In the Moving Waters

By Jones Otisi Kalu

In the Moving Waters is an original fiction which focuses on the struggle with depression and purpose in life of the main character. Joanna, a bright and lovely woman finds herself locked in the depths of mental despair and anguish, desperately searching for relief from this most insidious psychological calamity; she appears mired in the endless pit of depression. She, however, is relieved by coming to understand that she could overcome her predicament by living less for herself and more for others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Oct 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477116722

Jones Otisi Kalu

The Rev Jones Otisi Kalu was born in Abiriba, Abia State Nigeria, but currently lives, with his wife and children, in Nnewi, Anambra State where he is the pastor of a congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria. He is both a pastor and a writer; and weaves both enterprises together with a blend of mastery, passion and vocation. In the Moving Waters is his first novel.

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In the Moving

Waters

Jones Otisi Kalu

Copyright © 2012 by Jones Otisi Kalu.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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0-800-644-6988

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Contents

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

Dedication

To

Mrs Oyediya Otisi Kalu,

My Mother, My Heroine.

ONE

The sun shone so luminously, as it journeyed towards the western horizon, ever faithful to its course in its orbital path, its rich golden rays now piercing through the lace curtains that graced the windows in a beautiful combination with the colourful damask blinds. The sunlight, refracting at the window glasses further reflected at the rather polished walls; and the result was a natural appearance of aesthetic loveliness. Indeed the house wore a façade that had been produced by a natural tapestry of sunset’s golden beauty woven upon the rich ornaments of the house. That was how it used to be most evenings when the sun habitually decided to take its leave of this part of the globe to visit the other side, only to be trailed behind by darkness that slowly but certainly would creep in to envelop the atmosphere. Only the blind would be allowed to go guiltless in the event of ignoring or failing to appreciate this radiance that usually made the exquisiteness of the adornment of this house rather too obvious.

But quite unlike her, Joanna had become indifferent to those sunlight beams and their effects. She used to admire the effects even to the point of going out to the porch either to take an appreciative glance at that golden disk whenever it went westward, back to its abode, or to admire the long shadows that had cast upon the ground by the retiring sun. Before now, while gazing at that incandescent round object fading in its radiance as it retired westward, Joanna had always wondered how it could truly be that it was the earth itself that actually revolved around the sun causing sunrise and sunset. It had always sounded ridiculous to her, for she could see it vividly that it was the sun that always moved, and on one steady course, everyday. Even though she had learnt in school that the sun never moved, yet she would always, like many others, express sunrise-through-sunset as the sun journeying from east to west, persistently wondering why there was such expressions as ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ if, in reality, the sun never moved.

But now Joanna no longer acknowledged or admired this beauty. Rather, in a lackadaisical and aimless demeanour, she paced around in that well-decorated and furnished sitting room of the house that had pitifully become a horror theatre in her life.

Why me? Why? What have I done? Where have I gone wrong? she mumbled incessantly.

Joanna, what is it again? Do you want to drink yourself to death? Carol interrupted her.

Ah Carol, so you are here; and I didn’t even know when you came in.

"Na so. How would you, when you are always in deep romance with virtually every kind of hard drink? If it’s not brandy, it is rum or dry gin; even schnapps, you don’t mind, always getting yourself drunk as a lord. What do you think you are doing? Look at what you have turned yourself into—a wretched shadow of yourself, a mere walking corpse." Although she demonstrated a concrete blend of love and sympathy, Carol nevertheless, apparently felt a twinge of anger, perhaps because of the way her friend was reacting to her ill-fated life.

But Carol, it seems you don’t really understand my plight. Anyway, you can’t understand.

Joanna! How could you say a thing like that? Carol rather howled than asked. Who else do you think understands if I don’t?

Nobody does, not even you, otherwise you wouldn’t talk the way you do.

It was hurting for Carol to hear her friend indict her, along with every other person, of being apathetic to her predicament. Placing her in the class of others was being most unfair not only to her but to the loyalty of her friendship. She understood and had always tried to even empathize with her friend all the way through.

