The orchestra

yinka ogunlami

February 10, 2017 3:34 PM

The driver's rendition was an excellent annihilation of a war ship song.

The orchestra

That was how the driver started singing that famous song:

Lif him up haia

Lif him up hia

Da law is goo

I we lif him up haia

Efrywear I go

I we lif him up haia.

My attention was like a ball in the grips of Chilavert. The driver's rendition was an excellent annihilation of a war ship song. A smile sliced across my face. I thought I was the one hard of hearing but the closer I listened proved me wrong. Every silenced morpheme, every distorted phoneme, every corrupt intonation grated my sensibilities.

Throughout the thirty-minute drive, I stewed in that frog of a voice. The conductor's shouts of different destinations was a perfect part to a wonderful two-man orchestra. The bus' engine chugged on despairingly as the tyres went in and out of the potholes that beautified the looooooong road. I became a dancer -- a reluctant dancer.

An expression kept floating "lif him up." My mind arranged it and it became "Lift Him up." And thus came a question: Isn't the meaning of the word "up" contained in "lift"? Why then do we have to "lift anything or anyone up when we can simply lift them?

Thus I rode on the hypnosis of the vibrating hall beyond my destination. I had become the music. The woman beside me was saying something like "The driver has fallen asleep." I did not give the kind of response she expected so she repeated what she said earlier but with a slight modification. She swapped "The driver" for "The president." That was when I ripped myself from the music and shouted "O wa Owa!" That was the song I was singing, no, shouting when I heard my roomate say: "Kilowa? Gerout of bed joor. Ooni lo class loni ni?

yinka ogunlami