Q: A Diary

By Eyitemi Egwuenu

When Jide Ejimofor decided to start keeping a diary, it was in an attempt to begin living the examined life. What he didnt anticipate was meeting the brilliant and enigmatic Nmadinobi Amankwe and how she would disrupt his sedate existence, erode previous certainties, and transform the ongoing motifs of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781982203061

Eyitemi Egwuenu

EYITEMI EGWUENU is the author of The Brimming Chalice, a collection of poetry. He trained as a Medical Doctor, has a PhD in cardiovascular neuroscience, and is a prolific writer. He is currently working on a second novel.

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Copyright © 2018 Eyitemi Egwuenu.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-0305-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-0307-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-0306-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905791

Balboa Press rev. date:  06/01/2018

Contents

Author’s Notes

The First year

The Second Year

The Third Year

The unexamined life is not worth living.

SOCRATES

Author’s Notes

Q is based on the diary entries of a young man over a period of three years; his struggles, his hopes, his failures, and his dreams. It is his attempt at eschewing the unexamined life, interrogating popular norms, and making sense of the changing zeitgeist. The answers he seeks are not necessarily the answers he will get.

For

The Children of the Stars,

who ask, who seek, who knock.

The First year

10th March, The First Year

I once saw a quote attributed to Socrates,

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Since I read those words, I have had a compelling desire to keep a diary about the events of my life. I don’t know yet if this type of documentation qualifies as ‘examining my life’, but I believe it’s a necessary first step. We will see.

My plan is to keep a detailed account that would read as one continuous story, and not simply a series of disparate events. As often as is possible, I will introduce dialogue where suitable. I believe this will capture the essence of each entry more completely.

I wonder what I will write about. There are so many blank pages in the new notebook I have dedicated for this exercise; I wonder what record of events will fill them, say, in a year’s time. My life, as it is, is pretty ordinary.

But who knows, the diary may write the writer.

We will see.

17th March, The First Year.

I call her, ‘Q’.

And I will tell you why, soon. It is a strange name, I know, but it was no stranger than the way we ‘met’. It all started when I received a letter earlier today.

It was evening, but it was not completely dark yet. The horizon in the west still had a dash of crimson, and reels of amber still lined dark, grey clouds. I had just returned from school. The school day ended four hours ago but I usually stayed back with some of my classmates to receive private tutoring classes.

The letter I received?

It was a white envelope lying there on a wooden table in the middle of the living room. I picked up the square-shaped missive and balanced it on my hands as if to gauge its weight. It was a greeting card from the look of it. I wondered who it was from; I have never received any kind of correspondence, ever, in my life. Mentally, I tried drawing up a shortlist of possible ‘senders’. None.

Was this a mistake?

But my name, ‘Jide Ejimofor’ was written neatly on the envelope, and it seemed penned by a confident hand; there was nothing tentative about the handwriting. The envelope felt heavier than what one would expect from its size. I slid a pen in the slit beneath the cover flap and ripped it open across the upper border. I took out the card. After a cursory glance at the cover image, – a picture of a cup containing pencils and pens, – I flipped it open to the inside page. The card was signed by one ‘Nmadinobi Amankwe’. The name held no meaning to me. I didn’t know this person. At best, I only knew half the name: ‘Nmadinobi’ was alien to me, but the name, ‘Amankwe’, was a familiar one in my house.

Mr and Mrs Amankwe were friends of my parents. The Amankwes lived in Port Harcourt. They have been friends of my parents since they all were children. They were like an ‘uncle and aunt’ to my siblings and me.

I wasn’t aware my mother had been watching me all this time. I guess she was just as curious to know who was sending me a card. Seeing the puzzled expression on my face, she asked me who the card was from.

Nmadinobi Amankwe, I replied, reading the name off the card.

My mother shed some light on my confusion. She told me, Nma (the short form of her name), was my ‘uncle and aunt’s’ daughter. She said Nma had completed her Senior Secondary Certificate Exams the previous year; this was the same exam that I would be writing in a few months, myself.

My heart warmed to the kindness of Nma’s gesture. She didn’t know me, and have never met me either, but she still sent me her best wishes. Although we had pictures in our family album of her parents going as far back as their teenage years, I was sure there wasn’t any picture of her in our family collection.

I was pleased she sent me, a stranger, a card wishing me success in my forthcoming exams. But, what impressed me even more was the manner in which she did it. I quote her exactly,

‘Jide, best wishes for your exams. Qapla!’

Qapla?

That was a word I have never heard anyone in my circle of friends or acquaintances use before. This singular word deepened my appreciation for her ‘best wishes’ even more. She must have a rather fascinating mind to have used the Klingon word for ‘Success’, – Qapla!

She was a Trekkie, it seemed. I was one too. How fortuitous.

And for this Success, for this Qapla, I chose to call her, ‘Q’.

19th March, The First Year.

