Laws
by Tolu Ogunlesi.
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Right from their first meeting Jaiyeola Desmond knew that his wife’s father never particularly fancied him. The meeting was at the old man’s wife’s grand fortieth birthday party in 1963. As boyfriend to Mrs. Desmond (then known as Sade Bankole), he had got an invitation – even if only a verbal one, from his girlfriend – to the "party of the century" (as reported by the Daily Lighthouse of May 27, 1963), held on a boat anchored at the Ikoyi Boat Club. Otunba Bankole had been the first black member of the Club.
Mr. Desmond remembers only too well his introduction to his future father-in-law. Sade had chosen a moment before the party kicked off, while her father stood alone, all five feet of worldly success and godlike bearing; gazing intently at a painting on the wall of the boat. It had been said that he respected the aestheticism of art more than the humanity of his business competitors.
“Daddy, this is Jaiye Desmond…”
Jaiye – the bulk of his mental and physical energies diverted to battling a seasickness goblin holed up somewhere in his upper-stomach, leaving only a ragtag remnant to handle the nervousness that accompanies an encounter with a man of Otunba Bankole’s mystique – had mumbled a greeting.
“Good afternoon Sir. Nice to meet you Sir. I’m having a good time Sir!” All of this sealed with a tortuous, foolish grin.
“I see,” Otunba Bankole had said, holding up his glass in such a manner as to make it appear that he was viewing Mr. Desmond through the red of the wine it held. Then he turned to his daughter. “What did you say his name was?”
“Jaiyeola Desmond Sir,” Jaiye burst out. The first Law of Indiscretion; indiscretion as a defense against budding condescension.
“Desmond… Desmond… the Desmonds I know are Trinidadian, you can’t possibly be related to them…”
“Yes Sir, I mean no Sir… there are actually quite a number of Desmonds around, mostly unrelated. Perhaps the only thing we all share in common is the slave trade.” He added this with a chuckle, more self-congratulatory (on account of his mounting self-confidence and on account of a sudden ceasefire called by the sea-goblin) than in an acknowledgement of an exhibited sense of humour.
Otunba Bankole frowned. “You seem to be proud of the slave trade. It must be an honour to be a descendant of slaves.” He let out a laugh, a short burst of it, fart-length.
“Daddy, no one has any choices about their ancestry or pedigree,” Sade had defended.
“I see. So where is the young man from…?”
That was the last thing the Otunba said before hauling his agbada off to greet a guest who had just arrived. Sade and Jaiyeola evaded each other’s eyes as her father walked off.
“Who painted this?” said Jaiyeola straight away. It was a moment of pure awkwardness, one that he has not come close to replicating in the thirty-plus years since then. He stepped close to the painting, so close that his nose was only inches away and he could smell the canvas; the apparent foolishness (or was it simply a mild clumsiness?) of a few moments earlier appearing to have permanently cured him of his physical sickness, replacing it with a lightheadedness, a faint, elusive swirl of dementedness.
He can’t remember the answer Sade gave, or if she bothered to answer at all. Perhaps he should have apologised to her for associating himself with slavery in front of her father.
Jaiyeola Desmond spent the rest of the evening wondering whether his indeterminate ancestry would elicit any reading at all on Otunba Bankole’s pedigree-o-meter; and foolishly dreaming he could suddenly discover himself to have originated from Trinidad.
In the years that followed he never stopped feeling he skillfully blew a oncein- a-lifetime opportunity to prove himself to his father-in-law-to-be.
***
Sade Desmond (they got married in '73), as the only daughter of her father got a quite tidy inheritance from her old man. But the old man laid down conditions. Otunba Bankole's will stated that under no condition whatsoever was any of the property that Sade would be inheriting to be disposed of, and that the rubber factory that he left to her would, at her death, pass to the oldest surviving member of the Bankole family who would decide what was to be done with it.
The will went on to state that a trust fund be set up for all Sade’s children, which was to be managed, not by her – their mother – but by a Board of Trustees. Rumour has it that there was a clause (mercifully expunged) that stated that Mrs. Desmond would only be entitled to all that the will provided for her provided she retained her maiden name alongside her husband's. Mrs. Bankole-Desmond. Every time Mr. Desmond thinks of this, he shudders.
