Dial - Season 1 - Episode 107

4 years ago

Dial - Season 1 - Episode 107

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I drove without a destination in mind.
Life, with its horrors, was doing its best to drive me insane, and I just needed to get away for a while, far away, to a place I wouldn’t be recognized, a place I wasn’t known and where I didn’t know anybody.
I needed that space and the air of anonymity to plan my next move. For one thing, my Pappy had always stressed on me the fact that there were many solutions to every problem. We had adopted the slogan ‘Impossible Is Nothing,’ and we had always worked assiduously from that angle.

There was always a way out, no matter how impossible the situation was.
I was growing old, yes, and I would die of old age.

Factors then were: how fast was I growing by day, and what age would be old age to determine death.

So, in retrospect, maybe I had a few years in me yet, and that was time enough to find a remedy, if a remedy were possible. If not, then so be it.

But I couldn’t function in an environment where every stare, every look and every remark showed how horrible I was growing. That was stressful, and wasn’t a good enough condition to de-stress and think things through rationally.

The Regera was a strong, beautiful and powerful car, crafted by a master, just to suit me, and so I ate up the miles. I didn’t use the GPS…I just drove! Simply, I took turnings in the roads randomly…and drove.

I checked into hotels or guest houses at nights, ate when I felt hungry and continued driving. Sometimes I hit dead-ends, but I reversed, joined a main road, and continued. Once, in an unknown hotel, I entered a salon, and had my grey hair twisted into fine braided locks, and then I drove on.

After a week, I was completely lost. Turning on the GPS would have told me where I was, but I didn’t want to know. The air of anonymity, of being in an unknown place, was quite refreshing. The good thing was that I was far from a major city. The fuel in my car was almost zero by the time I turned into a roadside fuel station.

This fuel station didn’t have a mechanized machine; they used hand pumps that filled up a globe-like glass cylinder before dispersion. As it were, I got only a gallon of fuel, which couldn’t take me anywhere. They had run out, and were expecting a fuel load within the week.

It was a small town, and so I asked of the police station, and drove there. I met a couple of bored sergeants at the small building that served as a police station. I explained to them that I had run out of fuel, so I needed to park my car with them, and would be back in a week to have it fuelled.

They looked at me sourly, but when they came out and saw the car, their lackadaisical attitude changed to sprightly enthusiasm, respect and reverence. They reversed their battered police jeep out of a makeshift enclosure, and beamingly begged me to park inside. I drove in, parked, and then gave them more money than they would ever receive in a month, and when I left I knew that car would be guarded more than their lives.

I was standing by the rutted excuse of a main road when a dangerous-looking Bedford truck rumbled forward and came to a tottering halt a short distance from me. It was one of those old Bedfords, the one we used to call ‘bone-shakers.’

It was dilapidated, and its back wooden cabin needed some serious repairs, but surprisingly, it was filled with passengers!

The trucks roof was laden high with goods tied with ropes and covered by dirty tarpaulin and polyethene sheets.

I stared at it with a funny look on my face. This was the first time I had seen one close-up. On its wooden back were the words: MAN NO GO DIE!

And that hooked me, instantly.
Without thinking I moved toward the truck. Some women had gotten down, and there were some men on top of the truck, bringing down some goods. I jumped into the Bedford truck.

It had narrow wooden planks for seats, and I sat on the back one.

It was mostly filled with women, jabbering women. But there were some men too. As I sat down, many eyes turned to look at me with sudden trepidation, and then they began to speak with something close to fear as they made wild gesticulations toward me. Their language was strange to me, and as I looked at them, and many more turned in their seats to stare at me, I became very uncomfortable indeed.

A young man in his teens just sitting in front of me reached out, tapped my arm, and spoke excitedly in that strange language.
I replied in the Fante tongue.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

He nodded suddenly with a wide grin, and also spoke in Fante.
“Oh, Fante old man,” he said. “You shouldn’t sit on that seat. You should move forward.”

“Why?” I asked with a sardonic smile. “All the seats are too packed. This one is free, gives me more space.”

“That’s because no one wants to sit beside the witch,” he said in a scared voice.
“The witch?” I asked with raised eyebrows.
And then he pointed at my right, and that was when I saw the elderly lady sitting at the far end of the seat I was sitting on.

She was dressed in black clothes, and had covered her head with some black cloth too. She was in her late sixties, I guessed, and was a beautiful, dark woman with a lined face. Her eyes, though, were the saddest eyes I had ever seen as she looked at me.

I turned and looked at the young man.
“Aha!” I said softly. “She’s a witch?”
“Yes, the witch,” he replied. “No one sits beside her.”
“And what will happen if I sit beside her?” I asked softly.

“She will eat you,” he replied fearfully.
“She will eat me, like khebab?” I asked with smile, but he didn’t smile back. He nodded hard.

“Please, better move here, otherwise you’ll die!” he said dourly.
“My friend, we’re all dying,” I smiled.
And then I stood up, moved to the very end of the seat where the witch was sitting, and I sat down beside her.

There was pandemonium in the truck instantly!

The women spoke wildly, some putting their hands on top of their heads to indicate great mourning! They gesticulated cruelly at the sad woman, and I was sure their words were cruel indeed.

She said nothing, though. She just drew her cloth tighter over her hair and stared out.
“You this old man,” the young boy said, shaking his head sadly. “You touched the witch by sitting that close? You’re dead to ghost, I swear!”
Eventually the truck moved on.

About an hour later, only a few people remained in it. We were on a very bad road! It was filled with clay, with deep ruts and pools of water, causing the car to tremble rather alarmingly!

On each side were thick vegetation. I knew I was headed for a very remote part of the country because the distances between the villages increased, and the road got worse, narrower and more dangerous.

It was getting dark too, and suddenly I started having trepidations. I didn’t have a car, and it didn’t seem as if I could make a return trip now. I wondered where we were headed.

The truck was almost empty now. A few women, four men, the boy, then me and the sad woman by my side.

We got to another village, and three women got down, leaving four women on board. All the men got down, and the boy looked at me and hopped out of the truck.
“Hey, so you’re going to Etwe-Pe-Kote,” he said.

I turned a shocked face to him.
“What?” I asked numbly.
He seemed confused for a moment.
“The next village, it is the last village here,” he said. “After that, no other village. Etwe-Pe-Kote.”

“That’s the name of the village?” I asked, horrified.

“Yes, don’t you know?” he asked, even more confused.
The driver’s mate came round the back.
“Fare, please, sir,” he said. “Four cedis to Etwe-Pe-Kote.”
I laughed then.

For the very first time since Nana b0s0mba came into my life, I laughed.

The name of the village, in the Akan language, simply meant that ‘’the female sexual organ loves the male sex organ.”
Well, in a macabre sort of way, that was an apt description of a place that described a part of my woes.

And so, sitting beside the witch in the gathering darkness, I continued my journey to that unknown place called Etwe-Pe-Kote.
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