Trapped in Broad-Day Light

By Charles Uzoaru

Trapped in broad daylight is the story of a young man who leaves his quiet humble native village in order to fulfill his hidden ambition in a rough, cold and hostile distant metropolis. While in the city, he fulfills his ambition in a manner and to a level that is beyond his intellectual capacity. With inflated ego and a sense of invincibility, he goes back home to the village where he literally places himself above all and sundry. The entire world around him falls to his feet. He displays so much wealth and well-being that all the village youngsters begin to imitate his brand of lifestyle and flock to the city to duplicate his success. Sooner than later, they realize that there had been so much misconception and misinformation about the city and begin to wish they had stayed home in the first place.
Meanwhile, the city boy continues to shine in the village in his newly-found stardom. At the height of his popularity, a most beautiful and largely-unknown seductive widow shows up in a puzzling manner to tantalize and trail him. His nocturnal dreams quickly turned into a cyclical platform of strange love affair. Allured by the magical images of the seductive widow he, in turn, began to chase after her. The double chase turns into a fierce battle of will, of determination and strange love affair. The man who ruled the world around him is suddenly held spellbound by the evasive images of a puzzling widow in black. He cannot wait to unravel the mystery surrounding her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504933711

Charles Uzoaru

Charles Onyegbule Uzoaru, M.D. is a graduate of Columbia University, New York (1977) and the University of Pennsylvania school of Medicine, Philadelphia (1977). Born in Aguneze Ahiara, Mbaise, Imo State of Nigera, he was the last child of his mother. His first novel, “Behind a timid Mask” was published in 2005. His other books “Road to a happy Marriage” and “Born in Africa” were published in 2011 while the “Song of the Cricket” was published in 2013. Married with children and grand-children; he has been a practicing Obstetrician-Gynecologist in the USA since 1981.

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© 2015 Charles Uzoaru. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/28/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3370-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3339-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3371-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015913903

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

About the author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my late parents, Paul Uzoaru Njoku and Mary Otelahu Uzoaru (nee Njoku). For us their children, they went hungry and gave up every little thing they had so that we could be well-nurtured. They never let us witness their moments of pain, grief and sadness. What mattered most to them was our happiness; our joy…our well-being. We could never pay them back for their selfless sacrifice and unconditioned love.

C:\Users\Charles O. Uzoaru\Pictures\My parents\Image0491.JPG

Paul Uzoaru & Mary Otelahu

Introduction

Don’t ask an old man lazing around the village what he thinks about a city boy. He will recount a litany of the young man’s faults. He will tell you that a city boy is a restless individual whose regular outfit is a combination of T-shirts, sagging pants, diamond-plated ear-rings and partly-exposed underwear. Tattooed from neck to torso, he wears expensive sneakers and swaggers around; hand-in- hand with pretty girls of both low morality and mentality. He smokes weed, experiments with drugs and alcohol, parties all night long and engages the police in a cyclical cat-and-mouse game. When he plays his music, the sounds go through thick walls like stray bullets to burst innocent by- standing ear drums. His tomorrow is today and his brain is like a car engine which is steadily fired at great speed to breeze through superhighways of human activity. When he is fully charged, you will either get out of his way, or else…both of you will perish, together, in a fireball. Life is meant to be good and enjoyed to the fullest even at the risk of looking stupid or suicidal. Why worry about tomorrow when the future can take care of itself? Resources are limitless and deserve no preservation. Don’t try to convince him that hard work pays off. To him, whoever preaches discipline and constructive labor must be a deranged sociopath on a grand mission of mischief and sadism. He is elegantly disorganized, dysfunctional, and dirty… some may call it ‘the new modern’. He turns his room; his environment into a zone of chaos and disorder with clothes, shoes, loose papers, dirty plates and cutlery strewed all over the floor. It’s better to talk to the wind than to advise him. His ears are like two open ends of a wide tunnel. Your words of advice will enter from one end and speed off through the other…unimpeded. The less you agree with his foolishness, the more you became his enemy of progress. His eyes see things different from yours. What you see as violent red is perceived by him as hopeful green in a land of hope. To him, fire is not a harmful object but a picturesque stimulant that leads one to the land of ecstasy. Though he still values his mother’s cooking, his favorite meal is junk food laced with sugar, cholesterol and addictive agents. He rejects the old man’s warning that his ills of today will always come back tomorrow to trail him, follow him and haunt him like an obsessive pair of eyes on a defined mission of vengeance.

His lifestyle, though bizarre in comparison with those of his predecessors, is so deceptively tempting, so alluring it sucks in the allegiance of his unsuspecting naïve diehard followers. Those who follow his footsteps find themselves, sooner or later, in the land of chameleon where they battle with uncertainties in an endless manner. As the leadership moves in his direction, a new wave of confusion and disorder seems to sweep across the land and carry everything in its path.

He can’t stand the sight or the wisdom of the old man.

