IN his room at 567 Cragmont Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705 Justin was about to say his night prayer when the phone rang. He was undecided, momentarily, whether to answer or proceed with the prayer. He looked at the screen to see who was calling. "Haba" he exclaimed. "Why will this woman be calling so late? It was Mrs. Ignatius, the parent of a student. She was one of those whom, Justin believed, was abusing the friendliness he permitted. Some-and many, indeed-kept the relationship as official as possible. They limited discussions to matters pertaining to fees, books, discipline, punctuality etc. But in Mrs. Ignatius' case, she overstretched the cordiality, discussing even her marital affairs with him. Justin racked his brain, trying to recall how it all started. He wondered how he could have allowed such personal dealings with any parent How could she call him in the dead of night? "He has come again o! Mrs. Ignatius cried.
"Who Madam?" Justin asked, anger bottled within. And before she could respond, he added: "Madam, check your watch. 11:55am! Is it not too late for this?
"I'm sorry, Principal. But did you know that nerah is not yet home?" Justin launched a silence that he knew would not be palatable to her. "For God's sake, is it a crime to be a principal?" he asked as he momentarily pushed the phone away from the range of his mouth, then shut his robust eyes as if the answer to the question lay in the dark.
Banking on his six-footer height and prominent eyeballs, he always jovially told the students that he was created to be a principal. According to him, once he was present in any class or hall, no act of cheating could go uncaught. "If you beat my height, you can't beat my eyes," he would declare whenever he was supervising any exam.
The fact was that the man seemed to have every trait maximally-if not in excess His complexion, for instance, was as fair as that of the yellow ant that the Yoruba called salamo, while his was a voice that hardly needed a loudspeaker no matter the size of the crowd he was addressing. Justin yet had another tale that the students often branded 'tori": "When I was growing up in the village and my family was working on my father's farm, salamo used to bite my brothers and sisters especially when we were harvesting kola nut whose trees one had to often climb. But salamo never bit me because my skin bore the same colour as theirs."
That was the extent to which Justin could be down to earth in the school, though he combined humour and compassion with seriousness wherever required. What be, however, hated was being taken for granted or overstretched as, he believed, Mrs Ignatius was now doing. He had told her that she needed to have a lot of patients to let the wound heal. She has wronged the man, he believed. She had terribly wronged him and the man had cause to be upset. As a matter of fact, he thought, only very few men would still allow the marriage to hold in whatever form.