It had taken Mrs Toyin Ajayi jr. several years to get used to the more relaxed pace of life in Nigeria compared to what her life had been in the U.K. There she had veritably been a busy bee hive of activity during her school days. She had had the fortunate experience of participating in a wide variety of sports on most days of the week. These had been as varied as hockey,net ball,badminton, tennis and general athletics. At all these she had excelled and had proven herself to be more of a sports-woman, than a scholarly type. All this had been to her advantage, for even now in her mid twenties, she could boast of a slim and lithe figure which though perhaps not of the voluptuous kind, nevertheless many men still found pleasing.. Moreover, there were real advantages to being thin, and none more important than the ease of putting on a dashing appearance in her designer digs, with little or no effort.
Maintaining her figure in the metropolis of lagos proved to be no easy feat. There was an abundance of foods and other temptations continously thrown in front of one, and little or no opportunity for exercise existed. even the roads were nearly totally unnavigable by a pedestrian in some seasons, there were no pavements or side walks or trattoir. In the small private gyms that existed, the air was dank and stale, and smelled suffocatingly of sweat, and instilled in her a unique sense of claustrophobia and a need to flee as quickly as possible from the whirring sound of the airconditioners in the background, so far from a motivational tune as possible it was. These poorly lit and humid places she hardly found tolerable. Yet to exercise outside was not really an option either, as described by the lack of side walks. So she had resigned herself to being satisfied with her Yoga routine which she did in the privacy of her living room, and this she complemented with short strolls in the gardden of the apartment complex.
On this day as she walked around the rose bushes and the sweet smelling Gardenias, and Hibiscuses and Bougainvilleas,she hastily glanced up over the high walls surrounding the compound, and tried to peer over and through the electrified barbed wire that sat as a crown jewel above the wall. And she tought to herself, that certainly she was at least in some form a prisoner. Yes, she thought to herself, love makes us a prisoner of the mind, and the husbands of this world act as the wardens to keep us all in check. But when I look up at this wall I cannot help but wonder, are the walls in the compounds of Afghanistan as high as these? For, no matter the wilful spiritual slavery which she had voluntarily subscribed to by being where she was, it was the physical prison of the high walls and the barred windows which made her feel like a beautiful caged animal, or rather like a well loved bird in a gilded cage.
She had said this to Femi many times, and in his usual fashion he had laughed it off. It was not that he was trying to brush off her feelings or make her feel belittled, but he was a man who was firmly tied and molded by reality, although he also was a dreamer. But he would say" what can do?" For this, the general insecurity was a fact of life, much becried and bemoaned in the newspaers on a daily basis for th " Rising state of insecurity in nation alarming". oddly enough, there was hardly a day that passed by when there was not one newspaer or the other with the sanme headline. There was one thing the articles always failed to come up with some plausible explanation for the disgruntled masses. As the fashinable worried about what dress to wear to the next party, and the color co ordination of their proposed birthday party,
and the expenditures on these dos became more and more ostentatious, the wealthy could simply not fathom why the less fortunate had tired of their roles as sycophants and had taken up a dastardly buisness of trading in human flesh to accomplish something in this life beyond misery and want. Sure, to kidnap anyone is to display a want of honor, but this had become the means of livelihood for a significant part of the population. \Femi worried constantly about her safety. He was well aware that due to her associations with him that she could be target for the kidnappers who had now migrated from the creeks of the Niger Delta and had settled down instead in the concrete djungle of Lagos with a thriving trade in Leke and Ikoyi. The whole of Lagos had stood by in disbelief as the kidnapping had started in Lagos. Truely the saying of Martin Luther King Jr. had become prophetic in this case for to tolerate injustice to one is to tolerate injustice to all, and as the injustice had been so easily tolerated as long as it was far away in some hinterland, and only involved expatriates... but then all the expats had wisely fled, the next target was the people themselves, or rather the haves were now targetted by the have nots. In fact, Femi had totally dissuaded Toyin from any thoughts of working, and it had probably had a lot to do with the difficulties of arranging a suitable security detail. As such she found herself with many hours to spend at home. After her few chores in the morning, which mainly consisted of her supervising the maid and the steward and the cook, she would do her yoga routine and then prepare to wait for her lover who was soon to become her husband, well, as far as traditional law was concerned they were already married but now they were planning for the court wedding.
