets. Our barrister finally moved his legs, turned his shoulders to an angle, and raised his face, in an attempt to look at the lady’s face. In that fraction of a second, just before his face met the lady’s, she dropped a packet of chocolate M&Ms in the middle of the book that the Barrister had been reading. “For you”, she said in one of the sexiest voices that ever emanated from the female species of any living thing - the sweetest music to a man’s ears. He quickly picked up the packet of candy and, within the half second that it took him to read the label, and look up from the book, the lady was gone. Her face he never saw. He stood up and looked frantically around, but all he could make out was the back of a lady several yards down the aisle before she faded away. He looked again at the packet of candy: attached to the packet was a typed note: From Nalum, with love. For the rest of the trip to the final train station in
As Barrister Abuo stepped out of the
It was as he made his way into the station, that the police surrounded him, took his carry-on bag from him, fished out the packet of M&M, placed it into a plastic bag, and handcuffed him. Too stunned by the speed with which he was searched and evacuated, Barrister Abuo was hardly able to ask even one question. He was in a police car when he saw the mystery lady exit, walk past the car, and wave at him before disappearing round the corner. Barrister Abuo was taken to a secret location, in an underground bunker, and interrogated by the police: Police: Sir, we received an anonymous tip that you came into the country with poisoned M&M sweets. Look at the colour of those sweets in this jar. This is an indication of the presence of cyanide. What is you mission here, sir? The Barrister: I swear, in the name of God, that the candy was given to me on the train. Police: By whom? The Barrister: I don’t know her name. She wrote it down: Nalum. Police: You can do better than that. What’s her full name? He opened and closed his mouth, frightened and sweating. He showed the police his invitation letter from the Scottish Court of Justice. They told him that the invitation documents were fake, that the Court would not normally invite an expert witness, and that in fact no case was pending in the Court about a Nigerian woman murdering her husband. His heart sank. He was told that he was a liar, that he created all the fake documents, and that he faced 25 years in prison for importation of poison into the country with intent to commit murder. He started to have a heart attack, his legs began to tremble. The Barrister: That Nalum lady, I liked her … why, why, why, why did she do this to me? It was at this time that the ladies from his village, including Nalum, Atsis Lous, Erenozi, Ibeb, JmE, Ekina, and so on and so forth, came out of the hidden room and embraced him, clapping, and happy. “We love you too, double trouble”, they told him. “Come back home, please,... the village misses you” The alleged police officers, Ibeanibiso and Hcnub71, also took off their disguises and embraced the villager. With all that love, and shedding tears of relief, the Barrister agreed to go back to the village. From that day, Nalum knew that men’s display of machismo is often just a show, that deep down, yes deep down, two troubles of a man may very well be equal to one secret love hidden away in the man’s mind, looking for a way out.
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