M y response to Q was short; in my estimation, anyway. It was four pages of foolscap sheets long. I have always thought that the art of letter writing was a dying one, – receding at light speed to a vanishing point. I wasn’t willing to be an accessory to its extinction.

In my letter, I introduced myself, thanked her for the ‘Success Card’ she sent me, spent more than a few sentences on how much I admired her parents, thanked her some more, and stated without any subtlety that I would be delighted to hear from her again by way of a reply. With a brown manilla envelope to hold my ‘epistle’, and the right amount of postage stamps attached, the letter was soon on its way to her.

The distance from Benin to Port Harcourt wasn’t a short one, – about four to five hours by road, I presumed. Not that I would know from experience. I have never been to Port Harcourt before. Indeed, I have never travelled anywhere outside of Benin City before. I expected the letter would get to her in a day or two. Meanwhile, I found myself wondering about her, – the mystery around her had a certain appeal. I wondered whether she would write back. Perhaps the card she sent was just a one-off gesture.

My mother told me that Q is the second of six children, – three boys and three girls. Coincidentally, we are six children in my house as well, – two boys and four girls.

I am the first.

26th March, The First Year

D espite my high hopes for a reply from Q, I was still surprised to find an envelope addressed to me sticking out of the metal bars of the living room window. I had looked forward to a response so earnestly, it seemed my expectations only existed in my dreams and not in reality.

The envelope was for me; her unmistakable handwriting was on the front of a bulky package, – so bulky, she had used cellotape to hold down the cover flaps. My eager fingers ripped it open. I pulled out the letter.

And it was long, – eight foolscap pages long.

I read through it greedily, wondering what new knowledge about this mysterious lady it would contain.

I learnt that her favourite colour was purple, and that she sang in the church choir. I learnt that she planned to train as an Electrical Engineer, even though she had more than an average interest and ability in the arts. She described the Shell Development Company Estate where she, her parents and her siblings had lived for six years in painstaking detail. She mentioned that they had a picture of me as a five-year old in their family album, and how she had been trying to reconcile the young child in the photo with the young man who wrote to her about a week ago.

From her letter, I deduced that she could be friendly but stern; driven, ambitious, – even stubborn. At the end of her mail she had taken to the appellation by which I addressed her in my letter. She signed off,

Yours sincerely,

Q

I smiled. Mischief and humour danced around the alphabet, Q. She seemed to have accepted and embraced it as her own.

It was Friday afternoon. I had the weekend before me. I was already crafting a reply in my mind, – thinking up responses to every line and every idea she had raised in her letter. Her long missive only succeeded in pulling at every string of curiosity in my heart, increasing the mystery around this young lady who was as yet faceless to me. I read her letter two more times before I set it aside. I tore out some pages from the centre of my long notebook, sat at my reading table, and began scribbling what would be my reply to Q.

24th April, The First Year

S he was six months younger than me. This piece of information hit me with a flood of embarrassment. Not because I was older than her, but because I was older than her and she had finished secondary school a year before me. I have never really understood why I never started primary school before my sixth birthday. At four years old I could already read with a fluency that exceeded older children in my neighbourhood. But my parents, for some reason, waited until I was exactly six.

From my sixth year in primary school, I told myself often that it didn’t matter, as long I could graduate from university as a medical doctor on or before I turned twenty-four. This self-talk worked most times, but it only lasted until I met anyone who was younger and who had a relative academic advancement over me, then my misery returned.

My final exams were only a few months away and I knew there was a lot of hard swotting ahead of me. Immediately after the Secondary School Certificate exams, the university entrance exam was next. If I wanted to gain entrance into medical school, I must bag a high score to scale the cut-off mark for what is the most competitive faculty in any university. There was no substitute for hardwork.

However, although I upheld the virtues of hardwork, I have never believed in ‘hardwork for its sake’. I recall a piece I wrote on the subject, titled, You are not a Donkey:

You are not a Donkey

We admire the man who personifies hardwork and industry. But, hardwork should be strategic and qualitative. Hardwork, adequately measured and appropriately directed is laudable. It lifts the heart with joy to see the mountain peak attained after daring the difficult and treacherous mountain pass. It awakens in us the wonder of the heroic spirit to see dedication and bravery break forth through a long night with sunrise as its reward.

But, do not work hard just for the appearance of working hard; anyone who does this, I believe, is his own worst enemy.

Hardwork by itself, and for its own sake, wearies the soul, fragments the creative force, and fritters away most of your psychic currency.

But, hardwork, when predicated on thoughtful planning, becomes art and may even reach the scale of worship to The Almighty. Directed hardwork should fill us with gratitude, for the privilege to unite heart, mind, and hands in transmuting thought into coherent action.

It makes no sense to try making a light bulb work over 10,000 attempts when a simple calculation before engaging in the experiment would have probably given you a successful outcome after 10 attempts.

You want to brag about how onerous the task was?

You want to take some dubious pride in the tedium of your duties?

Why would you mistake movement for progress and a lack of an imagination as admirable?

