The Wristwatch

by Jill Okpalugo-Nwajiaku

Why do strange things happen in March? It was on a wet day before April that I met Kasarachi Abel at the Division Two police station after queuing for ten minutes. The sky had a thundering temper that day and hurled about rainwater in fat splashes. I paid the cab driver, jumped over the gutters carrying off the dirty rainfall and ran into the police station. Surprisingly it was empty, like a bottle voided of its contents; and bare-chested barefooted boys sitting on the abandoned cars in the overgrown parking lot loudly argued if it were the one o’clock prayer at the Central Mosque or the pending government salaries that had emptied the premises that smelt of dead flesh scattering rottenness. I cleaned a dimpled wooden bench with a handkerchief, sat on its thin belly, and waited for my turn to speak with the constable.

Just to keep me from bickering with the man standing beside me, I enjoyed the games on my Nokia phone. Perhaps I would water down my English accent when I negotiate the proceedings our Charity team will observe to bail the felons locked up in prison cells for months. Yesterday over fish pepper soup, my sister Nonye had argued that my English now came out through the nose. And laughing I had held that it was the pepper in the food and not my acquired English accent that made it so.

Behind the filthy counter in the dully painted room stood a woman not more than twenty. Paint peelings and cobwebs drooped down the wall’s shoulder on which the pictures of the Governor and President hung in dusty frames. As the woman conversed with the policeman whose last name seemed simpler than the first, he scoffed and asked in Pidgin English if she had complained to God first before coming to disturb him at the police station (because her first name Kasarachi meant complain to God). I imagined she would fall into a rage and refuse to answer but she simply smiled. It was difficult to say if she had heard or ignored the policeman as her thin fingers scratched the roots of her full brown hair. Through the soiled window with missing louvers, I watched a constable woo a teenage girl beneath the discharge your duties diligently signpost. So far, the woman’s crime was that she had come to report a rape and when she finished speaking, the policeman burst into laughter. After he steadied, he asked her if the sky had been dark or brightly lit during the episode; and despite the pen and paper on the table, he didn’t take notes. The woman gazed on, unsure of what to say and what to leave out. I bit my nails thoughtfully till a brown goat zoomed past us and headed for a slippery bar of soap at the foot of a short pawpaw tree.

A fly perched near the policeman's mouth but he didn't hit it off immediately. It was the black and noisy type with ballooned belly and midnight blue on its shoulders and waist. He chased it off with a gentle wave of the ruler and flipped through a newspaper. Some political headlines caught his interest briefly and as he absorbed and emitted interest in a few articles, anger shot through me like a bolt of lightning then sweat raced down my temple. I swallowed saliva staring at the brittle leaves beneath the giant mango tree pregnant with fruits. Maybe there would be a crunchy crackle if I pressed the leaves together- before they became powder in my palms. Or would they simply collapse like the sand houses I built on the sandy beaches of childhood fantasies that fell on touch?

The woman coughed. She was flesh and blood and not a monument. Round tears escaped from her eyes and landed on the lavender shirt hanging stiffly on her thin body leaving patches resembling eyes. The policeman remained unreadable as she wept, like a badly written letter; and when our eyes met by chance, he said that females cried at the police station because it was as a ritual they supposed would get them more attention and less punishment. It was refreshing to see him lament over his meager pay and the twisted government before he pulled out lunch from a drawer. The food was rice and stew with a small piece of beef in the middle. The stew had lost its sheen and lay gloomily on the ashen face of the rice. I wasn’t sure what the beef resembled.

I turned to her who had taken her time to cry so that she could talk clearly. Because altruism begat contentment, I listened. The rapist was a man she wasn't dependent on financially who had bought her an expensive wrist watch days ago. I clicked my thumb and middle finger when I said that the price tag didn’t justify the rape; and as she narrated how the moneyed rapist joked about marrying her after he moved out of his brother’s residence, I changed into a stone. Could a rich man squat with his brother or was it simply a bait to escape identification?

I watched her speak- a lovely child in search of marriage and children. Against the dying light of the sky, I weighed her pointed nose, marble smooth complexion and her countenance which is an enduring lake. As I freed and studied the wristwatch, she swept away the lovely beads of sweat on her temple.

The policeman rose, cleaned his face with a tired naira note and asked me my mission. With round and remorseless eyes, I said that he wasn’t any better than the corrupt political system that he judged, and he had killed my trust in the police force. On spotting the wristwatch, his eyes twinkled. He said it belonged to his younger brother Okenna.

It is difficult to say much on such occasions so I simply pitied us for being prisoners of one man. A month ago had marked the start of a friendship that caged me in an iron-thought wave. My mind becomes stuffy. Tears roll instead of words their warmness romanticizing the soreness of the affair. I blow my nose and joke that having spent thirty-four minutes at the police station, it was time to eat the ripe banana on the table. Then I began to weep because I had given Okenna that wristwatch as a symbol of my lasting love and benevolence.  

© 2010 Jill Okpalugo-Nwajiaku.  All rights reserved.  
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jill Okapalugo-Nwajiaku has been published in Snap online literary journal, Identity Theory, All Things Girls, Glint and many other poetry and writing journals and magazines.