Part One.

I once knew a delightful young man,

Darasimi was his name, but I called him Simi,

Simi was easy to love, Simi was kind and graceful

My sisters used to say his face must have been crafted by Ogun himself

He stood tall, towering over everyone in sight, and though he already comfortably saw the balding spots on every man’s head, and the spilling dandruff on every woman’s

He still held his chin high, with a puffed up chest

Those jobless girls who always sat at the river banks, making ‘cho-cho’ noises with their Katanga-radio-without battery mouths, said it was because of his inflated ego, because of how the women, ripe and spoiled started at him whenever his grandmother Iya Risi sent him to buy her yams and spices.

They said it was because during the hunting season, he always came back with the biggest bush meat, and that the fading elders praised him too much, too often.

They said it was because he was the only one their fathers would call to help them and write letters to the families abroad, because he went to a missionary school in Igbo land, and his grandmother had bore holes into the picture of Simi and the white men, and tied it to her wrapper, wearing only that wrapper when she left the hut.

They said it was because of the rosary he wore on his neck, they said he was proud because he served a white mans God, while we served Ogun.

They said it was because of his broad chest, that he no longer flaunted like the other boys in the village, instead he now wore a white singlet and sometimes even a polo.

But I knew that all they said, they said because Simi would never glance their way, even when they would loosely tie their wrappers around their chest on Saturday mornings when he often went to wash his and his grandmother’s clothes by the river bank.

I knew that Simi, held his chin so high, because he was indeed so shy. I had never met someone as shy as Simi before. Although he was never shy around me, I noticed he always raised his chin, when we would walk past strangers, or someone waved it him. It is the same as one bowing their head to avoid the gazes of men, just that if he were to lower his head, he would meet more than a pair of eyes.

 I remember our walks within our neighborhood, every Sunday evening, he would tell my father he was taking me to the square to teach me English and Mathematics, when in truth he was taking me to the foot of the mountain, not so far from Ogun’s sacred river, to study The Holy Book, and tell me about the Messiah. When the sun began to go to sleep, he would make me recite the two times table, and a tongue twister, so I would have something to convince my illiterate father and siblings that I had learnt something new.

I once mused, and asked Simi, why he didn’t just tell my father the truth about what we really did, when he took me away. Afterall, the 9^th commandment says not to lie. And he laughed, the laugh that made my lower abdomen warm. His laugh was not as disorganized as the boys and men of this village, who threw their legs around and scratched their heads, it was brief, and as gentle as the breeze. Then he placed a firm hand on my shoulder shook his head, and said, “Ayonifemi, you are so naïve,”