THE VILLAGE TEACHER
Episode 5
……… Abiba spread her mat parallel to my mattress. Her behaviour was as if she was given a letter by GES, informing her that I would be posted to that community to marry her. “See me, see wahala!” I thought. The worst part of it all was that she tried to leave no gap between my mattress and her mat.
Meanwhile, a mattress and a mat are not the same. The only similarity is the “mat”. There is a difference of “tress” in them. I hate temptation, especially when the temptation comes close to my ‘magnetic field’.
I built a room around my mattress with the mosquito net. At least that would help reduce the degree of temptation. I entered my ‘mosquito net’ room whiled my wife was left outside the net. What a wicked husband I was! I had wondered what Abiba would be thinking about me. While in a net, I peeped to see whether she was sleeping or not.
Each time I looked and our eyeballs met, she sighed, “hmmmm”. This happened severally until a time I looked and saw ‘light out’ on her face. “Thank God, I think I can sleep now”, I said to myself.
The next action I saw was carrying Kate on a motorcycle. We were cruising on the principal streets of a city. She was well dressed in a white dress. Her beauty was magnified by the symmetrical arrangement of her teeth. We soon got to the birthday party of one of her friends. Kate and I were given a separate table with a variety of drinks and food. We sat opposite each other and my entire attention was on her pretty face. Kate’s beauty could make any man with aesthetic eyes terminate his flight trip in order to have a nice time with her. I considered myself lucky to have gotten a beautiful angel like Kate. Her smiles never stopped.
“Let me use this opportunity to propose to this lady”, I thought. Before my thinking landed, I said to her, “Kate, please, will you marry me?”. She gave an optimistic smile, stood up from her seat and moved toward me. She got to me, went down on her knees and gave me a tap on my shoulder.
I received three strong taps on my leg with a call,
“Master! Master! Master!”. “Yes,” I responded and
opened my eyes. “What is the problem?” I asked.
“Mosquitoes are biting me”, she responded.
“hmmm!” I sighed and asked her again, “So what do
you want me to do?”. “I want to sleep in the net”,
she said. This girl didn’t know how annoyed I was with her. If she had known she had spoiled my best dream ever, she wouldn’t have been asking to sleep in my net. At least she should have waited for Kate to respond to my proposal. Maybe, she (Kate) would have even given me a kiss to confirm my proposal.
With an angry heart and mind, I asked her a question, in the language she would best understand, “are the mosquitoes biting you plenty, plenty?”. She answered with a naughty voice, “yes, sir!”. With my matured mind, I told her, “but my mattress is too small for two people to sleep on, or?”. I didn’t know Abiba was that smart. The village-class-six girl told me I could spread the net to cover my mattress and her mat. “See me, see trouble. Were you already sleeping in a mosquito net or do you want to capitalize on the fact that you are married to a man with a net?”, I thought. I didn’t hide my feeling. I asked her whether she used to use a mosquito net, and she said, “no!”.
I then asked her to manage the mosquitoes till the following day.
If I had known, I would have allowed her to share the net with me, because I was disturbed throughout that night by sound from slaps on her body, which she claimed were killing mosquitoes. I had wondered how many mosquitoes she succeeded in killing that night. If only the number of slaps corresponded to the number of mosquitoes killed, then Abiba’s action was too mosquitocidal.
The following morning, Abiba was the first to wake up. She tapped me and said she had fetched some water for me to bathe. I stretched out the dullness in me, took my bathing apparatus and then decided to head for the bathroom. I peeped through my door and saw the entire family happily seated in the compound. I had known I was a part of their gossip that morning. I had assumed they would think I had performed some nocturnal matrimonial responsibility. I gathered courage and went and took my bath, after all, I wasn’t guilty. Abiba also took her bath and got dressed up in her mother’s room. After we took our breakfast, we followed each other like we did the previous day, to school.
On reaching the campus, the number of pupils wasn’t encouraging. Neither Kate nor Ken was present as at that time we got to the school. My wife gave my books to me and joined her colleagues to sweep the compound. I was left alone under our staff common tree like an isolated witch. From a distance, I could see Abiba and her friends exhibiting a ‘hide and look’ on me. I wondered whether they were discussing me as a new teacher or a new husband.
Their ‘hide and look’ attitude made me uncomfortable. I pretended my mind wasn’t on them, but I was actually bothered. As I was seated alone wondering what my pupils were discussing while looking at me, I heard an adult female voice at the other side of the school block,
“hey! Sweep fast and go for assembly”. My mood
suddenly changed from wondering to
celebrating………………
👉Episode 1
👉Episode 2
Interesting story
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