The darkness was piercing and loud, the type that made sleep sonorous and waking up, a burden. It was past 5 a.m. in Oboda-Akpu, and the moon was beginning to bid its final goodbye. Nkem had barely smothered off his donjon of dreams before the screeching voice of Mama snapped him out of wonderland; he was wrapping up the dream by then. It was the kind of dream that lends itself to diverse interpretations. A dream where he had just eaten ofe onugbu and pounded yam was not one he was happy to wake up from, and as if the fetish was not enough, he had downed it with a bottle of Heineken. It was the kind of delicacy that made sleeping a profitable venture for someone whose real-life realities deny such pleasures.
‘Nkem, get up. It’s already 5 a.m. and you need to attend to the chores before the day breaks fully.’ Turning on the other side of his bed, he beheld Mama’s peering eyes which were still pouring on him. It was the peering eyes of the arriving sun that woke him up. He had planned to make love to sleep. Mama’s eyes were still on him. They were telling eyes forged by endless penury, dashed hopes and crushed dreams. Word on the grapevine had it that Mama was once a damsel, who both looked the part and had the brains to go with it. The naysayers once joked that her beauty demanded more from the creator than any other living thing. However, poverty and tradition conspired to leave her impoverished and reduced her to the mere housewife of the village nuisance, Da Amadi. Her looks were still extant, but it had been toned down by the strains of life.
Da Amadi was the vintage ‘never do well’ husband, a poster boy for a failed man - at least by society’s yardstick. The gist had always been that he was reeling from a curse he knew nothing about. The untamed ‘third leg’ of his father unleashed the wrath of Mpi, the village god. Cries of defiled girls made the otherwise benevolent Mpi furious. Da Amadi’s father was notorious for his proclivities, and in a village where secrets are a distant dream, everyone knew his story. Mothers warned their daughters to flee from him, and his fellow men revered him for his sexual escapades. Such was his sex drive that it defied even the testosterone impact. And while Mpi did not make his son, Da Amadi, follow in his steps, he made him a brilliant nuisance. He was a paradox of a man whose lips dripped of so much wisdom, yet his nonchalance and excessive alcohol indulgences would not allow him to thrive. Da Amadi’s father did not end well – or so the story goes. He was inflicted by an unknown illness, the kind of illness that was both long and torturous. It was a no-brainer for the villagers to conclude that the gods were taking their toll. It was a testimony to the cliché that, ‘the mill of the gods grinds slowly but surely.’
Link to access the novel on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Cacophony-Novel-Samuel-Kelvin-Okonkwo/dp/1729808557/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=cacophony+samuel&qid=1551786431&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull).
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