I Do Not Come to You by Chance - By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani Page 0,3

The past is constraining but the future has no limits.’ He smiled again. ‘I shall call you Augustina.’

Augustina meditated on his words as she walked back inside. One of her cousins was named Onwubiko, ‘death please’, because his mother had lost seven children before he was born. She had another relative called Ahamefule, ‘my name should not get lost’, because he was the first son after six girls. And then her classmate in secondary school was called Nkemakolam, ‘my own should not lack from me’, because she was the first child after several years of childlessness. This method of choosing names was quite common but this Engineer man was a wonder. He said things and thought things like no other person she had ever met.

A few days later, Engineer returned for lunch. Afterwards, he asked Teacher if it was OK to sit and chat with Augustina in the garden. Teacher and Wife looked at themselves and back at Engineer. He repeated his request.

Augustina completed her tasks and went to meet him outside. He was sitting on a pile of firewood by the back fence and had pulled a smaller pile close to his side. As she approached, he looked her over from top to toe, like a glutton beholding a spread of fried foods.

‘What of your slippers?’ he asked softly.

Augustina looked at her feet.

‘Why not go and wear your slippers,’ he said.

She was used to walking around barefoot. But the way he spoke made her rush back in and fetch the slippers she usually wore to the market on Nkwo Day.

‘Augustina, you shouldn’t go around with your bare feet,’ he said, after she had sat down on the smaller pile of wood.

Augustina kept quiet and stared ahead at a large family of fowls advancing towards them. A bold member of the brood stretched its neck and pecked at some invisible snack by Engineer’s feet. A more audacious member marched towards her toe area and attempted to feed. Augustina jerked her leg quickly. The abrupt motion sent the fowls sprinting towards the other side of the compound in a tsunami of fright.

‘You know,’ he continued, ‘when the white man first came, a lot of people thought he didn’t have any toes. They thought that his shoes were his actual feet.’

He laughed in a jolly, drowsy way that made her smile a drowsy, jolly smile. She also had heard all sorts of amusing stories about when the white man first turned up. Her grandmother had told her that the very first time she saw a white man, she and her friends had run away, thinking it was an evil spirit.

‘You have such beautiful hair,’ Engineer continued. ‘Have you gone to school?’

‘Yes, I’ve finished secondary school.’

‘What of university? Don’t you want to read further?’

‘I’m learning how to sew.’

‘Ah. Learning how to sew and going to university are not the same thing. Look at all these people you see going to the farm every day.’ With his right hand, he drew a slow semi-circle in the air. ‘Do you know what they could have been if they had gone to school?’

She did not.

‘Some of them could have been great inventors, great doctors or engineers. Some of them would have been known in other parts of the world. Have you ever heard of the nature/nurture controversy?’

She had not.

‘These people,’ he said, turning to face her, ‘if they were taken away from this environment and placed somewhere else for a while . . . just a little while . . . they would all be very different.’

He kept quiet to allow her to digest his words. Then she remembered the discussion of the other day.

‘Is it true that monkeys are our ancestors?’ she asked.

Engineer smiled with gladness.

‘Augustina, I like you. You’re a smart girl. I like the way you listen and ask questions.’

One of her father’s wives had complained that this was her main problem in life, that she asked too many questions for a girl.

‘They call it evolution,’ he said, and then told her how scientists said that men were once monkeys, that the monkeys had gradually turned into human beings. He said that Christians were angry about this because the Bible says God created man.

‘Why was the world originally without form and void? Could God have created it that way?’ He shook his head vehemently, as if he were resetting the bones in his skull. ‘I don’t think so. There must have been another earth that existed before Genesis, which was destroyed. Some parts