Must Read: Igbo-Smoking Keke Driver ( Short Story ) - Season 1 - Episode 2

7 years ago

Must Read: Igbo-Smoking Keke Driver ( Short Story ) - Season 1 - Episode 2

He zoomed down the road like the keke was the Bat-mobile and it occurred to me that his driving skills might have been one of the many reasons why passengers we passed on the way seemed to politely refuse a ride and generally waved him on. I resigned myself and settled comfortably at the back seat, at least with the way he was going I would be at the park in record time.

Before I knew it I was at Ogbogeonogo market. I jumped down from the keke, grateful to have all limbs still fully intact. I paid the man his fare and headed for one of the buses that was just about getting filled up. I managed to bag the front seat (an agbero that had been pretending to be a passenger in front had come down for me to sit) and the driver started the vehicle. From the time I got down from the keke to the time I entered the Onitsha bus couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds.

The next thing I knew I was overcome by a dreadful feeling. My right pocket that usually housed my arguably expensive android phone was unnaturally light. I felt in it and gasped. My pocket was empty! My android phone was gone!
I raised an alarm and jumped down from the bus, searching for the phone to see if it had fallen out of my pocket. It was nowhere in sight. It dawned on me that it could have fallen out during my rigmarole ride with the hemp-smoking keke driver. I whirled around to look for him and his signature smashed windscreen but he was gone. The other passengers immediately began to sympathize with my plight but the Onitsha bus driver was a more hands-on fellow.

“Oga, enter the bus make we pursue am!” He shouted, and I jumped in. The bus conductor barely had time to shut the door before the driver zoomed off, blaring his horn and weaving deftly and dangerously through traffic. I was having my second bat-mobile experience and it wasn’t even 8 o’clock.

I told the bus driver about the shattered windscreen and both of us kept a sharp lookout for the signature mark on each Keke-na-pep we hurtled past. As fate would have it, each keke we passed on the way had seamless, unbroken windscreens. As we got closer to the Onitsha expressway I had begun to lose hope. What I was really going to miss in the phone was my photos and contacts and very important information that I had forgotten to back-up. There were items dating back as far as five years, all saved in my memory card. I had been planning on backing them up but had never quite gotten round to doing it. I sighed deeply and began to accept my loss.