But you know I do. You know I actually share with you in all of your pains. You know it very well that I’ve always been with you, by your side, through all the mishaps you’ve had. You know . . . Carol tried, unable to restrain her own tears, to soothe her friend, to show her she cared; to prove to her she wasn’t like every other person; that she was different, that she was her friend.

You may be right; but you’ve not been able to tell me what is wrong with my life. Nobody has been able to tell me why it has to be me; why I have to be the one to live down in the dumps, being hopelessly tossed about by the merciless tides of moving waters. All you people tell me is, ‘Don’t worry it will be well. There’s nothing wrong with your life. God is in control. Just be strong and courageous;’ and things like that. Of course, the more I listen to such gospel, the stronger and courageous I try to be. But ironically, the more I try, the more my life is enveloped in chains of miserable circumstances that are beyond my capability to bear, better imagined than experienced.

Joanna, please, stop cataloguing all these things, it will rather worsen the situation. All will be well, some day. Believe me!

"It’s perhaps very easy to believe you; and I hope I could. But, unfortunately, as much as I try to believe you folks, none of you wants to believe me that there’s obviously something wrong with my life. Yet nobody has been able to tell me just one thing: why I, Joanna, must be the one to suffer from fate.

I wish you all would leave me alone to take things the way I see them, and the way I think best to handle them. I wish you all would leave me to bear my cross; your encouragements do me no good. Please leave me alone for Christ sake. Please leave me, and let me be . . . Joanna screamed.

Carol was not deterred, so she continued to comfort and encourage her bosom friend. But she had to take her leave when it began to get dark.

I will be on my way now, but I beg of you not to drink yourself to harm.

Joanna swayed from one end of the room to the other, looking gloomy with her glass of brandy. Her hair was dishevelled, and her clothes tattered. She seemed to be having a nervous breakdown resulting from sorrows, worries and depression, which had become her lot, or maybe from brandy, which had most recently become her closest companion.

What’s wrong with my life? she continued to ask, intermittently.

A moment or two passed in silence.

Who have I wronged? What have I done to deserve this kind of life? Why? Why . . . ? she continued to query, amidst tears.

Even though these had become the most frequent and often asked questions in her life, never had she got an answer; not even when people were around and she asked them.

In her skin-and-bone figure which she had depreciated into, and her scrawny legs unable to really carry her, Joanna made her way to the bar where she served herself another glass of brandy to replace the one she had just gulped down. Rather staggering, she walked out to the courtyard like a skeleton with a demon inside it, where as though she were a piece of cloth, she slumped into the deck chair under the parasol. And in a slapdash fashion, she dropped the glass, still full of the drink, on the floor, and the drink got wasted.

Sitting in the chair, not at all relaxing with comfort or ease, the ill-fated woman began to stray again in thought. Of recent, Joanna could no longer control her mind from racing from one place to another. She rambled in thoughts and finally saw herself going down memory lane back to the beginning of her ordeal; to the day it all started. Back to the genesis of her problems—one sacred day, one Afọ-nsọ day,—decades ago!

*     *     *

One fateful day had begun rather exciting at school. It was a missionary school that belonged to the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria. Before the mission came to establish a school in that village, not long ago, the people of Amankulu used to attend primary school in another school owned by the same mission in the nearby village of Ụmụzọba. Tradition had it that Amankulu and Ụmụzọba had the same progenitor, even though they lived apart. Ijeọma was now in Primary Two, almost at her ninth year of age. She would have been in Primary Three, or even Four, by this time. But unfortunately for her, until she was seven, her hand could not touch her ear on the other side, from over her head. Those days, that was the only means by which one was adjudged to have attained school age.

They had had compound-cleaning exercise in the school, which had no more than two thatch-roofed mud buildings. The trees, grasses and the totally wild environment only but made the clean-up exercise stressful. Yet it was still exciting. Going back home, as the school had dismissed before the usual time, Ijeọma walked home merrily with her mind on the akpụ and ọgbọlọ soup that would go with it, which usually served for her lunch.

