Finding Happiness

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Anulika’s woes began the very day she said “I do” to Chris. Since then, her life has been a rollercoaster. Sometimes she wondered how come throughout the period they courted, she hadn’t seen any signs to warn her against plunging deeper into the hell she now experienced.

Whenever she prayed for her husband, she fantasized about this former Chris who had been the epitome of everything lovely and lovable and wished she could have him back. He had been the tower on which her fragile self leaned in precarious moments. Now that he has become the harbinger of her misery, only God could save her – or so she thought.

To clear your doubts, Anulika had been in no haste to get married. A fresh Economics graduate from the University, her dream had been to get a well paying job, secure her aging mother a better life and save up for her future kids. Getting married was last on the list. Ever since her school days, she had always waded off advances from guys, even those who promised her heaven and earth. She had a mental picture of her ideal man and had committed the process of discovering him into God’s hands. She wanted to raise a noble Christian family so whoever would get married to her must be able to partner with her to achieve this. He must be God fearing, dark in complexion, tall but not skinny and possess some level of financial security. Whoever did not make the cut was a mere waste of time.

But then, is it not said that one’s life does not belong solely to one? Anulika failed to consider this in her standard setting orgy. Soon enough, her mother began to intrude on her breathing space. She became a regular visitor in Anulika’s rented apartment in New Haven.

Things Anulika already knew were rung into her ears time and again. Did she know she wasn’t getting any younger? Didn’t she realise that she – Anulika – was her only child? Or did she want to be reminded of how the icy hands of death snatched her brother Tobe from her some years back? Would it be a thing of joy for her to watch her poor mother go to the netherworld without setting her aging eyes on her grandchildren, just like her unfortunate father had?

Anulika had been so frustrated by these endless and annoying gimmicks that she had contemplated kicking her mother out on many occasions.

Just when Anulika had almost given up on finding the man of her dreams and was beginning to take into consideration the stream of men both fate and her mother were bringing her way, Chris came into the picture.

It seemed as though God had intentionally delayed his arrival until then as a way of testing her level of patience and faith. Anulika had prayed for a man who would not only be her lover but also an ardent lover of God. Chris was the man! She could not contain her joy when after she had slyly raised the issue of premarital sex in one of their seldom conversations, he had sternly opined how detestable he found the idea. He was the complete package, with some extra sauce! Or so she thought.

No sooner had Chris voiced his intention to marry her than the marriage preparations started. Anulika’s mother took a special liking to him and therefore ensured he was in the good books of the Umunna. This made the marriage rites speed up.

Matters were concluded so swiftly that it was more as if Chris had a free entry into the family. Even the customary bride price was drastically lessened. According to Anulika’s mother, since Anulika accepted him wholeheartedly and from her own judgement, he was a potential husband material, there was no point obscuring things for him.

Little did she know, however, that this same man would soon become a source of nightmares to her daughter.

As stated earlier, it all began on the day they both tied the knot in what was meant to be an everlasting conjugal bliss.

On their wedding night, Anulika had gotten the shock of her life when barely minutes after they got home, Chris, without uttering a word, violently pushed her to the bed and hurriedly stripped her of her immaculate wedding gown. She was taken aback by this so much so that she couldn’t struggle. Besides, she was fatigued from the boisterousness of the wedding. Her lovely husband didn’t stop there. He went on to tear her panties apart and crouched low before her, peering keenly into her private crevice. The real shocker came when, with a disgusted look on his face, he poked his clasped index and middle fingers into her vagina, still looking intently at it.

Anulika couldn’t take it anymore. What was this husband of hers doing?

“Honey, what’s wrong?” she finally asked, uneasily.

No response. The force with which he used in stroking her down there only doubled and his search for whatever it was became more frantic. After more awkward minutes passed, he finally withdrew from her. A more irritated expression was now etched on his face.

“So they were right, afterall,” he said eventually.

“What do you mean?” asked Anulika, queasily.

“They were right. You’re not a virgin!”

Anulika’s mouth opened agape suddenly, devoid of its own volition. Her mouth instantly lost the supply of moisture and her brows were raised in amazement. She stared wide-eyed at her husband, struggling hard to get out of this state of disequilibrium that his words had just left her in.

He wasn’t done with her yet.

“You hypocrite!” he thundered. “So you’ve been sleeping around all these while then you go ahead behaving like Virgin Mary before me, right? Today, the cat has been let out of the stinking bag! Do you hear me? Your secret has been exposed!”

Chris had gone on and on, raining all manner of insults on his dear wife. He went on to ask how many men there were that had tasted of her. And how many other lies she told in the course of their courtship. If there were more, she should do herself the favour of confessing and save herself the inevitable shame that would come from him unearthing them himself.

When Chris was done ranting, he picked up a pillow from the bed and headed for the sitting room, slamming the door behind him. Anulika had been left in a state of blatant shock. It was as though the person who had just walked out on her was a total stranger. She found it hard to believe that it was the same man with whom she had spent the past six months with. Her Chris would neither do nor say all that this man had just done and said to her. She felt insulted, used, defiled. The last time she felt something close to this was the day she was gang raped at the age of fifteen.

For two weeks straight after the humiliating episode, Chris refused to speak to his wife, talk more of share their matrimonial bed with her. One would mistake them for flat mates and not not newly weds. Anulika tried all she could to win back her husband, to no avail.

She cooked him his favourite, ofe onugbu with utaraji countless times. The food was always left untouched. According to him, he couldn’t eat any food prepared with soiled hands. No day passed without her saying sorry to him but all her sorrys fell on deaf ears and whenever she attempted to strike a conversation with her husband, she was always ignored.

