Midnight Call

My room seemed to me the Goshen of the ninth plague as I peeped through the window in an attempt to hear the shouts and wails more clearly. No street lights, no corridor lights, no passageway lights. All was dark outside. The Nigeria of my own youth was not the Nigeria of my fathers’ youth. Things were now different. Structures and infrastructures were now dilapidated, destroyed or being looted in bits. It seemed all was gone. And all were truly going, slipping off our holds by little almost unrecognisable instalments. So unsudden was it that our adaptations to the realities as they came were likewise imperceptible. Swift. With each tiny step down the minute rungs of the ladder of progress. I looked out and saw nobody. The darkness was thick, palpable. Not even a single firefly was on the grasses or in the air to give some tiny trails of lemon light. Nature itself, it seemed, was at war with us. I released the window blind and slipped back on my bed, took a sad look at the books that had come to dominate my life, and sued for further sleep.
But it couldn’t have been different for us.........