‘Bring me some salt,’ my mother said.

Odinkemmelu took his body odour away to the kitchen and returned with a teaspoon of salt.

‘Godfrey, I don’t want to hear that you forgot to bring the university entrance forms back from school tomorrow,’ my father said to my brother.

Godfrey grunted quietly.

‘For almost a week now, I’ve been reminding you,’ my father continued. ‘You don’t always have to wait till the last minute.’

When it was my turn about seven years ago, I had brought my forms home promptly. My father had sat down with me and we filled them out together. We divided the task equally: he decided that I should study Chemical Engineering, he decided that I should attend the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and he decided that I must not take the exams more than once. My own part was to fill in his instructions with biro and ink, study for the exams, and make one of the highest Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board exam scores into the university’s Chemical Engineering Department. Godfrey did not appear too keen on any such joint venture.

‘And I hope you’ve been studying,’ my father added. ‘Because any child of mine who decides to be useless and not go to university has his own self to blame for however his life turns out.’

A sudden bout of coughing forced an early conclusion to a speech that could easily have lasted the duration of our meal. To my parents, education was everything. She was the recipe for wealth, the pass to respectability, the ticket to eternal life.

Once, while in primary school, I had ventured to exercise my talents in the football field during break time and returned home with my school shirt badly ripped and stained. When my mother saw me, she stared as if I had huge pus-filled boils all over my body. Then she used a long koboko whip to express herself more vividly on my buttocks. Later that evening, my father called me into his bedroom. He sat on the bed, held my shoulders, and adjusted my posture until I was standing directly in front of him. He stared into my eyes forever. Then in a deep, sententious tone, he changed my life.