Listen to him speak:

The old man speaks out of bias and naivety. He talks and behaves like someone who never passed through the teenage years. In his old age, he is a perfect man in a perfect environment with perfect attitude and perfect habits. Filled with rigid idealistic thoughts and words of recrimination and condemnation, he’ll rather waste away in his timeless rural zone while the rest of the dynamic world passes him by on a daily basis. Someone should remind him that every place, be it city or village, has its ups and downs and that he is no longer the dominant figure in our midst.

Maybe the old man is right. Or, maybe the city boy is right. Or, could both of them be right at the same time?

‘Trapped in broad daylight’ is the story of a young man who leaves his quiet humble native village in order to fulfill his hidden ambition in a rough, cold and hostile distant metropolis. While in the city, he fulfills his ambition in a manner and to a level that is beyond his intellectual capacity. With inflated ego and a sense of invincibility, he goes back home to the village where he literally places himself above all and sundry. The entire world around him falls to his feet. He displays so much wealth and well-being that all the village youngsters begin to imitate his brand of lifestyle and flock to the city to duplicate his success. Sooner than later, they realize that there had been so much misconception and misinformation about the city and begin to wish they had stayed home in the first place.

Meanwhile, the city boy continues to shine in the village in his newly-found stardom. At the height of his popularity, a most beautiful and largely-unknown seductive widow shows up in a puzzling manner to tantalize and trail him. His nocturnal dreams quickly turn into a cyclical platform of strange love affair. Allured by the magical images of the seductive widow he, in turn, begins to chase after her. The double chase turns into a fierce battle of will, of determination and strange love affair. The man who ruled the world around him is suddenly held spellbound by the evasive images of a puzzling widow in black. He cannot wait to unravel the mystery surrounding her.

Chapter 1

When the white man first came to Umunta village, children who committed crimes and those that were least favored by their parents were speedily sent to the white man’s schools and other institutions by their parents just ‘to get rid of them’ while the ‘good kids’ were kept ‘safely’ at home to be engaged in farming, trade and industry.

Traditionally, every name given to a child in Umunta village had a special meaning. A man, for example, could be expressing gratitude for a special favor he had received from God by naming his son Kelechi (thank God). Umunta village was part of a larger region that comprised several sprawling villages which stretched thousands of miles in a country of different ethnicities.

There was something about age mates in Umunta village. In accordance with the practice of the land, nothing could stop a person from talking trash to an age mate no matter the level of class distinction between them. Even if a man happened to be the head of state of the country, his age mate would always speak to him like an equal (though respectfully) in every social event.

There were two age mates who, judging from their names, could have been twins from the same mother; but they were not. Ubanwata (The wealth of a child) and Obinwata (The heart of a child) were age mates whose names happened to rhyme by coincidence. They were fondly called Uba and Obi by the folks.

Obi’s father was a man named Ikemba (People’s Power) who had weighed close to twelve pounds at birth. He was named Ikemba because of his birth weight; and he lived true to his name. Starting from his teenage years, Ikemba quickly rose to prominence and became the greatest athlete of his time as he swept one national title after another. He became the national wrestling champion, the national weight-lifting champion, the national heavy-weight boxing champion and a national hero.

In both physique and behavior, Ikemba was a carbon-copy of his own father who was nick-named Obinwata (the heart of a child) by the people for his humility, honesty and love. As time went on, few people could recall his actual name because the nick-name had overshadowed his real name. He was a man of imposing stature; a man who held no grudges against others and he, in turn, was held in the highest esteem by everyone.

Ikemba was so close to his father… a man he loved and cherished so much… that he decided he would name his first son Obinwata (the heart of a child) in memory of his father. That was how one of the age mates who happened to be the first son of Ikemba, got his name. Obi was only five years old when Ikemba, his father, died.

Like most men his age, the late-Ikemba was illiterate, having grown up in an era when education was new and frowned at as a white-man’s evil tool of subjugation and self-degradation. When the white man first came to Umunta village, children who committed crimes and those that were least favored by their parents were speedily sent to the white man’s schools and other institutions by their parents just ‘to get rid of them’ while the ‘good kids’ were kept ‘safely’ at home to be engaged in farming, trade and industry. Ikemba happened to be his father’s ‘favorite’ child and, therefore, was never sent to school. As a result and even as a national hero, he grew up illiterate like his father before him and always felt insecure and uncomfortable in the midst of educated people. He was paying a price for his illiteracy and for the ignorance of his predecessors.

In his profession as a successful athlete, the late-Ikemba did not have to work as hard as an average man to make lots of money. One would have expected him to die a very rich man. He didn’t. He had squandered most of his money on things he didn’t need. But, who could blame him? His money came with little sweat and was, in turn, spent with great ease. Obi followed the family tradition of illiteracy as well as the lifestyle of simplicity and contentment. He was appreciative of every little thing in life. As he grew up (and true to his name), Obi had the heart of a child. He was loving, respectful, open-minded, innocent and devoid of hate. He was greatly loved by his parents and the entire community and was regarded as an excellent role-model for all the growing kids in the land.