But he can swear on his great-grandfather’s pelvic-girdle (and this he has done a number of times) that those clauses were all targeted at him – designed to prevent him from gaining access to or enjoying even a tiny slice of his father-in-law's stupendous wealth. He wouldn’t be so direct as to impose a husband of his choice on his daughter, but he still found a way to impose his wishes and make a point nonetheless.
Not a few people believed the old man was behind the infamous cocoa rumour of June 1958, in order to do his competitors in. News of Otunba Bankole’s involvement in a fatal car crash in Akure in June of 1958 led to a (quite literal) overnight crash of the price of cocoa by eighty percent. Men who went to bed rich, by virtue of the tonnes of cocoa beans sitting patiently in their warehouses waiting to be shipped to Europe, woke up to find out that their still-full warehouses were symbolically empty. Such was the surreal grip that Otunba Bankole had on the cocoa industry of western Nigeria that no law of Economics could explain the scenario.
Meanwhile, at the time he was supposed to have been involved in the crash, Otunba Bankole was far away in England brushing snow off his shoulders as he inspected 18th century manors for possible acquisition.
***
It quickly dawned on Jaiyeola Desmond that he and his wife would be unable to sell any of the real estate and impressive art collection she inherited. This qualified, in his opinion, as a direct financial blow.
The money-spinning rubber factory would pass, neither to him if she died before him, nor to their children, but to some stupid old family head who deserved a rubber casket and not a rubber factory. This Mr. Desmond surmised to be an indirect blow, more psychological than financial; a disincentive, designed to discourage him from attempting to take over or run the business; banking on the fact that he would not – as long as the ageless male ego evaded extinction – want to invest his energy running and profiting from a business that'd end up in the hands of the enemy. He'd rather leave it to his wife to run. Or ruin.
But it had equally not taken long for Mr. Desmond to realize that his father-in-law had, if only this once, acted rather foolishly. For father-in-law could shield his assets from son-in-law, but could not prevent son-in-law from subtly, smartly running those assets aground. Not only the ones in Mrs. Desmond’s inheritance, but in fact every Bankole asset wherever it lay on the face of the planet.
This was how it came to be that, not long after his father-in-law's death in '80, Mr. Desmond chanced upon a hobby that would engage him almost as much as his banking career – inflicting collateral damage on the Bankole business legacy.
It still hasn't occurred to many philosophers that the millionaire father-in-law who insists that his son-in-law exists to be humiliated, will in the hands of a vengeful son-inlaw, spin in endless angst-powered circles in his mausoleum. To a large extent Mr. Desmond succeeded in his self-appointed task. He would often imagine that by the time he was through, his father-in-law's bones would be spinning at the speed of light in his Taj Mahal. No laws, of Physics, or any other science, would be able to explain this.
***
The son-in-law’s extensive connections in the business world, by virtue of his meteoric rise through the ranks of Summit Bank in the `80s, made his work easy. One example: As a member of the Presidential Review Panel on Import Duties in '85, he engineered a downward review of the import duties on rubber – from fifteen percent to two-and-a half percent. Imported rubber thus became much cheaper than before, and local industries, of whom the Bankole factory was a field-leader, filed to their deaths one after the other. He concluded his mission of business euthanasia at about the time he founded ArrowBank.
It had always been his dream to found, or at least head a Finance House that would be the toast of the financial services sector. Twelve years as COO of Summit Bank, Nigeria's second largest merchant bank had adequately prepared him to start his own bank. He hadn't been the first Nigerian to single-handedly set up a bank, but he did manage to build it into such a successful business that it came to the notice of a consortium of foreign investors who invested heavily in it and allowed him to run it.
***
On the day that the bank, ArrowBank, was launched, at a glitzy ceremony at the Lagos Hilton Hotel, in the swarm of the elite crowd – captains of Industry, diplomats, the Lagos and Ogun State Governors, newspaper editors, a Presidential representative; amidst the flowing champagne and banter and flashing cameras and sophisticated electronic displays; Mr. Desmond caught someone staring at him. It was a gaze both serious and playful in intent, proceeding from a pair of eyes twinkling and murderous at the same time – a rare combination that made you want to suddenly visit the toilet or drown your head beneath an iron pillow.
