It was very early in the morning, around 7:15 a.m. I was still in bed, still begging my bed to release me, when I heard my name being called in a shouty manner from outside. I knew who was calling, an elderly man who owns a shop at the front side of the compound. I knew he was heading straight to my door, and there was no way I could dodge answering him.
"Sir!! I’m coming!"
I got up and put on my trousers because I was only on shorts, and the early-morning body show in a man’s body was still very active in me. 🫣
"Who set my tyre on fire last night?" He asked, expecting me to give him a quick response, but I was dumbfounded, not knowing what he was referring to. He told me to follow him, and we walked to the frontage where we saw the blackened spot of a tyre that had been set on fire overnight.
"So you mean there was fire at this spot and you didn’t know?" He began to act all mature with his series of questions, and I didn’t take much time before cutting him short, throwing some questions back at him...to let him know that it's not everything I should know because I sleep at night too and he doesn't expect me to stay awake all night just to observe wrong acts in the compound.
Look at it: His shop is positioned on a different side, and there is no way things would be happening at the frontage of the shop and we would know. The only time we would notice anything is if someone tried to break into the shop and caused noise. So yeah, he was trying to imply that we do not put our ears to the ground to observe or hear what is happening at night, and that someone might enter his shop and we would not even know.
He sells motor spare parts, and he has some old tyres hung by the roadside in front of his shop as a sign of what he sells. One of those old tyres was burnt by someone at midnight.
Actually, that wasn’t the big deal until he started being superstitious and attaching strange meanings to the tyre that was burnt. He insisted that the tyre being burnt was an attack from his enemies, but that they could not kill him because he has the Almighty God by his side. He went on spewing a lot of things, and I couldn’t stop imagining how deep that kind of thinking runs.
He gave me his phone to snap the spot and said he was going to show it to his reverend father so they could join him in prayers, because the burnt tyre was not ordinary and he would not fold his hands and watch.
Haaaa!
Mehn! Some people can be so dramatic!
Thanks for reading.
The photo used is mine
