Hello People,
I hope you have been having a good week. Mine has been pretty eventful, but, I will give you that gist later. So here's the concluding part of THE ROAD TO INSANITY and it was written by one of my ardent readers; Dr. Rey Smith. It's quite a story, I must say, almost as if I had written it myself.
Check it out!
It was now 11.47pm. Kaka did not know where to go. It’s been over 4 hours she left the house, driving aimlessly about in the rain with her daughter.
She couldn’t go to her parents’. She wasn’t in for the usual endurance pitch from her parents: “You have to endure o. There has never been a single-mother in our family line and you will not be the first”. As if being a single mother is leprosy.
Then she remembered the refuge home for women suffering domestic violence, run by the Stella Damasus, the Nollywood celebrity. She had read about it on the internet. She looked about for a safe place to stop and park. Then her daughter woke up. While she rocked her back to sleep with one hand, she used the other hand to search on the net with her phone for the address of the refuge home. 117, Adeniran Olusanya, Surulere.
“Madam settle us o”. She heard a guttural voice from her side of the car. She looked up, there were two men there. Hungry looking, bloodshot eyes, scary faces. She froze. She knew any false move, she would be in trouble. “Madam we no be beggars o. We go waste you and your pikin now if you no cooperate. Wind down, wind down”, the taller, meaner one commanded. As he spoke, he reached for an object from inside the rucksack he was carrying.
Something told Kaka, “You will be dead in the next minute if you do not move!”. She summoned her courage and zoomed off at a neck-breaking speed. The two men ran after the car. One of them hit the wind screen and shattered it in the process. She screamed at the sound of shattered glass. But she moved on. She was lucky the road was near empty. Her baby was now crying hysterically. “Sorry baby, we will both be okay”. She stopped, after she had driven at top speed for about 20 minutes, when she got to a gas station where the attendants were wrapping up the day’s activities. She was visibly shaken.
“Na those bad peoples o. Madam why you too dey waka for night with small pikin like this? Bad peoples is too plenty for road for night o”. That was the response of the night security man as she tried to narrate her ordeal to the attendants. “Where would she start from?” she thought to herself as the yellow-stained-teeth security man walked away apparently in disgust at her for being out so late.
She rolled up her glass and continued her journey to the refuge home. She got there 12:50am. Kaka got out of the car and banged at the gate. No response, no sound. From outside, the place looked desolate. What was she to do? She banged at the gate again. This time harder and repeatedly as she cursed Jide under her breath.
After a while, she heard a voice: “Who is you? We don close o! Come tomorrow”. The sound of a voice was a relief.
Kaka stayed two days in the refuge home before she contacted her parents on phone. Her parents had gone visiting her at home when they discovered Jide’s almost lifeless body on the floor of the living room with blood stains around his head and on the rug. Kaka was nowhere to be found. They had rushed him to the hospital and he regained consciousness the following day. Her parents were by Jide’s bed side when her call came in. Her mother was livid on the phone: “It is forbidden for you to raise hands to beat your husband, talk less of beating him to a coma. Abomination! I didn’t raise you to be a husband beater o”
No one was willing to hear her own side of the story. She was the villain and Jide, the victim. So sad. Jide had asked to be given the phone to speak with her. He apologized profusely to her and asked her to come back home. Kaka would not bulge. Jide was wondering what a scandal it would be, if the church got to know the rift between him and his wife, especially his wife-beating habit. What a shame it would be for the church to learn that his wife had sent him to the hospital bed from beating. His church membership may dwindle further. He could not afford for this ministry business to fail. What to do? He thought to himself. For the sake of the ministry, he has to keep his family together.
When Jide was out of the hospital the 3rd day, he went to the refuge home with Kaka’s parents and they begged and pressurized her to return to her matrimonial home. She eventually gave in and returned home with Jide.
That was to be the greatest mistake of her life.
The bandage and wound on Jide’s head was explained off to the church and friends as a domestic accident and life went on as usual for another four months.
One Sunday evening, an argument had ensured between Jide and Kaka over an amorous text message Kaka saw on Jide’s phone from one of the church members in the choir. Her hunches had told her all along that something was going down between her husband and Ifeoma. Now, this text confirmed she was right all along. When she confronted her husband with the text, he was enraged. He screamed at her: “What are you doing with my phone! How dare you touch my phone! Since when have you started running through my messages? You bitch! Don’t you have respect for my privacy?” Kaka barked back: “ Which privacy? I can’t touch your phone, but I can touch your private part when you are horny. Which one should be more private?”
Jide threw her a blinding slap. She fell on the floor. He lounged at her on the floor, screaming: “You will not get a second chance to humiliate me! You bitch!” He grabbed her head and hit it violently with so much hate in him, on the floor severally. Kaka passed out.
It was Jide himself who rushed her to the hospital. Ironically, as he drove her unconscious body through the streets in his car, the DJ on radio was playing Tracy Chapman’s “Last Night”.
Kaka came out of the coma after five days in the hospital and she was never again to regain her sanity. She had become “one of them thang” at the psychiatric hospital.
