That true confession

At what point do we truly confess our iniquities to God? In other words, when can one sincerely come out and say ‘I have confessed my sins, big or small, to my maker?’ Some people are of the opinion that one is in true confession more during the Friday Muslim worship or on Sundays during church service, or even during similar religious festivals like the vigil worship, Sallah, Chrismas and Easter. But what obtains in those or similar occasions or other religious festivals could be automated prayers compared to what you are squeezed into doing when you are in immediate distress like being ill and suffering relentless pain or when nature calls.

Yes, when nature calls, categorically put, when you must sh*t. That is the time you may be in what I accept as true confession to whoever you believe in and supplicate to. Unrepentant sinner me was in such a situation yesterday. But yesterday’s was nothing compared to what I once experienced on a journey from Lagos to Ebonyi during my time in Ebonyi as a youth corps member. My journey to the confessional on that occasion a year ago started like play like play o; I had spent Easter with my family and was scheduled to return to Ebonyi a day after Easter. As I did not eat the Easter pepper soup with the rest of the family on Easter Sunday, I decided to eat my share on Easter Monday night, the eve of my departure. Toyin, the house help sensed what I was about to get myself into and cautioned me, but like the proverbial fly destined to end up in the grave with the corpse, I refused to listen. “No be today I don dey eat pepper soup and im never do me anything before” I told her. So, I proceeded to devour a bowl+ of hotly spiced hot water and goat meat, topping it with a bottle of chilled malt drink before retiring to bed.

We were barely out of Lagos the next morning when my ordeal began, starting with a rumble down there. At first, I just thought, ‘C'mon, this is nothing Good Ole Fart can’t take care of.’ So, I went f-a-r-t. But it didn’t solve anything. Very quickly, it started fizzing, sizzling, churning, burping and sputtering Downtown, all in one seemingly choreographed movement. Next, all the sweat pores and glands in my system went into hyperactive mode as sweat broke out and dried up on my skin with equal rapidity. I kept shuffling my feet, adjusting to different sitting positions just to keep the blowhole from popping open. As I struggled with the enemy within, the woman sitting across the aisle from me asked me what time of day it was, and after a long look at my wristwatch I told her it was just 15 minutes before 9am. I didn’t need more than the look of incredulity on her face to confirm that I was now officially in a time warp, for time was actually 15 minutes past 10 am.

I decided to deflate the wanton energy coming from under to some other things, so, I tried reading from the book I was holding, - Vijaya Kumar’s World’s Greatest Speeches. But words from Gandhi, Mandela, Mother Theresa, Lincoln, Hitler, Clinton, and several others offered no sucour. As for Martin Luther King and his I have a dream, the only dream I could dare have at that time was one in which one day soon, a Nigerian man would enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the first recorded person to have died of inability to sh*t.

Long stories short, after a period in which I kept saying ‘bros’, ‘my guy’, ‘chairman’, and the like, to one of the bus stewards (molue conductor more like it), the driver reluctantly stopped somewhere along the road in Edo State. Pronto, I got off the bus, skidding down a slope by the side of the road to do the thing. Funnily, two or three other people who had obviously been going through similar predicament also shamelessly joined in the act, after which we got going again. Alas, my reprieve was only temporary, for the front wheels of the bus had barely crossed from Awka in Anambra State into Enugu when that now familiar sound came calling once again. This time I could even swear I heard Luciano Pavarotti leading the orchestra that was playing down there. And that was when the true confession really started all the way from Enugu to Abakaliki, Ebonyi.

First, I thanked God for His mercies for seeing me through the earlier episode and expressed confidence in His ability to do it for me again. Next, I thought of how, years ago, while being in charge of my uncle’s provisions store, a tin of garri, beans or rice, or their cash equivalent would fly into the blue, so I prayed to God to please forgive me for my part in it, for I knew not what I was doing back then. I equally remembered how, while standing in a queue at a corn mill years back, I kept tapping current from the bom-bom of the girl in front of me. I fervently prayed God to forgive me for that little period of misguided judgment. As that blasted potential entry in the Guinness Book of World Records flashed through my eyes once more, I confessed to God about being guilty of picking that piece of meat from the pot so many years ago, an offence for which one poor boy had been kept on his knees with a bucket of water on his head for about an hour. As the sound effect from under became more furious, I generalised all my sins, asking God to please forgive me for all of them, whether known to me or not. Then the urgency went up another wrench, and I employed all the languages I know and started a mantra of, ‘abeg o, abeg o’. Thankfully, the road was very coarse and the bus from Enugu to Abakaliki was a locomotive, with thundering noise levels and I was sitting close to the window, so even though I muttered my mantra fairly audibly, none of the other passengers seemed to hear me do it.

He must have accepted the confessions of my poor soul, for miraculously, we made the journey from Enugu to Abakaliki about 15 minutes faster. Once in Abakaliki, I frantically begged the first okada man I met to lead me to where I could do my thing. Luckily, it was about 9.35 pm and the man happened to know of the site of a freshly demolished building-cum-temporary-dump-site. He took me there and with a, ‘thank you sir’ I paid him the bike fare, plus a pretty hefty tip before hurrying, with two travelling bags in tow, to discharge that pesky waste. Once I was sufficiently relieved, I looked up into the starry sky and something told me that someone somewhere up there was laughing their heart out at the sight of sinner like me scrambling for cover from mere sh*t.

So, when yesterday it started churning and rumbling Down under again, you can imagine how relieved I must have felt to be able to release after only about 30 minutes in the traffic. And when one of my cousins sped into the house this morning and ignored my calls as he dashed through the passage, I felt slighted. But after I traced him 10 minutes later only to see him emerge from the toilet area, I instantly recognised the demons he had been running from or trying to appease, and as they say in Yoruba, oro just pesin je.