The Burial

Episode 13

Frequent meetings were held in our house because the date was just drawing nearer and nearer. Attires/Aso Ebi were coming in from the market and going out to people who felt it compulsory to buy it, since there is a saying in the yoruba language that I would call a slang “Eni ti o ra Ankara o le je Semo (those that didn’t buy Ankara/Attire are ineligible to eat Semo on the day of the party).”

To Ms. kehinde and others, it was something of joy, at least there would be money that would be used to prepare food for those coming for the burial reception, most especially those that bought the Attire.

I don’t really know the reason why they made it compulsory to always pick or sell Aso ebi’s whenever there was a party to throw up. May be it were to provide food for those coming, I do not know.
But those coming are not supposed to base their minds on food neither was it necessary for those that threw up the party to invite the whole world, when they knew they wouldn’t have money to cater for those coming.
These were the thoughts I had when I said to myself, it had become a norm to we africans, mostly Nigerians, to always pick Aso Ebi whenever something little that cause to throw-up a party made itself available.

“I will drop a bag of rice.” Ms. kehinde blurted out. “Just leave that to me, plus the cooking.”

You don’t need to bother your mind too much about her mouth making just to brag or show herself off. She is a politician and she knows many of them, Senators, Chairmen and their likes.

She does knows how to get bags of rice as she promised, either through clean or dirty ways.

She could get it through a clean way by contacting those at the top she knows and before she had even finished asking for it, they would have sent her whatever she needed. She had those attitude of clinching to people too much as if they were her gods.
She could get it in a dirty way too. She does this, by either ‘short-counting’ or ‘steal-keeping’ bags of rice that were meant to be shared to the electorates. Whenever those bags of rice were brought, she always make sure they were brought to her house.

She purposely built a store for keeping bags of rice. A very big cage for keeping live chickens/hens and a cool place to keep many kegs of Ground-nut oil.

She turned herself into an automatic women leader at the same time heading the males.

The males didn’t digest the title ‘women-leader’ because you wouldn’t expect when they were sharing the rice, they should back off cause she is called ‘women-leader.’ To them, she was ‘human-leader’ and anything that was meant for the electorates wasn’t meant for just females alone because she was regarded as a ‘women-leader’.

I never knew some people were well to do a little in my family until the meetings they were holding frequently. I had thought may be we were all totally useless. You can’t ask someone that was your elder brother or sister for help, the reply you get was ‘I don’t have anything’ or ‘don’t worry, I will try” when at the end of the day, you would be left in the lurch.

But what I was hearing and seeing were of surprise to me.
Different people were just promising from all angles and I knew from there that Mama’s burial would actually be remarkable since they didn’t have to rely much on the money they would get from the ‘Ankara’ returns(profit).

Things were really going smoothly at our end but I never knew what Mama’s children were facing at their end, never knew my predictions “Mama’s burial would actually be remarkable” was unreliable. it was remaining just about 12days to the burial. Though everything seem set but they were all under threat.

Who they were all seeing seems to be someone very familiar, and was either threatening to totally cancel all the preparations that had been made so far or just to scare them off their skin.

Were they day-dreaming?. Is someone playing tricks on them?. This person can’t just be who they think it is!.

Find out yourself in what would happen to be coming to the scary part of this interesting story.