Perhaps she was angry that I had not been to visit her as regularly as I should have. But then, the woman was always busy. Ola’s mother, for the earlier part of her married life, had been a contented housewife. She was forced to start her own business only after her husband defected to some other woman. Now she owned a busy pepper-soup joint somewhere in the middle of town, which she ran with an almost fanatical zeal.

This mystery was going to torment me forever. There was no better way to regain my peace of mind than to pay her a visit tomorrow.

I decided to walk. As I tried my best to avoid the speeding cars and the gaping gutters, I was amazed to see how much this obscure town was developing just a few years after Abia State had been carved out of Imo State, and Umuahia made the capital. There were several more cars on the roads, and neon signs announcing new businesses. There were more and more posters advertising the political intentions of… almost everybody. The scallywags hired to post these bills did not spare any available space in the pursuit of their endeavours. Faces of candidates were posted over traffic signs, and faces over the faces of other contestants. There were even faces posted on dustbins. Did these people not realise the subconscious message of seeing a candidate’s hopeful face grinning from a container specially prepared for garbage? Perhaps most of them did not go to school.

A red car zoomed past and nearly broomed me off the road.

‘Hei!’ I cried while struggling to keep myself from tumbling into the gutter.

These parts were largely populated by civil servants and traders; the most ostentatious they aspired to was a Mercedes-Benz V-Boot. Anybody riding such an extraterrestrial car must either be a dealer in human body parts or a 419er – a swindler of men and women in distant lands, an offender against section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, which addresses fraudulent schemes.