Pepper Soup Palaver

I’m an opportunist –the type that eats up the pepper soup in the bowl while the pessimists and optimists argue as to whether the bowl was half empty or half full.

Earlier today, over bowls of hot pepper soup –the type where catfish tails wiggle in your bowl as you eat, Collins told me about his episode with the keke driver that dropped him off at the joint. After a long argument, the keke driver zoomed off angrily without collecting the 250 naira fare, claiming that they agreed on 300 naira.

We laughed at the keke driver’s folly, warm watery mucus running down our noses. I did a quick why not in my head and ordered for one more bowl from Mama Caro; after all, I could now find my way home for free.

In a keke, on my way home, Collins called excitedly to tell me of the wide-palmed slap Mama Caro had just blessed one customer that was overzealous about her bumbum. We laughed and jested as I told him in Yoruba of my grand plan to get home without paying the fare.

Minutes later, I was yelling Akoi, the only Hausa word I knew to the driver, signalling him to stop. I flippantly asked the driver, “200 naira, no?” as one of the plump women smelling like tomatoes stepped down from the keke, so that I could too. “No! It is 250” was his curt reply.

I had rehearsed the scene in my head, and like a seesaw, we did a back and forth on the fare as I coolly anticipated him to get angry and zoom off. It did not work and just when I saw his fingers fisting-up, scared that he would do a ‘Mohammad Ali’ on me, the other plump woman offered to balance up my fare.
She waited for me to bring out my own share of money, he waited, the whole of Kaduna seemed to stand still — waiting, and in the frozen silence, the 250 naira did a pepper soup rumble in the jungle in my tummy — loudly.

“You’ll know the length and breadth of Kaduna today”, he told me in Yoruba as he forced me back into the keke, the two fat women sandwiching me effectively between them after he explained to them the con I planned to play on him as he rode us to the other end of the town, stripping me to my boxer shorts and hole riddled singlet before kicking me out of his keke few minutes shy of 12 am.

Pepper soup is a bastard.