Abiola. Part 1

It's a warm afternoon in 1978 in Lagos, Nigeria. Abiola, twenty-five-year-old final-year medical student at Uni Zaria, is sitting on a plush sofa in her father's sitting room, clutching a light pink small pillow embellished with two flower stalks made with red and blue satin threads, She's watching NTA News but doesn'+ hear what the presenter is saying due to the poor signal. The fussy image of the reporter, whom Abiola thinks is wearing a blouse with a very huge lopsided head tie locally called "gele" almost like it's about to fall off, doesn't stay in one place; it's darting from the top of the screen to the bottom with a rhythmic fervour and a sound akin to that produced when a piece of paper is being rubbed on a cemented floor with a few grains of sand on it, "shhhh... .. She stands up, moves straight to the medium-sized TV interposed in the middle of a brown varnished shelf, and switches it off. Just then, her dad, popularly called "chief", a wealthy contractor and a friend to some top military officials, comes into the sitting room. She greets him, and he nods his head and goes straight to a corner in the sitting room where the telephone is kept. He rotates the dial and places the telephone on his ear while its springy wire dangles as he speaks. She looks at him and thinks about how the house had been before her mom left for the UK, the house is relatively peaceful now. Her mother was always fighting with her father over his philandering acts. Chief was always seen in clubs with small girls and never came home on time, sometimes he never came home at all. Her mother was always going to hotels to fight the girls, despite Abiola's warnings. Somehow, she always got information about his whereabouts, and the last time she did this, The girl gave her the beating of her life, and she ended up in the hospital with severe pains all over, Abiola looks at the living room and remembers how controlling her father is. It's not just the fact that he handpicked every single piece of furniture in their sitting room, it's the fact that he enforces his decisions on everyone around him. She always wanted to be an artist: everything about paintings and drawings gave her a sense of relish. She isn't much of a talker, and art to her was a way of expressing her thoughts, So many people also didn't understand this part, and then she concluded that art is esoteric. Her father forced her to study Medicine and said she had to do it in the UK. After a lot of back and forths, he finally allowed her to pick a school of her choice in the country. and she picked ABU Zaria, why not? It was the best choice for her. far from Lagos, where she can't be monitored by him and his wealthy friends, and far away from the cacophony of the home front.