fate

Chapter one    My Dearest, It hurts the base of my soul that I could not have written to you earlier, but the events that have occurred these past seasons of my life has caused me a great deal of pain and change. When I got your letter, I had meant to write to you sooner but days turned into weeks, weeks into months and the months dragged on to five years.  A few years ago, I would not have given such an amount of time any thought for time was on my side. When I close my eyes amidst all that changed, I try to remember the sound of our laughter ringing out loud and how carefree I once was. I still remember the fun times we had, which have eluded me since this phase began. You have always been the only one I trusted to bear my mind to. All the tales of my mischievous adventures I told you of: “tapping” meat from earthen pots and playing truant, you promised to take to the grave, I fear that you must carry this last tale to your grave. I regret that I may not be able to see you before I leave this world and that the last memory you will have left of me is written on this paper. By the time you get this letter, I may probably be with Baba wherever he is. I pray that it is the purgatory I have dreamed of and never saw. I hope I would be as happy as I was when I was with you playing in my youthful innocence which is now long gone. I am not sure where to start but I think that I should begin by saying that he died three months after you had left for Calabar. I probably should have told you but I did not believe in burdening you with my burden as you may have sold your soul just to raise enough money to get us out of what we had to face. I do not feel any form of resentment towards you even though you never returned, I am glad you stayed far away from the demons in my life. When Baba died, we had 11 mouths to feed for Ma neither had a trade or an office employment, she did not even possess any education except arithmetic and writing. We needed a solution in order to survive and we needed it fast. Pretty soon the devil himself came to strike us the cliché deal to sell our souls only at that time we had no idea that the devil himself had come for us we had naively celebrated that  we were about to have a solution to our problems. I laugh bitterly whenever I remember the day our “family friend”, Eld Marcus had come in search of a maid who would be of help to his wife. Looking back now, I can’t still believe that I was naïve enough to fall for that. I was on a one way ticket to hell only that I did not know it. Accompanying me as a co-passenger on this trip to hell was my sister Dimchi. Together we faced this unimaginable hell. The day before we were to depart, my mother called us into the tiny room that served as our sitting room.  I still remember her exact words in Igbo, she had said: “Dimchi, Ugochi, you will be going on this journey of your lives and how you show yourself would determine if I and your 11 siblings would have food on our table and if you would wipe away the sorrow of our loss or if we would die in our predicament. I hope that you would be very responsible and hardworking, obedient and trustworthy but above all never refuse your master of anything…be at his beck and call always, you are his till he settles you and remember that your wages are the only thing that we can survive on.” Poor Ma! If only she had known the kind of man our master was going to be, she would not have told us to surrender ourselves totally but to have weapons of self defence. She had said that if we had served well, we could go back to school. Imagine my joy when I thought of the possibilities of being your equal! My heart sang at the very thought of being by your side as your equal after our college years. In my daydreams, I dreamt of being by your side as your equal together as we had once been. But alas that was all it was ever going to be– a daydream. Looking back, I guess that it was this daydream of mine and the promise you had made me – to come back for me– that had made me believe that it was going to be an easy path and that something would come out of promises made with considering destiny.