The life history of his age mate, Ubanwata (The wealth of a child), was clearly different from his. To start with, no one really knew why his father called him a name that could invoke a sense of greed, recklessness and misplaced priorities. Why should wealth become such a priority for a growing child? One would expect childhood to be a period of freedom and innocent exploration devoid of hassles and stresses of adult life. At Ubanwata’s naming ceremony, an old man even sounded a word of caution: A child’s name is something that should not be trivialized. When a child inherits a name, he or she inherits all the behavioral characteristics that come along with it. Don’t name a child ‘goat’ unless you want that child to behave like a goat, he surmised.

The two age mates did have few things in common. They both came from the same Umunta village and from middle-class families. They belonged to the same age-grade and bumped into each other so often that they were never too far apart in a community where people knew each other by name, and secrets were shared between neighbors. Both of them were obligated to attend the same meetings and social functions organized by their age grade. Coming from the same village, they attended the same community events and shared the same communal food and drink. They attended the same school and the same church and knew each other’s family background.

However, whatever they had in common was dwarfed by their stark differences. Their physical features were different. Obi was a tall, handsome and meaty individual with a kind harmless face and a soft smile. His calm demeanor and friendly facial expressions were enough to make a total stranger feel at ease. As big as he was, he could never kill a fly or try to hurt someone.

Uba, on the other hand, was a short and arrogant person with a lean-muscled stomach and a rather disrespecting outlook. He would go out of his way to make others feel inferior to him even when the odds were against him.

Their family backgrounds were different as well. Unlike Obi’s father who was happily-married to one wife, Uba’s father had eight wives; Uba’s mother being the sixth. His father was often teased as a man who had eight coconuts fighting for a position to break his head. Coming from a large family where there were many children, Uba was not particularly close to his father and was compelled to attend school by his mother who saw education as a logical tool to surpass others in a competitive world.

Life in a polygamous family had taught his mother to fight for dominance in her daily life. She wanted her son to grow up and dominate all other kids through education. Unlike Obi who was never pressured by his parents to stay in school, Uba was pushed by his mother to be the best in his class by all means; fair or foul. Unfortunately, he was not up to his mother’s expectations. He could never be an intellectual. To please his mother and stay out of her trouble, he resorted to falsifying his school reports and grades. As a result and with all his ‘excellent grades in school’, he was as good as a high-school drop-out …a young man who did not place much value on education, good reputation or civilized human behavior.

While Obi viewed family and friends as people that could be trusted and relied upon, Uba’s sentiments and lifestyle were clouded by suspicion and mistrust. He grew up with a sense of paranoia; neither trusting nor being open-minded. Right from childhood, he mastered the art of telling lies. When he ate, he ate fast and swallowed it while it was still hot. The young man was so good at gulping down hot food that kids in the village dubbed him ‘the frozen mouth’; meaning that no food was too hot for him to eat and swallow. Uba had grown up in a family where, despite some of the merits of polygamy, there was the usual cold war atmosphere between co-wives. Sometimes, the cold war would escalate into an open physical and verbal warfare. At the end of the day, there was always a fragile resolution of conflicts and people would continue to live together in harmonious falsehood. The co-wives, unlike those in monogamous marriages, were very competitive in practically everything they did. They competed with each other for portions of land, business opportunities, larger share of foodstuff, and their husband’s love and attention.

In terms of personal ambitions, Obi and Uba were as different from each other as night and day. Obi’s main ambition in life was to live a simple life in a happy family that was devoid of rancor and simmering jealousy. Like his father before him, he appreciated every little good thing that came his way on a daily basis. He was as humble as he was respectful.

Uba, on the other hand, grew up with a sense of inordinate ambition and desire. He believed in quick wealth without labor and right from childhood, he acquired the habit of trailing those who were considered powerful, rich and famous by the society at large. He would imitate them and study their overall behavior… the type of business they were engaged in, the way they operated, and the types of clothes and shoes they wore. He would even go to the extent of claiming close relationship with highly-successful strangers. He would say such things as: ‘my godfather, the governor’, ‘my friend, the president’s son’, ‘my uncle, the minister’… even when it was so obvious that he had no personal relationship with such individuals. He would take chances and risk everything to push his way into the lives of those considered rich and famous.

From early childhood, Uba was so good at recalling his dreams in its entirety that his mother dubbed him ‘dream-boy’. He daydreamed most of the day and woke up from his sleep at night with vivid recollections of the lofty dreams he had encountered. Uba did not only dream big. He had an insatiable fixation on pretty girls whom he called ‘God’s gifts to men’. He chased them like there was no tomorrow. At the same time, he despised ugly girls and refused to have any relationship with them. His uncontrollable appetite for pretty girls gave his father great concern.

Obi, on the other hand, could never remember any of his dreams except the scary ones that woke him up from sleep. He liked girls a lot and was attracted to them as members of the opposite sex. However, if he fell in love with a girl, it was because of her ‘inner beauty’ and not her physical appearance.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that right from their early childhood, there were open rivalry and hostility between Uba and Obi whereby they always challenged, criticized and pestered each other at every opportunity. During the wrestling season when individuals of same age and strength were paired,