I used to laugh at men who let their wives control them. In my mind, no woman born of a woman could control me.
“It’s impossicant!” I used to say adamantly.
But these past few years have taught me that life is not like that. You can laugh. You can cry. Emotions are usually mixed. They say it’s a free world. So I won’t hold it against you.
What was my crime? Pounded Yam. I love pounded yam. Let me repeat it again, I love pounded yam. You know that freshly boiled and pounded white tuber that is neither soft nor hard and draws peke peke like fresh rubber, generously accompanied by a delicious ofe onugbu and smoothly glides down the gullet to rest and digest lovingly in the stomach. Sometimes when I was little, I used to imagine heaven as a place where I can eat pounded yam and ofe onugbu twenty-four hours a day. Now as an adult, I know that kind of weakness can put the son of man into all kinds of wahala.
You see, I had a wife. Her name was Chioma. As her name implied, God was so good that He granted me the luck to make her my wife. Her beauty was flawless. Her eyes sparkled like clear water. Her laughter was angelic music to my ears. She was blessed generously front and back. I could die a happy man on those heavy mounds on her chest and backside. She was the sun, the moon and the stars. And her acrobatic ‘bedmatics’ had no comparison. See me blowing grammar up and down because of woman. What is it with we men that we are either big mugus or poetic geniuses when it comes to matters of sex?
Let me not digress.
My wife was everything. But she couldn’t pound yam to save her life. That’s the one thing I could never tolerate from any woman. If you like, be Miss World or Miss Ugly, you must know how to pound yam. Period! I could stay for three years without seeing the color of a woman’s pant, but I couldn’t stay a day without eating pounded yam. In fact, it is kill me and leave my pounded yam alone.
For her, I made an exception. Before we got married, she had told me she didn’t know how to pound yam and she wasn’t ready to learn. That it was too stressful. That she didn’t want to develop muscles like akpu-obi. And I agreed because I was in love. I thought that once I made her my wife, I would somehow make her change her mind and shape her to my kind of ideal wife. After all, a woman is supposed to be submissive to her husband. It’s in the Bible. And the Holy Book does not lie.
I was wrong.
Chioma was one of those nonsense women that called themselves feminists. On days she managed to listen to me, her pounded yam looked like a lumpy sacrifice made to the gods by an angry worshipper. Even though I had enrolled her in a catering school to learn, she refused. How person pikin go just stubborn like goat?
After ten years of eating her shit and frequenting the toilet, including one that made me almost purge my intestines, I started visiting joints to eat. Mind you, I had never liked eating outside. But she pushed me. So, what happened next was not my fault.
To be continued…