Douglas Road (Series): Nnamdi .G. Nwaigwe - Part 1

DOUGLAS ROAD

I

My elder brother used to say there were only two roads in Owerri: Douglas and Wetheral roads. The other roads, he said, merely occupied space. I did not understand what he meant. How could a big city have only two roads? Where does that happen? Unlike him, I hadn’t been to Owerri, so I could not argue. I was left thinking – aloud, sometimes – about the possibility of what he said.

We lived in Aba, on Okigwe road, surrounded by four roads: Faulks,Azikiwe, Eziukwu and Umungasi roads. And there were Ngwa road, Tenant road, Cameroon road and Clifford road. How come Owerri has only two? It made no sense to me, but I did not ask for explanations. He would say, as he often did, that I won’t understand.

It upset me how he said that. Other peoplehad said the same thing to me, but in a more playful, accommodating manner. But his own came with a tone of dismissal, as though by an unfortunate configuration of my brain, I was doomed to never understand certain things. I could not blame him.I was about seven years old then, and there were many things I did not understand, many things that fascinated me.

I did not understand death. I thought people did not die with their eyes open, and that no matter what happened, as long as you kept your eyes open, you would live. I imagined being involved in an accident. I decided that no matter how bad the accident was, how many times the vehicle somersaulted, I would keep my eyes open. Keeping one’s eyes open shouldn’t take much effort, I believed.

My resolve to live as long as I wanted was rattledwhen news came that grandfather had died in his sleep. Scared, I thought hard about how to manoeuvre this kind of death, about how to keep my eyes open while asleep. For the first few nights after the news of grandfather’s death, I practised how to sleep with my eyes open. I would stay up late into the heart of the night, forcing my tired eyelids to stay apart. At some point, I would bolt up, alarmed that I’d slept with my eyes closed and could have died as a result. It culminated inmy waking up with a heavier head, a pounding headache and sleeping in class the next morning. I gave up, grudgingly.

Pregnancy was another thing that fascinated me.I only knew that a woman’s stomach got bigger and bigger until she gave birth, and I knew only one way of getting the stomach big. So it unsettled me when my mother preferred to keep a portion of her food for me instead of eating it all, because I wanted a baby sister to play with!

So I could not really blame my elder brother then for saying I would not understand how Douglas and Wetheral came to be the only roads in Owerri, but I wished he offered more explanation. I tucked away my worry, knowing that I would visit Owerri one day or perhaps become old enough to understand. But aging came with more distractions which possessed my mind and purged it of such puerile longings.