Beautiful Stuff

by Steve Akinkuolie

The day Baba Femi decided to bottle the wind was the day the whole village knew madness had a new landlord. His old mud house at the edge of Oja village, with its stubbornly leaning walls and unpredictable roof that trembled with every passing breeze, had seen many experiments. But this one — “this beautiful stuff,” as he called it — was different.

He sat on his bamboo chair, staring at the dusty sky as if in conversation with the spirits of wind and wisdom. His face, a map of deep trenches and folded years, bore the marks of a man who had walked too far into the forest of ideas and never found his way back. His wife, Mama Femi, had long given up trying to drag him home. “Let the river carry him where it pleases,” she often sighed to the neighbors, “as long as he brings back fish.”

On this particular morning, Baba Femi was armed with a small glass bottle, a wooden cork, and an incantation he had stolen from the mad poet of the next village, who spoke only in riddles and owed debt to every palm-wine tapper from here to Ibadan. The plan was simple: capture the wind, bottle it, and sell it to those in need. “Eh-heh,” Baba Femi mused, stroking his chin, “people buy bottled water. They buy bottled pepper. Why not bottled wind?”

His first attempt was ambitious. He stood in the center of the village square, raised his bottle high and called upon the wind with the confidence of a man summoning his debtor. The wind did come — suddenly and violently — snatching his bottle from his hand, slapping him with his own cap, and rolling him into the lap of Mama Bose, the fat akara seller, who had been fanning her fire with the enthusiasm of a woman married to her craft.

“Baba Femi, you want to kill me?” she screeched, flinging a hot akara ball at him. It bounced off his bald head and landed in the dust. “You are disturbing my business!”

He picked himself up, dusted his pride, and returned home. Failure was only the beginning of genius, he told himself. If lightning had given up after its first strike, we would all be in darkness.

* * *

The next morning, Oja village woke to find Baba Femi standing on the roof of his house, a large calabash in one hand and a cow tail in the other, chanting words that belonged neither to Yoruba, nor to English, nor to the secret language of goats. He had devised a new method: summon the wind respectfully, invite it for a meeting, and then trick it into the bottle like luring a chicken with corn.

The village children gathered below, watching with the anticipation of a people who knew that disaster and entertainment often wore the same trousers.

“I call you, wind of our ancestors! Come forth, spirit of the air! Enter this calabash, and let us do business!”

The wind obliged. But it came not as a whisper, not as a breeze, but as a furious gust that picked up his wrapper and exposed secrets that had been hidden since 1962.

The village women screamed. The children cheered. Baba Femi, in his struggle to hold his dignity together, lost his balance and tumbled off the roof, landing in a spectacular embrace with the goat that had been minding its business near Mama Chika’s vegetable stall.

“Ah-ah! This is not ordinary wind!” Mama Chika screamed, covering her eyes.

“It is the work of the gods,” muttered old Baba Ibeji, who had been drinking palm wine since dawn and could see the invisible hands of destiny in everything.

But Baba Femi was not discouraged. A man who wrestles with the wind must not be afraid of a little exposure.

* * *

Three weeks later, he had perfected the art. He had captured the wind. It sat, swirling in a dozen glass bottles, each labeled with different names: “Harmattan Breeze” for those who wanted cold air, “Market Day Gust” for those who needed to chase flies from their food and “Whispering Lover’s Wind” for the desperate bachelors who wished to send messages to women too far away to hear their words.

He set up a stall in the market. The villagers came, curious and amused. Some came to buy, others to mock and a few just to confirm whether madness had finally cooked itself into a meal.

Mama Bose was the first customer. “Baba Femi,” she said, arms folded, “if this wind does not blow, I will refund myself with that foolish cap of yours.”

Baba Femi smiled. He picked a bottle labeled “Gentle Breeze,” uncorked it carefully, and — lo and behold! — a soft, cool air escaped, brushing Mama Bose’s face with a relief that smelled of fresh rain and unbothered ancestors.

“Ehn?!” she gasped. “This thing is real?”

Before long, the queue stretched from the akara stall to the village chief’s palace. People fought for the best wind. Mama Ronke bought “Argument Ender,” hoping it would silence her mother-in-law. Young Dipo bought “Proposal Wind,” convinced that a soft breeze at the right moment would make Sade finally say yes.

Even Chief Kolade, the man who had once declared Baba Femi a “useless dreamer,” came and bought a bottle labeled “Royal Wind.”

“If you say this wind is royal,” the chief warned, adjusting his agbada, “it had better smell of wealth and intimidation.”

Baba Femi, wise to the ways of the world, had soaked that particular bottle in the chief’s favorite perfume and the sweat of a tax collector. When the chief opened it, a strong, commanding air filled the market, making people instinctively bow.

“Aha!” the chief declared, nodding in satisfaction. “This is beautiful stuff!”

* * *

But, as it is with all great men, trouble soon arrived, this time in the form of the District Officer, a skinny, humorless man whose trousers were always too tight for the weight of his own self-importance.

“You cannot sell the wind,” he declared, adjusting his monocle. “The government owns the air!”

Baba Femi, never one to be intimidated by colonial echoes, laughed. “Did the government create the air?”

“That is not the point!” the officer snapped. “If you make money from it, you must pay tax!”

“And what tax does the wind pay?” Baba Femi asked.

The officer had no answer. He stormed off, muttering about native stubbornness and papers that needed signing. But, by the time he returned with an official document, the entire stock of bottled wind had sold out, and Baba Femi had disappeared like the very air he had mastered.

Some say he went to the next village, where he now sells “Portable Tornadoes” to farmers who want to clear their lands. Others say he moved to Lagos, where he tried to bottle traffic but was chased by danfo drivers.

But those who know the truth say that every now and then, when the harmattan wind blows just right through Oja village, you can hear his laughter carried in the air, the laughter of a man who once sold the wind and made the whole world believe in beautiful stuff.