Anulika had not yet recovered from the harrowing experience of her wedding night and being that there was no one to talk to, it was worse for her. Chris had seized her mobile phone and banned her indefinitely from leaving the house. Sometimes she wondered what he told people when they asked after her. He would make sure to lock all the exit doors and carry the keys along to work. Besides, what would she tell whoever it was that cared to listen? Where would she begin? How would she narrate the story without either implicating her husband or getting the blame herself?

So she fell back to the most reliable source of succour she has known her entire life. She prayed. Day and night, without ceasing. Whenever Chris left for work, she prayed. In between chores during the day, she didn’t stop praying. At night when Chris was snuggled up on the sitting room couch, she didn’t fail to pray.

She prayed for a myriad of things, but mostly for her husband. She prayed for him to have a change of heart, that his attitude towards her changes so that they might begin to live the lives of the true Christian couple that she has always envisaged.

One day, after having spent about two weeks of detention in her husband’s house, Anulika was finally able to see the light of day and breathe fresh air. As fate would have it, her husband had not locked the doors that day. Whether he had done so mistakenly or on purpose, she didn’t care to know. She only saw it as the way God had chosen to answer her prayers. She saw it as a rare opportunity to be duly utilized.

That day, the only place she went to was her church, to see her spiritual father and confidant Pastor Arinze. He was the only one she could trust with her burden at that moment. He was the only one who would understand. So, to church she went.

There, she poured out her heart to him, sobbing intermittently. She didn’t hide anything from the man of God. She didn’t even consider her own mother as being worthy enough to hear some of the things she told him.

Being a man of few words, the widowed Pastor Arinze simply listened attentively to all Anulika had to say after which he asked her some questions which he termed salient. Was she sure she hadn’t done anything to annoy her husband since the episode began? Did she love Chris as much as she claimed to? Would she be able to stay with him through thick and thin just as she had vowed at the altar of God, no matter what came her way? Even though her answers to these questions were all in the affirmative, the thought of spending the rest of her life with this stranger who was her husband was quite worrisome. But she didn’t have a choice, or so she thought.

Pastor Arinze thought it prudent to accompany Anulika home afterwards. So after they had prayed together for a stretch of hours, they sojourned together to her matrimonial home.

Chance Encounters

As Chris drove home from work that evening, his mind raced through numerous thoughts. He wondered what he had gotten himself into. How long more could he hide his embarrassingly ugly secret from Anulika? Sometimes he considered telling her straight up, but then his ego always reared its head. Besides, if he did, it would ruin both their lives.

He wondered what would have become of him if his wife had turned out to be a virgin, if what he had heard about her being a rape victim had been false. What other ploy would he have devised to legitimize his inability to have sex with his wife?

After giving it much thought, he had decided the altruistic thing to do was to let her go. But he couldn’t tell her this to her face as well. She had suffered much from him already. He didn’t intend to compound that. So he had left the doors unlocked today and unearthed her mobile phone from where he had hidden it. It’d be a whole lot easier that way, he had thought.

When Chris got home, he was stunned to find his wife seated in the sitting room with a young man dressed in a well ironed three piece suit. He recognized him as the man who had said the opening prayer at his wedding, who Anulika had introduced to him as her pastor earlier on. Without waiting to hear any explanation, he barked angrily at his wife.

“Who the hell did you invite to my house without my consent?”

“Dear, welcome. This is Pastor Arinze. He only came to…”

He didn’t allow her to complete the statement before he gave her a hot slap on her face. Taken aback by this, Pastor Arinze tried to calm Chris down but the latter responded rather coldly.

“Hang it there, young man! Don’t you have better things to do than to poke your nose into the affairs of others? If you know what’s good for you, get out of my house right now… before I lose my temper!”

With those words, Anulika was again confined in the dungeon that was her matrimonial home.

In the days that followed, Anulika’s condition deteriorated. She would have felt more comfortable living in a real prison, knowing at least that she was being punished for a crime she committed. It was worse here because she didn’t understand what she was being punished for. Chris would hit her at the slightest provocation. If it wasn’t because his meal was served late, it would be because she spoke back or questioned him while he doled out instructions to her. But most often, the bane of his beatings was usually around the subject of his refusal to perform his conjugal duties. At these instances, he would always remind her about the virgin he had thought he married, but the whore he got instead.

Though Chris no longer imposed a curfew on her, the emotional cage in which he put her was overwhelmingly horrendous. He still refused to share the same bed with her and she no longer bothered to cook for him because the food always ended up either in the microwave or dustbin. In her twenty-eight years on earth, the only times she had experienced the feel of a man were when she was brutally raped years back and then unceremoniously fingered by her own husband.

Once, at the advice of a colleague at work, she had tried to seduce her husband. Adorned in her immaculate see through nightgown, she had approached him as he lay on the couch in the sitting room. This had resulted in her being hospitalized for days due to the numerous punches she had received in response.

Nobody had to remind her that she wasn’t getting any younger and desperately needed some good loving after those painful years of recuperating from the rape incident and then painstakingly keeping herself for her husband, who was clearly not interested in her.

With her mother’s recent pesterings for her to give her a grandchild, her husband’s belligerence worsening by the day and an intensified libido, Anulika’s woes had climaxed and she had to make a drastic decision, before things got out of hand.

She had all these in mind as she drove to Pastor Arinze’s house that cool evening, never to return to that prison she called a home. Her mother’s endless naggings rang loud in her ears as she tearfully poured her heart out to him like she had never done during her visits in the past weeks. The hot slaps she had received from Chris that day when she attempted to seduce him resounded in her ears as she hugged Pastor Arinze tightly, refusing to let go when he patted her on the shoulder as she cried uncontrollably.

And as their bodies finally responded to the mutual chemistry they felt, her sexual drive was not only satisfied but she felt happiness like never before.