After my favorite tutor’s death I thought all mental stimulation was over- I was so uncharacteristically right…for a time ,at least,almost a year.
But there’s another like him, no not as perfectly him as he was, but enough so that I may be strangely comfortable speaking to the new, younger, but not better Mr. Akinyele.
A week after the death of my Uncle,my favorite tutor, the most erudite man I’ve ever known, died of a heart attack. I cried, more than I cried at news of my Uncle’s Death, because for some queer reason Mr. Akinyele’s academic relationship with me inspired me more than my Uncle’s affections. At his funeral, I could hardly believe that he was truly deceased-in fact,I thought he was faking his death(yes,i was THAT delusional). After all, he had once told me, “The best way to find out how loved you are is to fake your death.”
Every night for more than two weeks I cried, because his expected arrivalat exactly nine everyday forever to be unfulfilled. But still , I imagined that he was residing somewhere amongst archaic novels with a tobacco pipe in his mouth, humming ‘Pharoah, let my people go’. When I moved to Trinidad, months after,I had lobg stopped crying. Also, I had given up the belief that he was dead, afterall, I had seen neither his corpse nor his coffin.
