Monday 15 July 2013

IYA BOBO.........nemesis is now!!!!




What goes around comes around I have often written on this blog. Yes, be mindful of the stones you throw at the market place, you have no idea who will be hit!
In this century, change is the most constant thing. Not only can you travel in a tube moving at almost the speed of light nowadays when it used to be weeks unending in times past, so also, these days, the evils that men do lives within them, not after them like our ancestors thought.
Today, I would like to share the tale of a certain fish seller, IYA BOBO as generally called by all who know her and after you read this story, feel free to either dissent or nod in the affirmative to my earlier assertions.
A few years back, I met a middle aged dry fish seller, who was at the moment a mother of four- three boys and a girl. However, her husband and father of three of her four children looked triple her age. Okay, that was a little exaggeration but he was well above seventy and I was of the assumption that she would be in her late thirties or very early forties and I was correct!
Moving on to the crux of the matter, Iya Bobo hails from the coastal area of south western Nigeria, an Ilaje woman who had inherited the fish trade from her mother. Although she migrated to Ile-Ife, the cradle of the Yoruba people in search for the legendary greener pastures a few years after she was given off in marriage to Baba as she called him. I met Iya Bobo via business transactions as fish, be it fresh or dry and a full blooded ijaw person is inseparable and it was that search for fish that led my mother and I one day to the road side fish stall of Iya Bobo and in no time, a business relationship blossomed and flourished into friendship.
 
Consequently, it never ended in a buyer to seller conversation when we visited Iya Bobo’s fish stall. It was that between friends. She confided in my mother about her personal-most especially, her marriage.
She was devastated about being married to Baba and kept insisting on walking out of the marriage. My mom advised her not to. Baba was taking good enough care of her and her children but it seemed Iya Bobo’s mind was already made up and all my mom’s sermon fell on a rocky place.
Days turned into weeks and in four months, Iya Bobo got hit by cupids arrow- she had fallen in love with someone her age and wasn’t hesitant about brandishing her new lover.
That day we visited her fish stall, we were astonished by what greeted us. Iya Bobo frolicking in the arms of her new lover. My dear mother confronted her but Iya Bobo’s reply was “mummy, e ma worry, mo ti fi Baba Oloriburuku sile jare” She went on to do the introduction, “mummy, meet my dear, he works in the University with professors and earns millions” she concluded with incoherent English.
My mother called Iya Bobo aside privately and began her interrogations after which she discovered that the new lover already had his own family- a wife and about four children in the same town. She warned Iya Bobo that holding on to another woman’s husband would resurrect consequences she won’t be able to bear and that providence was frowning at her misdemeanor but Iya Bobo jovially tossed the advice aside. Iya Bobo behaved like the proverbial dog that feigns deaf ears to the hunter’s whistle and soon disappears into the forest.
She continued to bask in the euphoria of her new found romance. Fish business was flourishing simultaneously as her love life. She even instructed her children to call her lover, “father”.
She thought she had found a lasting happiness