Author: Nnanna Esther

 You little boy whom I don’t know. Your exact age, I don’t know that either but I’m guessing you’d be around 8 years old. In front of this dingy street, which I don’t know the name, you sit on a pavement aligning the deep convent. You are facing the road, your back to the street and your legs dangling inside the gutter. You look down into the gutter with fascination. My heart skips as I imagine you’d fall inside. While I passed you, I wondered what could be inside a gutter to be fascinating to a little boy to make…

“Grandpa, Chinedu is too small to take snuffs. Don’t you know that you are destroying his lungs by giving it to him? You ask your grandfather as he is teaching your younger brother how to put the deep brown powder into his nostrils. You try to imagine in your head, why grandpa should give that harmful powder to Chinedu, a very small boy of six. You stamp off to your father to tell him what Grandpa is doing, and meet him teaching your mother how to breathe-in air, after putting the powder into her nostrils. “What is all this?” you…