‘How many times is a man reborn in one life?’

He chuckled, looked at me, and carried on playing with unrestrained zest. Then someone came in through the door, bringing ghosts and memories and a magic, fleeting smile. I looked up. A flash dazzled me. It was the photographer. He had just taken a picture. He hurried over to Dad’s bedside. He made a quick speech about his best wishes and hopes for recovery. Dad did not recognise him. The photographer didn’t let it bother him. He took Dad’s hand and shook it. Dad made faces. The photographer took another picture. The flash hurt Dad and he groaned. The photographer, with an air of mystery, said:

‘They don’t know I am here. So I’m going.’

He touched me on the head, fondled my hair, put on his hat, and crept out into the compound as if everyone were after him.

‘When people keep running, something keeps pursuing them,’ the blind old man said, in his sepulchral voice.

The old man started to play again. Dad was so irritated that, to our amazement, he got out of bed and saw the blind old man to the door.

On the seventh day Dad rose miraculously from his condition. It was as if he had snapped out of a trance. The colours of his bruises had become fairly normal. His face was still disfigured, his eyes still swollen and angry, his wounds livid, but something in him had mended. His recovery surprised all of us. I woke up to find him jumping and shadow-boxing again. He looked lean but his eyes glowed. It seemed as if his illness and his escape into the world of infancy had given him fresh energies and accelerated his healing. He went to work, but came back early. He slept for a while, boxing in his dreams. When he woke up he made me tell him about his epic battle with Yellow Jaguar. He made me tell it several times. He didn’t seem to be able to remembermost ofwhathadhappened.Hespokeofthefightassomethingthathehad dreamt, and the illness as the only thing that had been real.

Mum returned late and told us of the preparations for the great rally. She said womenwereearningalot ofmoneycookingfortheeventandthatMadameKotohad offered her a job. She asked Dad if she should accept.

‘People will think you are a prostitute,’ Dad said.

‘But what about the money?’

‘Wedon’t need their stinkingmoney.’

Mum sulked for the rest of the night. It didn’t bother Dad because all he wanted to do was talk about his fight with Yellow Jaguar. He grew so obsessive about the fight that all through the next day he talked about it, made me repeat my account of how he had crouched low, and moved into the dark, how he had launched his counter-attack. The only thing that spoiled it for him was that there had been no one else apart from me who had witnessed the strange battle.

‘Are you sure no one else saw it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody woke up?’

‘No.’

Dad grunted in agony. It seemed to hurt him a little to have performed such a heroic feat unwitnessed.

‘So no one saw it?’‘No.’‘Not even a woman?’‘No.’‘No other children, no onepassed alongthestreet, no traders?’‘No.’‘So no one else saw me beat him?’‘No one.’‘Not even a dog, a cat?’‘Not even a dog or cat.’‘No strangers?’

‘No. Except three lights.’

‘What three lights?’ ‘Three lights,’ I said. He hit me on the head. ‘Then other lights came and joined them.’ He hit me again. I shut up. Dad was so impressed by his performance that he badly wanted to boast about it. He knew no one would believe him. But that, in the end, didn’t matter because after Dad got well he developed interesting powers and a kind of madness.

‘Maybe you have to overcome things first in the spirit world, before you can do it in this world, eh?’ he would say to the wind.

He went around, demented and restless, as if a jaguar had somehow got trapped in his brain. An unbearable energy bristled in him. Whenever he came near me I felt him shiveringlikeagreatanimalstartledby itsownferocity.

FOUR

AND SO DAD resumed training. He woke us up with his exercises. He went off to work, and came back early. In the evenings, after he had slept, he would practise at the housefront. The neighbours, who stayed outside drinking and talking because of the heat in their rooms, watched him. Most evenings they brought out their chairs and stools and made themselves comfortable in anticipation of Dad’s arrival. When enough people had gathered he would bound out of the room.

‘Black Tyger!’ the people would cheer.

Then shamelessly he would begin to shadow-box and make grunting noises. His activity drew so much interest that street hawkers, prostrate from a whole day’s wandering, would stop to watch him. Sellers of oranges, boiled eggs, bread, roasted ground-nuts, would crouch and stare at him. Some of them did quite well for themselves, selling their wares to the compound people. Some of them, seated on the sand, their basins of goods beside them, would eventually stretch out and fall asleep while Dad trained. Mallams and children on errands, old women on visits and charm-sellers, all stopped to watch for no other reason than that a crowd had formed around him.

Meanwhile, Dad jumped about, throwingcombinations to thefour winds.

‘Is this a new thing?’ one of them would ask.

‘Yes.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘A new thing, eh?’

‘Completely new.’

‘So who is he?’

‘They call him Black Tyger.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

The shop-owners and street traders around did excellent business on account of Dad. They all did good business, except Mum, who was unaware of the interest Dad wasgenerating,andwhoat that momentwasprobablypoundingthedustofthegreat ghetto wastes, selling nothing but a box of matches for the whole evening. While Mum wended her long way back home the street traders sold drinks and sweets, cigarettes and mosquito coils, kola-nuts and chewing gums, cheap sunglasses and kerosine lamps. They wove Dad’s antics into their sales cries; meanwhile, Dad sparred with the air and dust and shattered bricks with his fist. He developed such a reputation from fooling around at the housefront that everyone became afraid of him.

His fame spread on the wings of their fear.

I would wander round our area and pass bars and drinking houses and hear people talking about Black Tyger. I heard his name mentioned in the wind. Women talked about him in dark places. People argued about how he rated in comparison with current boxing heroes and decided in Dad’s favour, because he was unknown, because he belonged to the ghetto, and because he was not afraid to show the range of his styles to the people. When I told Dad about all this his obsession grew. We became very poor because of his obsession. We ate very little and he ate a lot, because his increased powers needed it. His appetite grew legendary, like that of the elephant. After he had trained for the evening, bathed, drank bottled malt and stout, he would settle down to eat. He ate ravenously. We would stare at him in horror as he swallowed mighty balls of eba.

‘There was once a man,’ Mum would say to me, ‘who choked on eba. They had to cut open his throat to get it out.’

‘That man was not Black Tyger,’ Dad would say, in between one gulp and another.

Not only did he swallow such death-defying dollops of eba, he ate gargantuan quantities as well. He ate as if his body were some sort of abyss. And he ate fast, as if he were attacking the food, ranging counter-gulps and eating-combinations on the massive portion. He ate so much that Mum became very lean indeed and I lost appetite for food. Dad did all our eating for us. And at the end of every meal he always complained about how the eba was never enough and how he could have done with more stew. He never spoke of the taste of the cooking. My stomach began to expand.

What made all this worse was that he brought back less money from work. He spent all his time thinking about boxing. He would travel long distances to see a free or a cheap boxingmatch.Hewoulddisappearforhours.Thenhebegantospendless money on food. For one thing, he drank more. After he had eaten he would go out and visit a round of bars and everywhere, on account of his new-found fame, people bought him drinks. He would come home drunk. The more he trained, the more he drank. And the more he drank, the madder he became, the more restless. He could spend an hour creakinghis joints, freeinghis body of trapped energies and frustrated dreams of greatness.