At home she met an environment so strangely noiseless and still.

Mama, mama, she called for quite a lot of times but no answer was forthcoming.

Where could she have gone to? she wondered.

Although she could only pass for a child, Ijeọma could still tell that the day was an Afọ-nsọ day. Nobody ever went to farm or market on an Afọ-nsọ; that she needed not be told. It used to be a special day set aside for sacrificing to the gods of the land; that she knew because it had always been so for as long as she could remember. She was, therefore, clear in her mind that her mother could not have gone to the farm, for that day was a holiday—a holy day, a sacred Afọ.

She called the more but nobody was at hand.

Well, I will eat first then. She would definitely return, she thought.

Going for her meal at its usual place, she was confronted by an odd sight. The bowl with which her food was usually served was not to be found. Searching through every corner of the hut but to no avail, she suddenly began to read meaning into the absence of her mother. Obviously, the situation was more serious than she had thought or imagined.

Something must be wrong.

She went to their next-door neighbour, but they too were ignorant of her mother’s whereabouts. Back home, she started crying, and in no time the tears were rather pouring.

Ijeọma had cried for so long, no one around to console her, until her voice, which had now increased in volume and pitch, beat and overcame the hindering forces of the vegetation that surrounded their hut. As they heard the loud wailing, the villagers rushed towards Late Mazi Akụbụiro’s compound from different parts of the neighbourhood. They came but only to behold that lone child of Ekemma, Mazi Akụbụiro’s widow, crying out her eyes.

Most of the neighbours were baffled at such a sight, that they thought perhaps Ekemma had died.

Ije, what is the problem, why are you crying like this? one of them asked.

Is there no food in the house for you, asked the woman to whose house Ijeọma had earlier gone while looking for her mother. Many others asked one similar question or the other, which were most of all far from the reality of the situation; from the fact that Ekemma was missing, and her whereabouts was a mystery to Ijeọma, her only daughter.

Ekemma, that was what everybody in the village called her. Even her daughter called her Ekemma. It was only recently that Ijeọma began to call her Mama; that she knew she shouldn’t call her mother by her name. It was disrespectful to call elderly ones by their first names, by their names at all. But it was not so in the case of Ekemma. Her only child grew up to hear people call her that name. When she learnt the right way to address her, to call her ‘Mama’, the girl was perplexed and questioned Ekemma on why everybody called her by her name and not ‘Mama Ijeọma’—Ijeọma’s mother—like other mothers were addressed by attaching the name of any of their children to mama, to show whose mother they were. Her mother had laughed and said it was the name her father gave her when she was born on a bright Eke day, with beauty so glaring. And as she was growing up the beauty had become rather too dazzling that it was generally believed she was her name personified, an epitome of beauty. So all and sundry found it befitting calling her by her maiden name, even after she had got married and had Ijeọma. But even after Ijeọma had learnt the right way to address her, most times she still called her Ekemma; she had become too used to that, and her mother never complained, she never took it as being disrespectful.

Meanwhile, a few people knew the truth. They knew more than Ijeọma herself did, more than she could imagine. They knew about her missing mother; where she was and what had happened to her. To them the whereabouts of Ekemma was not a mystery. These ones all only grimaced and shook their heads at one point or the other in pity for the girl whose life was beginning to become unpleasant. Without letting the cat out of the bag yet, they tried as much as they could to console Ijeọma.

"Mama mụ oo, Mama mụ oo, Mama mụ oo," the little girl kept crying. She would not heed to any of them; all she needed was her mother. Not even food could do her any more good.

Ijeọma’s mother, Ekemma had joined the missionary church and followed an alien religion. She’d believed their stories; how a God who was never seen made everything, including the earth itself; how he created all things by speaking mere words; how people had disobeyed him, each living in their sinful ways; and how he gave his one and only son who died to save anyone