WHO IS THIS GEORGE SEF???!!!/CLEANING HOUSE, A STORY WRITTEN BY GEORGE...

WHO IS GEORGE SEF???!!!

George Chimezirim Egbuchulam is a graduate of English, Matric No 132135, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He graduated with a second class upper division.  He hails from Emekuku, Owerri in Imo State Nigeria. He is born to Mr George and Chinyere Egbuchulam, the first out of six children: three boys and three girls. During his sojourn in the University of Ibadan, He won several awards and made some notable achievements. George as a pressman in his early years won the Union of Campus Journalist award for best fiction. George was also the winner of the annual quiz competition organized by an alumnus of the Theatre Arts Department for the ATAS week. George was also part of the twenty students that made qualified for the Zain20 in the first edition of Zain Africa Challenge though he wasn’t among the final four selected to represent the University of Ibadan at the National and African levels. George was the president of the UI Chess Club in his final year. He is a good prose, poetry and screen writer. Some of his works can be accessed on NaijaStories. He has even picked up his form to pursue a masters degree at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan.

Some of you know him as Oddman, Chess master, Pawpaw, and lots more. Well, he cannot do some of the things you know him for, in his present state of health. He needs your help now. 2.5 million naira is needed for a kidney transplant. And the above figure only caters for the surgery that will be performed on him and his donor. After the surgery, both patients will need very expensive post-surgery drugs to sustain themselves and other laboratory charges. He is currently undergoing dialysis.

Below is a literary non-fiction: Cleaning House, written by George Chimezirim Egbuchulam. A true life account of his sojourn in Lagos with his family. This was written ages ago. Thanks for reading.

Cleaning House by George Chimezirim Egbuchulam

Did you know that there’s a ubiquitous stink to public toilets? (At least, I think so.) I wonder why that is. The fact occurred to me today while I was using the toilet in our new face-me-I-slap-you house. I remembered the days when, as a child, I spent a lot of my holidays at my Aunty Jane’s (she was my dad’s elder sister―and was kind and generous, by the way), in a slum in Orile. She too lived with her husband and children in a face-me-I-slap-you, and their public toilet smelt just the same.

            In all the houses my family and I have lived in, none of them ever smelt close to being near-perfect. Let me give a rundown of our domiciliary exodus: sole occupants of an entire bungalow →fellow occupants in a block of flats → fellow occupants in another block of flats → fellow tenants in a face-me-I-slap-you. Now, our first house, which was in a ghetto in Ilasamaja, Mushin, Lagos, was where I grew up. The first twenty years of my life were spent there. I have already mentioned that we were the only occupants of a bungalow. It rested on, I believe, a plot of land. Let me add that it was a very fertile plot of land. We lived there for so long that people actually thought the house was ours. It should have been, but that’s a story I’m not writing now to disclose.

            So what was wrong with our first house? Plenty. For one, I remember no single day―not one―that rain fell and did not leak into the house―in all the rooms. The kind of trauma it imprinted on us is not one I’m prepared to wish on a foe. Two, there was no privacy: anyone who cared to could look to see what we were doing in the compound: spreading any or both of our two fat bedbug-infested mattresses (one, and the best, of which was my parents’, which any of my three youngest siblings had bedwetted―which was often; there was a third mattress, a rather skinny affair, which I brought home after my stint in secondary school) on the multi-purpose wooden rack my mom had had built; putting foodstuff like dried fish, crayfish, smoked fish, dried pepper, vegetables, etc. out in the sun to dry and watching out for goats and birds; lounging in one of our six plastic chairs―which hurt our arses like hell, not to mention hardening them too; playing soccer or ludo or chess, and so on. Any idiot could graze their cattle and goats and rams and pigs there, if they chose. And they did choose, plenty of times. The pigs were the worst and the hardest to chase away: they dug ugly holes in our compound in their endless search for the tortoise’s millstone. Also, there was this particular beans-seller and her daughters who, until we moved out of there, spread their laundry either on our clotheslines or on the grass in our compound. Hell, a lot of people spread their laundry in our compound. Three, our septic tank deteriorated so bad that its top (laid by a mediocre bricklayer, one tribal-marked Mr Rasaqi) completely caved in, revealing shit for the whole street to see and smell. It was so terrible that health officials, time and again, threatened to lash the law on my dad―being the head of the house and all. I think he ‘settled’ them each time they came and that ended it. Matters were made even worse by the fact that our neighbours in the street behind us, though we were separated by a moss-coated fence, hurled their refuse into our backyard―but mostly they aimed for the soak away. Our neighbours who lived in a face-me-I-slap-you beside us also threw their garbage into our sump. Their combined efforts, undeterred by our enraged outbursts and cursing, over the years filled the septic tank to the brim. But even after that they continued to throw refuse into our compound. Can you imagine the sheer humiliation of it all? Four, the house was an architectural bomb waiting to implode. There were marked signs, both interior and exterior, of this: deep crevices in the walls; the wood in all the windows were crumbling by the day; the wooden beams in the roof were rotting away. Five, the landlord put a lot of pressure on us to leave, mostly because my dad helped him secure a mouth-watering contract with Globacom to plant their mast in the compound, and he most likely had nightmares, inspired by his full-grown male children, about my dad suddenly becoming covetous and claiming ownership of the house and its concomitant royalties… We eventually moved…

