By
Wande Akindiose
“Daddy Bola, are you going out?” Bose asked her husband.
“As you can see, yes” Afolabi answered as he was walking dressing out of the house.
“Ah, look at what I prepared for you; your favourite. Just eat little before you go out” Bose begged her husband.
Intuitively, Afolabi looked towards the centre table where a bowl of hot pounded yam with well garnished vegetable soup was waiting. He wasn’t really seeing the food but the sweating bottle of Star lager beside it.
He gently retraced his steps and sat down. Bose rushed there and lifted the bowl of water up for him to wash his hands. She quickly opened the beer and filled the “who send you” cup.
Afolabi smiled and sat down to do justice to the food and drink.
Afolabi was a very hardworking senior civil servant who lived at the Bodija Estate, Ibadan with his wife and three children. Though a good man but his problem was the green bottle.
Afolabi was a fish. He drank to stupor everyday. Sometimes, he would leave his Peugeot SR car at in front of the beer parlour and walked home. Most often, he would slump at his door and would have to be helped inside by his family.
Sometimes he would not even come home from work and even when he did, it was to change his dress.
Bose fought the husband every night querying his drinking habit. The neighbours were tired of their nuisances, so they left them alone.
While Afolabi was eating, he was draining the cold beer. As the yellow liquid in the cup was going down, Bose brought another bottle opened it and served his husband.
It was on the second bottle that Afolabi finished his food and Bose brought in the third bottle. While on the third bottle, Afolabi removed his cloth and put it on the sofa.
On the fourth bottle, he slept off on the chair and was only woken up at night to go into the room.
That night, the neighbours were disappointed because there was no noise from his house.
The next day, even Afolabi came back from work, it was Amala with egusi soup along with his favourite beer that was waiting. He only took three bottles before he slept on the sofa.
When he was going to work in the morning, he gave his wife money to buy a carton of beer at home.
Bose kept doing this and the fight and noise from her house ceased.
After two weeks, Afolabi came home from work and his wife has prepared the usual. As she was about to open the beer, Afolabi told her not to open it but requested for water instead.
Bose knelt down and started begging, “Ah, Olowo ori mi” (the owner of my head) “if I have offended you, please forgive me”.
Afolabi looked at his wife and said, ” my loving wife, you have not done anything wrong. I have decided that I will never drink beer again”.
Bose was dazed. It was too good to be true.
Afolabi stopped drinking and a year later, he was made a permanent secretary in the office of the military governor of Oyo state.
And they lives happily thereafter.
Source: wandecof@gmail.com
