Asking for Creditors
Join me, if you please, in counseling spendthrifts against extravagance. It is nothing short of financial imprudence. Well, you are most likely to rush at the job and make it a cause or hobby after coursing through the narrative below, its message hopefully lodged in the retentive hall of your memory. It has to do with a female Nigerian of Igbo extraction, who had sworn to arrange a replica of a splendid birthday party a neighbor of hers had thrown for her only daughter of the same age as her son. Pulling out all the stops, Mrs. Maureen Asila strung up a list of orders she shall make between birthday items and gifts, in it Bartholomew’s three-piece suit and his princely cake standing tallest. Readily, she settled the price for a sleek goat, which her expected guests shall eventually meet in its slaughtered and cooked form in their served rice with stew. Mrs. Maureen Asila - it appeared - had not anymore space left in her faculty for serious consideration of the enormous difference in financial power between her and Lady Genevieve, whom she was clearly copying. Forty-year-old Genevieve owned enough paper money to run up expenses as high as the ones she had incurred while marking her daughter Dorothy’s completion of Twelve Years on Planet Earth. A big - time poultry farmer who also commercialized their feed - why would she not be able to pump into her only child’s birthday the close to one million naira the thing later licked up? And what’s more, Lady Genevieve had a first-rate business man and malt drinks distributor in her forty-seven-year-old husband, Sir Charles Mere: a man who had for two decades remained so comfortable financially that it would have been a misjudgment taking him and his Genevieve wife for a couple striving to keep up with The Joneses after choosing to publicity flaunt their acquired wealth. To just drop it bare, Charles’ affluence had provided the backdrop against which his wife Genevieve readily parted with N957,000:00 for Dorothy’s personally requested birthday.
Tactlessly, Maureen Asila –The Willing-To-Be-Ostentatious-started skirting round their quarters in search of trusting lenders or a lender for Bartholomew’s things. And found Maureen did An Understanding Two, who also presumed her credit-worthiness. From the two Maureen got a half million naira for the much sought birthday feast for young Bartholomew, two weeks away from Twelve Years. Beautifully, the received amount was only three hundred thousand naira less her earmarked N800,000:00 for organizing the event feast. Mrs. Maureen Asila knew what next she should do to be able to round off the amount to the target figure…
“Sure… Sure, my gold necklace and bracelets of good carat”
She would not mind disposing of both for at least N200,000:00 to bravely approach the mark.
“Oh! Surely painful it’s going to be at last,” came Mrs. Maureen’s honest voice as she thought over the idea. Of course, if she sold off her gold jewel to a ready gold lover buyer, she herself would cease to answer an owner of gold both here on Earth and in Heaven until Resurrection, unless somehow she should brave their fresh purchase for a replacement. Nonetheless, it was to Maureen pleasing to think that the birthday thing once brought off would keep serving as her true demonstration of maternal affection for Bartholomew Asila, whom she had some twelve years ago given life in a far-off hospital’s maternity. Mildly, it turned out a moment for Maureen to shudder anew at the whole near blinding experience and she having to disobey several times midwives’ order that she should not yet, try to push out The Rioting Life in her uterus!
But – Gosh! Why would or how could an expectant mother first timer bring her doubly embattled self to act normal or for that matter The Cool-Headed! She remembered insisting that she be allowed to push out her baby there and then with her last hidden strength, the request presenting as her human right!
It was not a secret to the others: Maureen Asila’s eager preparation for Bartholomew’s uplifting moment. It duly got to the notice of her closer friends and neighbors, with her closest ones fully bothering to digest what she was lately up against. Tried their utmost the closest ones did to get across to her words of wisdom that would finally translate into her cancellation of her borrowing plans for Bartholomew’s Birthday, except that their efforts fell on sandy soil. Maureen’s mind had been made up to pursue her pet dream to its logical conclusion. Firm was her hope that her well-off eldest sister resident in London would soonest send her a promised five thousand pounds. On getting it, she would change it to Naira - some Three Million Naira or even more - and quick like lightning, offset her debts, with much still left for reserve. A truly convincing part of the whole drama was Mrs. Maureen’s convincing on-the-spot hooking up to the woman in far-away Birmingham to first ask after her family of five, the smooth progress of Life in Birmingham and a laughing reminder of her promised five thousand pounds – all before Maureen’s concerned friends…
What would have been more genuinely calming for the worrying well-wisher of a friend about to unwittingly taste financial hell after imprudent dissipation of hard-to-acquire wealth? Well, in any case, it should be silly trying to return unused borrowed money, interest attached it or not… In her own case “No,” for having gone the direction of good neighbors doubling as True Christians.
But readers, matters later wickedly chose a route which was in and out different from The Foreseen by Maureen, good a thing they did not in the end confine her to the wheel chair…
Oh really! It was a supreme birthday Master Bartholomew Mere grabbed! Very few observers would have withheld from it the word epithet “Splendid” upon invitation to capture it in one picturing word. All the same, the evinced splendor by the Birthday was truest in the response it received from informed and self-invited, guests, a good many of them Bartholomew’s peers and Maureen’s female friends. Bartholomew’s Vote of Thanks to his friends and guests just managed to escape being a disaster - a very shy job - while a good student of English could have sworn that his entire speech had left a lot to be desired in terms of coherence and accuracy. On the other more jolting side, Maureen could only bury her face in her hands, when the time came for her to redeem her solemn pledge to agreeable creditors.
Weeks elapsed after weeks; soon a month and yet another but no received credit alerts by Maureen creditors nor physical handing over to them of their money. On an agreed date, creditors with lost patience paid her a threatening visit, whose subject was to unfailingly show her the ugly side of life, if she failed to discharge her financial obligation of them within forty-eight hours.
It was time for father to come to the rescue of daughter. Not entirely with a free mind, Mr. Fred Aka, Maureen’s septuagenarian father, parted with an inherited plot of his for twice the amount she owed her creditors.
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