Our Old Neighbor

IT WAS recently that I got into the habit of thinking about the family that used to live in the bungalow opposite our old house. This would not have happened, I believe, had I not come across a newspaper report about their eldest son. Bad news, to be clear, which left me shaken, and it was after I’d read it that I began to think about that family, the Obidis, that maybe if all had gone right with them, the photo of their firstborn would not have appeared in the Saturday Crime section of The Punch.

I think things started to change for them when Mrs. Obidi died. I was then too young to have known what caused her death, but from the little I could gather from my parents’ conversation, it seemed to have something to do with the conception of a child, which had baffled me, because I’d thought with three boys, why did they have to bother with having another? But I could have been wrong. It could have been something else that had caused her death. I was really too young to know.

What I later knew of, clearly, was the incident—a scandal, if we could call it that—that followed her death. I knew this because everyone on our street was discussing it, even my parents, not in secret but in the open, as if by discussing it so openly, people were hoping to shame Mr. Obidi for having done what he’d done.

The matter was that Mrs. Obidi hadn’t even been dead for long—not sure how long—when Mr. Obidi returned home one evening with a woman. A new wife.

Everyone said he was insensitive. How could he have brought home another woman so soon? His wife’s corpse was still fresh in the grave and here he was