NDU by Ukamaka Olisakwe

Author(s): Ukamaka Olisakwe

Ndu.

For lack of a name and since no one knew his real name, let’s call him “Ndu”.

Ndu, whose name means “life” in Igbo, was a mentally challenged man who became a legend of sorts in Aba. Young and thin, he had a face so narrow the skin stretched tight over its bony expanse perfected a look of hardship. The air around him hung thick, suffused with a heartrending sadness that was difficult to wave away, even long after you had left his presence.

But there was always some kind of smile on his face, as though he was mocking the pain that obviously was a part of his daily life―he had a large wound on his left leg that ran from around his knee to almost his ankle. He wasn’t the only mentally challenged and displaced person in Aba, but what stood him out was the bad leg and the permanent place he occupied in the city: a spot opposite the Abia State Polytechnic.

There were different versions to his story, depending on who was talking. Some said he was one of those vagrants who escaped from Uyo after the governor of Akwa Ibom State conducted the exercise to rid the streets of all mentally challenged and displaced persons. Others said he was a youngman who became mentally imbalanced after he took to hard drugs. And some said, in that generic way, with a superior smile on their religious faces, that ‘probably’ it was nemesis catching up with him―all of these stories were told with the casual indifference of people discussing the weather.

For months, he sat at his spot hunched over his wound, a souvenir from a hit-and-run early last year. Once, he was found wrapped in bandages, but he must have torn them off and began what would become his daily ritual of picking the wound with his finger until it bled. The state’s teaching hospital was about four kilometres away. Upon enquiries, a doctor said that they had tried all they could but that he had become infected and that the infection had spread. They were seeking other ways to get him off the streets and possibly cured. But that never happened.

Ndu remained on our streets. At a point he couldn’t move ten metres from his spot except he dragged his rump on the ground, pulling the bad leg along. At some point too, he sat hunched over the sore, unable to take shelter when the rains came.

As the months rode on, Ndu remained there, held hostage by his condition. We walked, head straight and noses scrunched up in disgust as his other diseases began to manifest: a bloated scrotum, the horrid  growth from his anus―possibly pile, which had him permanently sitting on one side of his buttock. He lost his smile. We sped past him each day. And then we went online and wept for Mandela’s health. We wept for the children dying in Aleppo. We screamed in solidarity with Turkish and Brazilian protesters. We shook our heads at the Americans―they were the cause of the problems in Africa.

And when we got to our churches or workplaces, we recited the arrogant prayer: to thank God for how we weren’t unlucky like the folks rotting on the streets. We gave to the church, when the offerings for the homeless and sick and poor were announced. Even though we had driven past them on our way to church. Even though the homeless, mentally challenged man on the street just few poles away from our church had been sitting there for more than a year, isolated. Even though his left leg had been rotting and no one cared to give him medication anymore. Even though he was dying in a city where you find a church in every other third building, in every street, blaring loud music and smatterings of prayers, screaming God’s salvation, urging on passerby to come witness how the pastor had cured the mad and raised the dead and healed the sick. Even though on the wastebin, opposite the spot where the Ndu sat, was emblazoned with different posters of our preachers advertising these miracles they had performed.

We did not talk about Ndu in our churches, or the various Ndu(s) scattered all over Aba, seeking for help, pleading with sorrow-filled eyes for relief from the pains so heavy they are unable to walk straight anymore. We find them on the various major roads where they touch our car doors and plead with open palms.

First week of June, 2013, on my way to work, I saw people clustered together, muttering and jabbing themselves on the shoulder. I saw him, the object of the gathering―Ndu. He was walking! I sreamed in joy. He was walking! Though it was more like limping, as he dragged the bad leg along. Vehicles stopped for him. People stuck their heads out of their windows to watch him. Him, half dressed in rags, walked with a sneer on his face, as though he was mocking us all, as though he held the secret of surviving on this crude conception called life. We all gawked, mouths frozen in Os and eyes asking questions we dare not give voice to. I said, “thank God!” Ndu’s eyes said, “fuck you!” when he returned our stare. And when he got to his spot, he carefully, in that practiced way, sat back down and resumed his ritual.

I got to work that day and before I was done talking about him, colleagues were already hailing his struggles. “Yes!” they said. “At least our government and the doctors must be hanging their heads in shame. They had been waiting for the youngman to die.”

Hope is what keeps the fire burning. It rose in our eyes each day as we returned to watching that one man who had grabbed life by the neck and wrestled it until it succumbed to his will. And he was there too, everyday, picking away at his bag leg, sitting with a mock-like pose. Perhaps it was my mind playing tricks on me.

On Friday, June 14, 2013, as I rode to work in the early hours of the wet morning, waiting to take my share of our daily perverse stares, I found him lying flatback on the ground, completely naked, his eyes wide and vacant and his tongue sticking out of his mouth as flies buzzed around his face and also around his bad leg.

And the body that hosted his soul stayed there for four days.

His death was unimportant. There was no mention of him in the popular Sun Newspaper known for their bizarre news reporting. There was no mention of him over the radio. And there was none too in the local TV stations. Vultures circled above the body by the following day. Same day, the sky, gorged with contempt, retched its anger over Aba. It rained like crazy. It washed over the body, sweeping his essence onto the road and into the rising, stagnant flood, until the body was almost immersed. And after it stopped raining, we, with no other option, poured into same flood on our way back to our homes, taking with us bits and memory of the man who had lain forsaken on our street.

This is 2013. He is not the first of this bizarre occurrence, we suddenly remember. He was not the first Mr No Name who had died on our streets and left there to bloat, until the health workers were awoken from their slumbers to remove them. He became just another statistic. By the fourth day, after he was removed, it was not relief that hung in the air. It was not sadness. The air was thick with mildew, one which clung to our skins and blurred our faces.