A FISH OUT OF WATER

Sometimes I feel I was a fish out of water desperate looking to be rescued.

It went asleep in my natural habitat of water Even got lost inside the bowels of sweet deceptive dreams Where it imagined itself becoming a shark , A king of the ocean king which any fish would sure love to become

Dreams are always so unreal . When they expire, they leave you carrying a can of emptiness. On woking up, its scales were nowhere near being wet but rather as dry as the sunbaked surface of a rock, as if it had been transplanted on a desert.

However, I am not a fish.

Actually, my name is Michael Adeyanju, but the comparison arises out of a story I have to tell.

It's a true story - my story, the story of my struggles to adapt to new realities after I had lost a most precious gift. Believe it or not, that precious gift was my grandmother.

It happened while I was in my teens and just a few years short of adulthood.

I had grown up in a town called Oro in kwara state (Nigeria). It was a lovely place to grow up in, featuring kind people who are enterprising, and very friendly.

If granny was a day old she couldn't have been less than eighty years old but to me she was ageless and nothing but a sweet lady. Had sheen been younger, she could have been the life of any party, because she was always so cheerful and inspiring.

Being raised in a serene and beautiful environment by such a mother figure like my granny was something I can never ever forget or downplay.

She disciplined us with love and groomed us to become useful to ourselves and to the society at large.

She would usually sit us down, I and my other brother Toyin, to explain to us reasons why certain things are better handled in certain ways and what could necessarily go wrong if they are done otherwise.

I have witnessed parents beating their children in the name of discipline, repeatedly and as if it was the only way you could correct a child. Only for such children to become used to the flog and acting I'm defiance of their parents.

I got to realize that children respond to you positively if you explain things to them, bond with them, and when you discipline them, doing so without wickedness but in moderation and never failing to let them know why they are being punished.

Because that's what grandma applied in raising us. She was a friend and a teacher. If she served punishment to you - and those moments were rare indeed - she would never fail to explain to you why she did so and would then proceed to provide guidance on how to avoid such incidents or situations in the future.

Nothing good ever lasts forever, though.

One sad day, an invisible or supernatural meteor of fate interfered with the natural order of things in our home, encroached on our comfort zone and caused an irreparable damage.

By the time we all woke up the next morning, granny was bedridden and unable to rise up.

Everyone was thrown into panic. Where was the potency of drugs? What even happened to our traditional herbal institutions and their formidable healing abilities? Had they all somehow lost their medicinal value?

All I saw on faces was frustration as thick and hard as a slab of stone. The atmosphere was screaming in thick clouds of hopelessness., and it was plain enough even for a child to decipher the message, though it wasn't put out in any open format. Nothing seemed to be working anymore.

Within some unfortunate hours, granny had breathed her last and was no more.

I was never to experience the regenerating rays of her sunshine any more. She was gone and now all I heard were mutterings on how to bury her. They sounded to my ears like hammers already hitting nails into the wooden body of her coffin.

In the early '80s, there were no phones or modern cellular means of communication in Nigeria, Therefore, the burden of duty fell upon me, so I was sent to travel by road to Lagos city to break the sad news to her direct children, including my own parents, and other relatives.

Being more closely attached to her, I was worst hit by the loss. I literally fell sick during the journey and scared the hell out of everyone by the time I reached Lagos.

Thus one chapter of the book about my life ended and I was afraid of what the future held in store for me.

Then I realized that I was going to be relocated, to leave my lovely town, since granny the umbilical cord who had held us to the scene was no more.

And I was right. We were to move to Lagos.

I was in tears on the day we left. As our bus left the park, I was casting desperate and longing stare at my old home and town.

I knew it was going to be tough coping with living in a new place, making new friends, and all what movement entails, but I knew it had to be done.

I would discover the strength and means.

Somehow.