I am not impressed. I would place all such vain instincts, and appeal to ‘hardwork’ under the category, ‘Inefficient’.

There is no virtue in expending energy that is not properly directed at a goal, or supplying an overabundance of effort where, with some forethought, much less would have sufficed.

Would you milk a male goat … and ‘work hard’ at it?

How much effort do you think is required to get milk from his udders?

Applying ‘trial and error’ 10,000 times is not hardwork or tenacity. It is inefficient.

Don’t work harder. You are not a donkey.

Instead, work harder, intelligently.

I am not interested in 10,000 attempts of mindless work only to succeed by accident.

30th April, The First Year.

M y interest in Q was not amorous. I didn’t experience any fluttering of emotions, or the inebriation of giddy excitement when I thought about her. My insatiable longing to read from her stemmed from, I believe, the piquant thrill of curiosity.

From her letters I found her to be a fascinating person, brimful with intelligence, and with the mastery and willingness to share it. She had a certain leaning towards cognitive revelry which only served to heighten the same impulse in me.

As far as the affairs of the heart were concerned, mine was already taken. My heart was somewhere else, captured by a girl called Vivian, who was a year my junior in school. She attended an all-girls secondary school about ten streets away from my own school.

30th May, The First Year

I have not made an entry in this diary for a while. I haven’t been fine. I had malaria, and like every other time I had succumbed to the illness, it started on a Monday night. Suddenly, I had felt a chill in the breeze of the warm evening, and a vague tiredness made my head and limbs heavy. Then came the fever, – it was slow at first, as it worked its way insidiously through the week; my body got so hot I could sense an aura of heat separating me from the surrounding air.

Usually, I started mending by Thursday night.

I feel better now.

1 July, The First Year

H ow many times was enough?

I have been reading through several textbooks, – mathematics, chemistry, biology, and five other subjects that I will take exams on in a few months. The intensity of the lectures in school was increasing, as the start date of the exams drew closer. My classmates and I stayed behind after regular classes each day for extra lectures.

I have never been a night owl; luckily, the preparation for this exam had not made me one. I could never stay up late into the night to read, like some students did. Like Cinderella, once it was midnight, I transformed; I experienced this irresistible urge to close my books and turn in for the night even when I wasn’t feeling sleepy. I could lay awake in bed, clear-eyed for hours, allowing my mind drift from one flight of fancy to another, but could not bear staying up for ten minutes after midnight to study. This meant I had to study for longer periods during the daylight hours.

So, I had gone to bed, with sleep the last thing on my mind. I replayed the events of the day in meticulous detail. At times I edited the memories, imagining other outcomes for a particular series of events, or pursued a thread of thought down a completely fictional path to explore other possibilities.

I shared a room with my brother and the youngest of my sisters. The three older girls shared another room, while my parents had the third. We lived in a quaint little bungalow situated on a short, quiet street, with six houses only. Legend had it that the bungalow in which we lived was the first house built on that street. No one knew for sure. Its previous occupants had lived there for over three decades, and they were not the first tenants. The street hadn’t changed much, according to those who had been around here long enough to know. It was still untarred, and during heavy rains the gutters by the sides of the road, which were half-filled with sand (deposited from previous floods), were inadequate to channel the fast-flowing flood waters. This part of town was not flatland, making the speed of the flood more treacherous and unforgiving. The only advantage, if one could think of it so, was that the flood waters never stagnated; egged on by the influence of gravity, it emptied into a river three kilometres away.

Geography was among the first subjects I was taking in the exams. I was the best in Geography in my school. I was confident I could keep it so.

3rd August, The First Year

A terrible thing happened today.

Well, to be more precise it did not happen today, but was only discovered today. A man died in the opposite house on my street. I didn’t know him well. The house opposite mine is what is called in the local lingo, a ‘face-me-I-face-you’ housing. It had a lot of tenants. It consisted of several rooms on both sides of a long corridor. It was often a convenient lodging for bachelors and spinsters, but at times you could have whole families living there too, and more often than not, was overpopulated.

This was how the story went: this tenant whose name I did not even know, had not been seen for several days. He had not told any of his neighbours that he was travelling anywhere, and no one had seen him leave for work in the mornings, or return at the end of the day. Like most face-me-I-face-you houses, it was difficult to keep your privacy; you not only shared a common bathroom, toilet and kitchen (if there was one) with your neighbours, but they made it their business to insert themselves in all facets of your life, and they expected you to do the same. Your neighbours had more than a passing interest in who your visitors or friends were, and how old and worn-out the linoleum carpet on your floor was (that is, if you had a carpet at all). These types of houses were the headquarters of gossips, and quite often, the battleground for acerbic verbal wars and outright fistfights.

No one, – absolutely no one had seen him for a week, – a full seven days. At first they assumed he had travelled. It wasn’t until someone said something about the smell of a dead rat coming from the ceiling that they began to entertain a more sinister hypothesis. It was not uncommon for rats, which were quite ubiquitous in such houses, to be caught on uninsulated electrical wires running