09/09/2025
Welcome to Alayi (Pt 4 )
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It was when we got to Kafanchan that I realized my uncle is a stingy man. Yes, Okom Anyaele is a stingy man, realizing this on time helped shape and condition my mind to expect no kind of kindness or good treatment from him.
No, if he is not stingy, please tell me how only one man and his family will be living in this mighty edifice and yet what he brings back home every time he visits is just dry bread and few kola nuts for my dad.
You can say I'm feeling entitled, no problem but some things are not just right.
Dry bread and few kolanuts? That's wickedness.
You see, I've heard the story countless times from my dad and sometimes from my uncle too how my dad singlehandedly raised him after the death of their parents.
My grandparents didn't live that long before they were killed. Yes, i heard it was poison from a family member who they trusted so much without knowing that he has an evil agenda in his heart to take over from my grandparents.
My grandfather i heard was a kind man, blessed by the gods with land and livestocks but no child. He stay for a very long time before my dad came, after consulting the gods and making sacrifices a million times. So it was a thing of great joy when my grandmother gave birth to my father. My little Ezi was thrown into ecstacy and celebration for 7 market days, eating pounded yam and sweet egusi soup, and gulping with fresh palmwine.
Friends and relatives from neighboring communities were hosted to a feast and everybody had the best moments of their life. Story had it that there has never been another celebration of a new born child so great and loud like my father's birth in our Ezi.
After the birth of my father, it took my grandmother 16 years to conceive again. So, my father didn't have the chance to grow at home because my grandmother persuaded my grandfather to send him to another community to grow so he can be safe. That was how my father spent his growing up days in Ezi Alayi and not my place in Amankalu.
It wasn't long after my uncle was born that my father came back home, my grandmother felt nobody would want to harm him again seeing that he is no longer the only child and heir to my grandfather's wealth but how wrong she was.
My uncle was but 3 years old when my grandparents were poisoned, so the responsibility of raising him felled on my father very early in life. He was of school age, my dad sent him to school and did all menial jobs available to send him to a secondary school in Igbere.
It was one of the days he went for nkuma that he had an accident that scarred him and left him with a chronic back pain that he suffered all till death.
To be continued...
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