Why did AUNTY KUBURAT do it?

Her name was Aunty Kuburat

By Samod Biobaku

Sixthsense34@yahoo.com

If you read chapter one of this, then I guess you already know who I am.

However, this chapter is not about me. It’s about ‘Aunty Kuburat.’ We all know those kind of aunts we’re not biologically related to but for some strange reason, we still end up placing that ‘Aunty’ prefix before their names. If you’re a Nigerian, then you should have had loads of them especially in your formative years. Remember that ‘Aunty Biola,’ ‘Aunty Jane,’ ‘Aunty Fatima,’ ‘Aunty Jumai,’ ‘Aunty Ubong,’ ‘Aunty Joy,’ ‘Aunty Joke,’ ‘Aunty Toyin’ and the list is endless. For some, they never even enjoyed the luxury of having a name behind the ‘Aunty’ prefix. It was just ‘Aunty’ and nothing more.

Well, mine was ‘Aunty Kuburat’ and even as a kid, I always wondered why the publishers of the dictionary failed to have her image under the word ‘weird.’

Oh yes! Aunty Kuburat was very weird. She did two things that I will never forget but today, I’ll tell you the first one that I found not just absurd but incredibly bizarre.

Aunty Kuburat liked bar soaps. Yes she did and there was a particular brand she loved more than any other. In fact, I can’t ever remember her with any other brand of bar soap. Her brand was the ‘Canoe soap.’ Yeah! If you were born in the 70s or 80s, then you must remember that very green bar soap that parents and guardians used to love to do the laundry with. Canoe Soap was loved for two reasons – It’s didn’t dissolve as fast as other brands and it gave coloured fabrics a longer life span.

However, for Aunty Kuburat, it was a very different ball game. If I hadn’t witnessed what she did with the bar soap, I would have branded whoever told me this tale a pathological liar but I saw it with my very own eyes perhaps because she was a neighbour.

Besides the ‘Canoe’ bar soap, Aunty Kuburat also loved cigarettes and her brand was the ‘Benson’ brand. In the daytime, she would smoke a lot of cigarette sticks; most times half a pack a day and at other times, a whole pack on a daily basis.

I was young and as one raised to be morally upright, it wasn’t surprising that I found her habit a deviant practice. Well, I was young and very naïve so I looked on with the eyes of a child.

The fact that she smoked might not have been worth dedicating an entire chapter to but like I said earlier, the things Aunty Kuburat did with her ‘Canoe’ bar soap remain unforgettable.

I began to notice her obsession for the Canoe bar soap at night. I noticed that whenever she was going into the bathroom and stepping out of it, she always had the canoe bar soap, her bathing sponge and a little sponge case with her.

It wasn’t hard to discover that Aunty Kuburat was having her bath with a bar soap. I was initially confused because I had never seen anyone bathing with the Canoe bar soap. As far as I was concerned, it was as good as taking a bath with ‘Omo’ or ‘Ariel’ detergents but this was what Aunty Kuburat did every night.

Once more, I could have ignored this as another one of her weird chapters until I discovered one more thing that she did with the Canoe Soap. Oh my goodness! This one got me confused for weeks. No wonder I never forgot.

As a result of her weird habits, overtime, I developed a strange interest in watching her whenever I could and that was when I discovered what Aunty Kuburat did with her Canoe bar soap in the mornings.

I noticed that after using the bar soap to scrub her body and bath at nights, she would put a little water in the sponge case and submerge the bar soap into the water. I was naturally curious so I watched on.

On the morning of revelation, I was up early and had my eyes on Aunty Kuburat and sometime before noon, I saw her step out of her room with her sponge case which contained the water and the bar soap she had submerged in it the previous night. I was eager to know why she did that.

That morning, she went straight to the tap, laid her sponge case on the floor and dipped her hand into the sponge case to bring out the Canoe bar soap, which was not soft. Before my very eyes, Aunty Kuburat pulled a toothbrush out of her wrapper and dragged the soft tip of the toothbrush across the soft and yielding bar soap the same way one would have tried scrubbing toothpaste off a solid surface.

As the possibility of what she was about to do dawned on me, Aunty Kuburat got some of the soft bar soap on her toothbrush again. By this time, she had enough of it on and then she confirmed my worst fear by dipping the toothbrush into her mouth and began brushing her teeth. I was confounded. How could a sane person brush her teeth with a bar soap?

This and many more questions raced through my gentle mind and the more answers I got, the more the questions that instantly jumped into focus.

However, now I understood clearly why Aunty Kuburat always had her mouth open while taking quick breaths an asthma patient in the middle of an asthma attack perhaps more like a child with a very bad flu and blocked nostrils.

Well, I’ll release the narrative hold now till I return with details of the second vile thing Aunty Kuburat did. Keep your fingers crossed.

*Fade Out*

Tomorrow beckons.

Note: Everything single detail that has been read here are true stories without an iota of fiction (including names and places mentioned). Narrated just the way it occurred.