Otunba Bankole had been one of the major backers and financiers of the Lagos Hilton project. In fact, it had been one of his last investments, before his death from prostate cancer in October '80. Which was why his photograph hung in the Blue Room, the largest of the Hilton's halls, where Mr. Desmond had chosen to hold his launch. As Mr. Desmond would later discover, the photograph had not always hung in the Blue Room. But by some stroke of serendipity, the management of the Hilton had, only two days before the ArrowBank launch, decided (at its recently resuscitated monthly top management Committee meeting) to relocate the photographs of its founders from the Purple Room to the Blue Room, and to commission a set of portraits to replace them in the Purple Room.
So it happened that the actual relocation was carried out on the morning of the launch, conveying the impression to an observer (only that there were no observers) that Otunba Bankole had somehow wangled his way into the long, distinguished stream of invited guests as they arrived for the event.
In the midst of all the goings-on minutes before the 9 o’clock start of the launch, as guests filed in and exchanged hugs and embraces and business cards, as ushers bustled about, and as the last balloons and banners were hoisted above the room, somewhere in the midst of all these, two or three bow-tied Hilton waiters heaved half a dozen huge, framed photographs onto their positions on the walls, blissfully unaware of any wider or deeper implications bound to their task that morning. It just happened that one of those photographs was Otunba Bankole’s.
Perhaps as he caught his breath up there on the wall (after the early morning exertion) Otunba Bankole shuddered to imagine how close he came to missing his son-inlaw’s finest hour.
But, as always, all is well that, as they say, ends well. There he was now, part of the celebrations, a slightly twisted smile on his thin lips. What did it matter that his father-inlaw was the last person Mr. Desmond had expected to see on his happiest day in life.
The old man on the wall was clad in his full regalia as a High Chief of Ekiti – the same regalia in which he was buried. From time to time throughout the whole event Mr. Desmond would lift his eyes to acknowledge his special guest, who hung quietly up on the wall, and whose gaze in return followed the Chief Host around. Whether the guest’s lips actually ever moved or not, Mr. Desmond will never be able to confidently tell. The only thing he remembers perfectly well is the instant he heard the laughter.
The Master-of-Ceremonies had cracked a joke that tickled the jaws of the guests to no small end. By natural law, what happens in such a situation is that the multitude of individual laughters will blend together – into one immense, blandly anonymous, cultured Public Laugh – in a process one might call “synergistic.” Which is exactly what transpired in the Blue Room of the Hilton that fateful day.
But on this particular day, there was a little problem. In the course of the transmission of the crowd’s mirth to Mr. Desmond’s ears, there had been some sort of hitch, a tampering-with of its identity.
For the half-minute that the guests laughed, Jaiyeola Desmond heard nothing but the discomfitingly familiar, brassy, minatorial laughter of his long-dead father-in-law. It scrolled through his ears in different incarnations, different keys, different frequencies, tumbling restlessly into one another like kids let loose after Mathematics; on and on like the morning sickness of a Peugeot engine.
***
That laughter was all that the son-in-law needed to know that his dream, ArrowBank, was a dream with an expiry date stamped on it. Envy or no envy, ArrowBank was born to die. It would take off, surely it would, and flourish, for years even, like Otunba Bankole's businesses in the fifties and sixties. But, one day, it would unassumingly and quietly take the guestroom in Otunba Bankole’s marble mausoleum. The Otunba had ensured that. It was a Law. The Law of the Avenging In-Law.
That must have been why the old man built a mausoleum that had a spare room. When they buried him no one had known what the spare room was supposed to be for. It simply had an inscription in a strange script.
Now, Jaiyeola Desmond could swear that he knew the meaning of the cryptic inscription, and the purpose of the room. It was simply a guest room for a son-in-law's lofty dreams.
©2007 By Tolu Ogunlesi