A teacher on the sidewalk
* Meeting up with an old mate can be quite a moment, writes JACK METTA *
THE vender was having a long conversation it seemed, with one of the customers on the sidewalk.
He was gesturing wildly and once in a while emphasised his point by punching the palm of his hand.
For a moment it looked like a dispute was unfolding but the unconcerned look and the understanding nods from the customer somehow signalled that the situation was very much not what it seemed from the outset.
There was no doubt that they were old acquaintances.
It was the vender’s wild gestures that had momentarily caught your attention as you walked past the spot on your way to the nearby store.
It was just a curious look but my attention was riveted to another factor – this guy was speaking fluent and perfect English.
Now why should that be so curious?
In your own personal way, you’ve come to associate many of the local venders as people with little or no formal education. You place them in the rural category, the so-called grassroots who lived off the land or simply struggled to eke out a living in the city through the informal sector.
It is only natural that one forms one’s own opinion according to one’s observation of others and your’s about the people who sell garden produce in the markets and the sidewalks has been that these people were simply simple people, mostly illiterate and uneducated and lived in the rural areas. You would least expect any of the venders to be university graduates or highly trained individuals in their respective fields of trade but with the high rate of unemployment nowadays, that subject is now debatable.
You notice a dozen or more plastic bags containing what looked like sago on the stall in front of him on the sidewalk. Those who enjoy sago, would have noticed that the colour of the sago were a bit off the fresh side, indicating that it had came a fair way and kept somewhere over time.
It was no wonder a lot of potential customers looked them over — others momentarily asked for the price, hefted the goods — and passed on. Sales, it seemed, was very slow in coming.
You had only glimpsed his face in passing - nothing distinctive about the guy – craggy faced, bearded, creases that told of his going on in time, a dirty shirt which obviously had been the grazing ground for at least three generations of moths, a faded football shorts and a cigarette company cap that was obviously given away at least a decade ago and certainly warmed a few heads before it came to warm his.
Anyway, what would you expect from a guy who tended his garden and lived in the bush anyway, you thought.
“... It’s unacceptable, totally and absolutely unacceptable...” he was saying in perfectly good English, by your standard.
That line of expression had caught you by surprise because of your forgone conclusion regarding grassroots, as explained earlier.
Actually, if you didn’t restrain yourself and reminded yourself that these guys were total strangers, you would have automatically popped the question: “What’s so ridiculous?”
But then, your mind had raced ahead of you and was picking up the jigsaw pieces and slotting them in place.
The bubble was about to burst when a piece struck a chord – something about that voice.
That’s when you noticed the vaguely familiar aura around the guy. He seemed like a shadow from the past, still floating in the mist of time as the mind races to construct a solid, recognisable figure that would spring up out of the past and into the present.
You looked at him long and hard but not making it too obvious that you were staring.
He looked my way for an instant and I was sure of an instant recognition.
You know those times when you meet a long lost friend or a member of the family after a long spell? There would be a moment of uncertainty at first but then that is cast aside to the wind as instant recognition dawns and you lose all sense of time and place and let your emotions and senses take control of your actions at those exact moments.
You had actually thought his face would light up and a sudden smile would break through the craggy features of his face but his line of vision continued past you and back to the confines of his circle of territory on the sidewalk and the man he was addressing.
“He’s never in his office but you see him at the ‘high low’ places in town playing the game…”
You were intrigued at the same time your curiosity was fired by his statement and moved slowly towards his stall, stopping a few metres away to heft a nice bunch of bananas, and cocking your ears in his direction.
“That game’s outlawed now, I believe,” the second person responded. “It was in the news lately.”
“Is it? Well, then this guy has to be arrested as well as the people who run the joints.”
You had no idea what the conversation was about but you kept listening for the clue to piece it together. It was something to do with a game.
“You know, I wouldn’t be here selling sago if he got his act together. He’s giving the town a bad name.”
Okay, he was talking about somebody who didn’t do the right thing by him.
“And you know what he does? He demands a 10% commission for approving the loan application. I’ll be damned if I’ll give him such when my application goes through.”
“You should write to his boss and tell him about the shortcomings of his staff,” the second person advised.
“I’ve drafted a letter but you know, that’s not a priority right now. I have to eat first.”
Interesting conversation, you thought but that thought was overwhelmed by the urge to place the face and the voice.
You must have stood there for ages reviewing the situations when another person sauntered up to him, greeted him and both fell into a frenzy of tokples.
It was definitely lingo from the East Kerema region – Toaripi.
You memory instamatically turned back the pages to another place, another time.
You were a student on overseas study and he was a teacher trainee at a nearby college. You had got together frequently during your year-long sojourn in the Land of the Long White Cloud that you became like family away from home.
A sob surged upward from your chest and tears clouded your eyes. The last thing you had expected was for a teacher to be selling foodstuff at the local market.
It was a situation one sometimes finds hard to swallow but in this country, many of us are privileged to go back to the life that our forefathers once led.
He was still busy in conversation when I interjected and said calmly: “Hullo George!”
There was that moment of uncertainty on his part, but that is soon swallowed up by the emotions of that moment of recognition – emotions that ran really deep that day.
There was no need for talk as each of you retraced the pages of that timeframe in your lives when you were in the peak years of reaching manhood.
By and by he explains that he had given up teaching years ago over some fund mismanagement allegation and was back at the village trying to set up a fisheries project.
Upon the mention of the project, he introduced his friend Roger, another ex-teacher and explained that he was telling Roger about his loan application with a bank in the provincial town and the guy who was supposedly not doing his job to serve him and other customers.
“It’s been three months since I lodged the application and there’s been no response. Every time I go to find out about my application, the officer is not there. They tell me I’ll probably find him down at the high and low joint or the back of some building knocking off a couple of crates with his mates. Maybe he buys the drinks from the 10% he makes from his commission…” he stops and smiles.
Fate led him to end up this way but for the time that he is in town, we had 24 years of catching up to do.
As the Wise Counsellor reminds us: “A page of history is worth a volume of logic …”
Weekender Stories