Exploring Asia

Dancing in a flare of sunlight, I squint at the sight of the ladies twirling atop a mobile caravan. Feathery skirts swirl yellow, pink, orange, blue, green on full waists. Hips jiggle to Efik songs. I chant along. Saxes blast, drum beats and ethnic renditions fill the air. Mixtures of sweat and perfume stir asphyxiation. Excited gyrators sing along, wave the Nigerian green-white-green flag.
Ducking and snaking my way out to the pedestrian path, I exhale; buy a bottle of water from a pre-teen. I hand her a blue fifty naira note. “Mesiere,” she says, flashing a thankful smile that reveals her gapped-incisors. Breathlessly, I stare. A hotel receptionist promised to take me to a teeth-smith. A chisel’s cut here and a file’s touch there and voila! I’ll have a charming smile too. But I am too afraid to go.
Riding in a cab down Mary Slessor road, I learn that Mary Slessor who abolished twin-killing was buried here in Calabar. I alight at a street full of canteens. Enticing aromas waft out to the pothole-ridden street as I vacillate about where to eat lunch. I am drooling when I walk into a canteen swarming with people. A long line snakes round a table and doubles round a chair. Sweating men argue about the Premier League Championships. A man calls for extra afang soup. A fair-skinned lady in a business suit orders for extra peppersoup and rice. Bits of tripe swim about in her bowl of soup. I smile and drool.
One morsel of pounded yam dipped in a bowl of the leaf-thick edikaikong soup melt in my mouth. My tongue rolls the mishmash and sucks the periwinkle shell. Edikaikong is tasty: all vegetable, fish, meat, periwinkle; and a drop of water. Why? I ask the business-suit lady. She tells me edikaikong means ‘no water’.
A boy commiserates with the dying Biafran warlord. A septuagenarian regales us with tales of how he fought gallantly on the Biafran side. We all listen and argue. I nod when he says, “we’re angry about this inevitable war. But it shaped us.”