            … to house number two. This was in Okerube, a town way after Ikotun. The first time I stepped into that house I thought it was the Nicon Hilton. What I mean is, the relief of no more leaking roof, no more exposed sewage pit, no more insults from insouciant neighbours… And what’s more, it had sliding doors and windows, and was fenced and gated! The best things about the house were the small farm (cultivated by the former occupant, and which my mom, raised in the village as she was, maintained) and a mango tree. There was a bathtub with a working shower―the handheld one that resembles a telephone― when there was water and a toilet that flushed! There was a GP tank filled by a pumping machine with water from a well that was sealed shut. But this is real life, and in it nothing lasts forever, if at all. It didn’t take long before we found faults with the house: it could be incredibly hot inside. You could cook beans in the heat. Furthermore, the bathtub leaked, and we were chagrined that we had to resort to scooping out the water again. (That was something we did in our former house that we hated but could not evade. We scooped water that pooled on the floor of the toilet, and water that pooled in the far corner of the corridor linking the toilet and bathroom.) The toilet also leaked, if memory serves. And when there was no electricity, which is a constant in this exasperating country, we had to go out and fetch water from the compounds of grumpy neighbours. Once again, pressure was mounted on us to move out of the house; this time, it was by the caretaker. Like in our former house, we owed rent. I was at school when my family moved to house number 2, and at school when they moved to house number 3.

            This was several streets away from house number 2, in a place called Abaranje. The first day I entered it my heart plummeted. I hated it on sight―and sound. For one, it was too remote, like the second house. As if that wasn’t enough, the landlord blockaded it from the front with a churchand a block of apartments. The bathroom/toilet and kitchen were at the wrong angles, the whole place irritated me and made me very restive. There was no cross ventilation: it was as hot inside as our second house, and was permanently sunk in gloom. Sunlight had to beg the preceding buildings in order to reach into the house. Reading in that house was hellish for me; writing in it was impossible. We were always fanning ourselves anytime we were inside. Again, the landlord put pressure on us to leave. I couldn’t understand what was so special about the house that he hurried us out for. Do you know how close his church was to us? I could place one foot on the wall of our house and plant the other on the wall of his church in a half split. That’s how close it was. It didn’t cross his enlightened mind that he and what passed for his congregation were an auditory nuisance to us, with their militant preaching, preemptory praying, and unskilled drumming. Do you know how foolish and insensitive he was? If he caught us staring or passing what he felt were unfavourable comments while they were gathered in whose name, he would complain later to my mom that wedisturbed them! What have we not been through in this life? I ask.

            And now we are in house number 4, preparing to pass our first night here. We moved in this morning, around eight. Located in Ikotun, it is much better placed than our last two residences. (Speaking of which: moving out of Ilasa to Ikotun was inspired by strictly financial concerns―or is it constraints? Rent in Ikotun is much cheaper; hence, the overpopulation. But leaving our house in Ilasa then to, say, Ojuelegba to purchase a novel or two was easy, affordable and trekable, compared to coming out of Ikotun to, say, Cele Bus Stop to breathe. Traffic in Ikotun is a prototype for its probable equivalent in Hell.) From our new house it’s only about six minutes to walk to Ikotun main market. I already went out to sightsee: Ikotun bubbles and is lively just the way I like it, even though it will never compare to Yaba or Ojuelegba. The thing I loathed the most about our last two residences was their remoteness from Ikotun: if you needed to go out, you had to pay N40 to get to Ikotun first; added to that was the time lost in waiting for a bus to fill up with passengers, except you were willing to pay an okada rider or a Keke-Marwa/-NAPEP, which naturally charged more than commuter buses. (Of course, during Christmas the fares were jacked outrageously high. Life in Okerube and then Abaranje made me very reluctant to return home when semesters ended.) Because of the location of our present accommodation, however, I can ignore the inconvenience of the public toilet, the public bathroom, the public kitchen and the constricted space of two rooms. For instance, if the mood hits me, I can walk to the bookseller’s and exchange novels for fifty bucks―whenever he has books, that is, since, by the looks of his supply, few people in Ikotun read or care to buy novels; I can walk to a shoe seller’s at the roadside and pick up a pair of good shoes for a thousand bucks! Provided, of course, that the police don’t pick him up. I heard a woman informer warn the shoe seller that ‘Alausa’ were coming in a ‘Black Maria’. He quickly threw a large black nylon over his wares and vanished. I too, a firm believer in the quip, ‘prevention is better than cure’, quickly stepped on home. Aside from the fact that we have no one to pay bail if I was picked up by the police, I heard later from my mom that people, especially kids (sent out to hawk), left too long in the hands of the po-po could be sold to ritualists for a quick profit. This country is indeed sick, when traders can’t sell in peace because the police stalks and pounces on them.

                                                                                                            Dec 30, 2010

P.S.:

This morning, a few hours past midnight, I suddenly realized why the toilet in this our yard smells like all the public toilets that I have come across: cockroaches! There is a unique smell to these vermin. There was a whole revolting gang of them on the walls of the toilet when I went in to pee. I had to detour to the bathroom. Sad, but that’s the way it is. I call cockroaches synonyms of public-toilet odour. Shit!