Have you ever been in a situation you just wanted some peace, calm and quiet away from the crazy world outside?
View yourself in a mixed crowd of people with half of them going nowhere specific, all they do each morning is wake up without so much as a splash of water on the face, or toothpaste to the teeth, set out to the corner of the street, with a sachet of alcohol in one hand and a Pepsi plastic bottle tucked into a pocket behind, walking the length of the junction or street corner, looking for who to brush past or harass and move on to the next victim.
I have to swim through these groups every other morning to get to the point I can catch a ride to work. Thankfully, I don’t make up their jurisdiction. Pheww. Imagine surviving that, getting into a bus of ‘seemingly’ sane people, only to meet a young man with beards that need a barber’s touch be nasty! Actually the beards have been shaven but it seemed with a blunt instrument. Well, I had no hand in that, so why was he nasty to me?!
He got into the bus before me (you know those 8-seater buses), I call them “Ilesha buses” because that’s where I saw them first. My Ilesha peeps, have mercy o! Mbok. On getting into the bus, I was trying to sit beside him and the driver moved, so I sort of slumped into the chair and ‘Unku’ moved himself to assert ownership of the zone and I said, “Please, take it easy.” He goes, “Do you want me to go out through the window?”
I’m only asking you to take it easy. Should I leave this seat, would it make you feel better?
What’s my own? Am I paying for the seat?
Probably, you want to, so you feel more comfortable.
And he goes on and on about how he didn’t even touch me and I’m wondering whose elbow was nudging me immediately I sat. When all I needed was to sit first before he started moving and claiming territories. I could see he was upset about something and this was purely “transferred things”. So I say to him, “I’m not the reason you are upset and I can see you are a nasty fellow.” Yes, I said it. And he responded back to me. Told him, he was a man (meaning he should have stopped talking by now), but he went on and on. I did the next best thing, I left him to the seat behind which was comfortable and free of the nagging man.
The good book says “It is better to stay on the rooftop than to live with a quarrelsome man”. I took the advice o! Did I tell you he had the last say? At this point, I’m sober and wondering who has gotten this young man to this point. What do I know? At least, I achieved that initial peace I was looking for, away for ‘Unku’.
Picture source: mintyfreshmangos, DeviantArt.
@imanikel 250919 Frances Kelvin Otung
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