He looked more and saw less
A fat unreachable number of Classified Information, Exclusive Files, Esoteric Knowledge; The Reserved for certain people. Try as an outsider might to ascertain their import one invariably failed. Mysteries, for example. Questions and Reflections on God in relation to ‘Who He Is’ beyond His “I AM WHO I AM”.
In the World of Gambling, it is a bit of a shocking similarity: The confusing skillful movement of hands by people playing cards for money. With his keenest looks at their art, The Outsider Green-Horn would still not discern the direction or flow of events. Sometimes, in the open, a couple of cards are placed on a platform, table or bare earth and dexterously swapped into different positions, after the winning one had just been turned up and displayed before one’s gaze and then one would be asked to identify it. Success at this means that one has won the contests, for which a number of people involved in the game had staked their hard-earned money while failure to do so would make one join the other losers in forfeiting ones staked to the winner.
On one Sunday morning, Obinna casually tried to recall the one word for such clever hand movements while The Game of Chance and Money is being played by a group of jobless grown-ups.
Sleight! Of course, Sleight of Hand”
How could he, Obinna Nna, have forgotten all too soon! A little surprise, a little show of shame by Obinna at his having to pause at all for an answer to the non-puzzle.
Sleight of Hand” was the name assigned to this always-an-eye-catching stuff for Obinna Nna in the afternoon hours while heading for home from school after close or was abroad in the late hours of 6:00pm to attend to a pressing need before night fall.
A handful of street-wise adults forming a ring around the displayed cards would be watching intently and listening with primed-up ears to what the performer of sleight with the cards did and said. In nearly all cases, the sleight performer’s remarks were a guide to his hand movements with the cards spiced with both words of caution and encouragement to the involved participants and prospective ones which card one would choose and win but also the one he would pick and he would be done for!
It was sometimes a spell-binding movement to Obinna who occasionally found time to glance many times in the direction of the sleight performer. He had never on any day lingered at the scene to take in more details of it. Even, later on he began to dread the very moment he would show up there, as each time he drew a bit closer to it, The Sleight Performer’s voice would abruptly fade away, with him wearing a disappointed look if he Obinna Nna did not stop to join them.
But what for? And why should I?
Obinna knew he was a student working towards the modest goal of becoming An Honest Careerist. There was no need to start signaling to the whole town that he had a couple of naira notes he wanted, gambling-wise, to double, triple or quadruple by outwitting others, who had come for the same purpose. Perhaps, Obinna Nna would have stuck fast to his Anti-Gambling Principle for being a thoughtful and realistic disposition towards life. Then, came the knee-crunching news that their just withheld School Certificate Results might never be released after all. The Exam Syndicate had found out after thorough investigations that their exam centre was indeed involved in gross examination malpractices.
“This should be death,” Obinna whimpered clearly dreading having to wait for a full year for another Not Sure School Certificate Exam, at home doing nearly nothing.
“What does he now do? For A Time-Killing One Year?”
Challenge he would not Exam Oracles on their claims that some centers of theirs had misbehaved in sheer violation of agreed sacrosanct rules of theirs for which they got contracting schools to duly endorse prepared provisions to that effect! And really to face the truth and voice it they had in their own examination hall in some of the papers Mathematics, in particular, soiled their initially clean candidates’ question-solving hands…
Rapidly, Obinna’s previous apprehension for the gimmicks of the sleight performer with cards began to be replaced with a building self-assurance that he would definitely beat them in their own game. Unfailingly, he would be dilating his eyes during the game, keep carefully monitoring the sleight of hand performer’s quick repositioning of the winning card after its brief display to the interested participant. Never would he take his eyes off that particular card from that moment.
“Never!’’ swore Obinna Nna with hard-set jaws, the vow repeating after a half minute of more devoted pensive thought to the idea.
However, it had sort of sneaked into his mind within that half-minute that one of the five regular faces at The Gamblers Spot he had met not once, not twice and possibly not thrice at another scenario that called for a last-minute serious rethink of his forming resolve!
Well, not ultimately in an absurd theatre. Rather in their City’s Official Motor Park to their State Government officially known and to her officially accountable, off and on generating her some flattering official revenue.
Just that, sadly, the same motor park always raunchily welcomed diverse characters - the city’s rodents - not by any means an exception…
And there The Guy had been not An Innocent Toyota Bus Conductor but one strangely repeatedly having brushes with passengers consenting to go in their Toyota. Would he Obinna Nna ever be in a hurry to forget that on a Thursday an aggrieved female passenger utterly displeased with his insistence that she pay as much for her luggage as her fare had poured endless curses on him. In the end, the woman’s loosened tongue did not spare The Guy the picture of one who daily sought to clean passengers through and through for little bags in a dirty booth demanding Extra Impossible Cash or homicide commit!
‘Yes, Madam, in you I see a seer,” The Guy offered to say at last not ashamed to humorously remark that he had joined The Transportation Thing for the sadistic pleasure in squeezing peoples neck until moisture starts dripping: “My ten finger prints all over a nape!”
Obinna’s last rethink failed him and delighted was The Gamblers in his axis, when he finally drew nearer to their dangerous past-time without so much as a prodding from them! Literally, they had got A New Investor in their business: at least, somebody whose money would be partly going into their food bills for breakfasts or lunches or both…
And that was what Obinna was regrettably transformed into, for in all the staked games he played with them over a month the more he looked the less he saw.
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