Imisi came along with his father’s old friend, a university academic who leased her flats in Fagun Estate to students from a nearby university. Call her his father’s old friend because he had lost his father more than half a dozen years ago. He had just been employed at the same university where the landlady worked, a gesture from the university’s management to finally compensate his family for the untimely loss of their patriarch.
Imisi’s entire life had revolved around places like this. He had seen many apartments dedicated to students by ordinary citizens who cared. Many of these kinds were designed to house two to four occupants, but as the days passed, they were crowded with six to ten. Students would bring in friends who found life too hard to afford even a common single room and to whom a self-contained apartment, whose main room was often half the size of a common room, was a luxury.
From the car, the huge structure tapered upward. The landlady parked her car at the estate’s gate and led the way into its compound. Imisi surveyed the whole space. Deep into this cursory act, he was startled awake as four student tenants rushed out of their apartments to greet the landlady, their faces lit with warm smiles as one of them fell into the woman’s arms in a tight embrace.
What followed was far from what Imisi had anticipated. He had looked forward to Madam introducing him to these cheerful students as the big man who would soon join them for a share in their little quiet blissful world. Maybe Madam had it in mind not to do that just yet. Maybe not. But the students started to rant that there was no electricity to pump water and that they had been going outside the fenced compound to fetch water. Imisi saw their ramblings through an utterly different shade of lens. His suffering was finally wobbling to an end, and now the journey was about to be soaked in a setback.
He wanted to move quickly into the new self-contained apartment the landlady was about to show him, a place he had not set his eyes on. He had spent five weeks in one of his friend’s family houses on the outskirts of the town. The friend’s mother had welcomed him in his first week there with sumptuous meals, while her daughter-in-law frolicked on her phone inside her room each time she sweated in her poorly ventilated kitchen.
This had casually unfolded right before Imisi’s eyes until one morning when the woman had asked him to sort a bowl of beans and cook them. When he heard the woman’s spasmodic command, it was as if the earth beneath his feet was gulping him whole and had gotten to the level of his hips, so that he would be fixed in one spot and absorb the cold embarrassment.
The evening before, he had even lost a bit of his dignity after using the woman’s daughter-in-law’s power bank to charge his phone. The young lady had refused to say a word to him ever since, insisting that Imisi had not apologised properly for using the power bank.
“I budgeted the percentage on it for an online evening meeting with my colleagues at work this night,” the lady had ranted.
“It was only a little time to come before I leave this annoying house,” Imisi had said to himself before brushing past his friend’s mother to sort the beans, lost in thought as he removed the pebbles and crushed husks from the inedible crop.
When the landlady finished with the students, she showed Imisi his new room. It was a small place where he could cram his measly belongings. One by one, as he endured his new place and the drought, he would move in more as soon as he started receiving his salary. And soon, they would not fit into the space, he thought. But who dares deny the joy of the moment when only the horizon can dictate tomorrow’s blessings?
“There’s a well in the compound,” the landlady told him as she drove him back to the university.
“It’s fine,” Imisi said to the landlady, excited to smell freedom at last.
There would be no problem with water and with light. One of them had told the landlady that they had been pumping water with their own generator. Meeting them would bail him out.
A week later, Imisi moved into the new house, met by the resentful version of his new co-tenants. Such selfish bodies in gaudy clothes; his thoughts then ran wild as they used to. Their dealings with the landlady had fuelled their egocentric nature, and this had trickled down to him in their first meeting.
Each time one of the rooms in a shared flat became vacant, the second occupant could always tell the landlady:
“I have already spoken to somebody I know very well, ma. She will be paying the rent for the vacant room next week, ma. I’ve sent the person your account number, ma.”
The proposal rang oddly in the new guy’s ears, even though they said it was for them to be sure they would be passing each day not living with a criminal. So, these old tenants imposed new tenants on the landlady? Wow! He then shrugged his painful shoulders. They had been lifting heavy buckets of water five blocks away from the compound to his room since the nonchalant tenants had begun to spit in his face, hammering home that they would never fuel their generator to pump water for him until he had succumbed to their bidding.
Just before Imisi moved in, Shade, the petulant girl living next door, told him of their many troubles: the landlady had refused to heed their many calls. They pay for electricity but buy petrol to pump water into their apartments; some tenants’ generators have broken down; when it poured, water seeped under her room’s door; and her friend next door had been searching for a new place. Now, they had found someone who could take their sufferings directly to the landlady’s ears and make her fix their many troubles. All Imisi had to do was listen.
He did listen. To the birds chirping over the currentless cables flown over the fence of the house before he moved in and after he had moved in, and to the landlady, who had revealed that her previous clients had left the generator she had bought for pumping water outside for many days, at the mercy of rain and the harshness of sunny days.
Now, the newer tenants were asking that she repair the generator from her purse. There had been little Imisi could argue for. He had badly wanted a new place, and now he would deaden his urge to contribute for the sake of his longing to remain in his new place for a while.
The next morning, Shade again intimated to Imisi the trickling water under her door, and soon after, the bad news announced itself physically at Imisi’s door. Shade heard him lament as he mopped the water that was threatening to sack him from his new place.
“He’s a mad man. We told him all the issues we have in this house o, but he said we’re lying. Now, he’s scooping water from his new place. His new place o. Very senseless man,” Imisi overheard Shade relaying to one of her friends.
The struggle for water mattered little to Imisi. What irked him the most was the weight of the disregard that met his newness in the neighbourhood. Suddenly, the rules were stacking up against him. Because he had come from the landlady, their water must now run without paying more, and their own acquaintances must continue to move into every vacant room. To cap it all, he had to listen to the cries and report the source of their pain to the landlady if he was to keep breathing in their midst.
Imisi would no longer take the choking conditions. He stormed out of his room.
“Hey, you need to stop this,” he said, calling out to Shade from her window. “I came here looking for a peaceful place to stay, and you guys have been welcoming me like I’m the leech you’ve been living with for ages.”
“I did not call your name o,” Shade exploded.
“What do you take me for? I’m not daft,” Imisi burst out in return.
He turned and barged into his own room. With his indignation surging at almost everything, he recoiled into silence for days. To these co-tenants, he must have appeared like one helpless student who had come to rent a room without their approval. To him, they wielded a strange, out-of-control power, and so his relationship with them, which had been feisty earlier on, slowly dwindled into cold indifference.
A day later, two new tenants moved into one of the two-bedroom apartments in the compound after two student doctors moved out following their induction. Imisi overheard the new tenants calling out to each other. Tola and Delola.
He was awestruck by the dainty nose God had curated at the centre of Tola’s face, and her gait made his head spin. He once caught her staring at him from the window of their apartment when he was searching for a key to the general generator after it had been repaired. When he finally found it and pumped water that evening, it struck him, like a flash of impressive afterthought, that Tola could finally be his one chance to make a friend around his new place.
So, after he had finished pumping the water and pushing the generator into its small house behind the girls’ apartment, he knocked on their door.
His eyes gleamed when they opened the door, while the ladies looked down on him, picking at his dishevelled hair and worn pair of plimsolls. They were prospective doctors. He was probably a vagabond awaiting them around their new place. Maybe he had a pompous head on a hopeful, optimistic neck.
But Imisi never wanted to see the whole situation in that light. He shrugged. There must still be a place of warmth that he could reach with these new neighbours. He pressed on. He had been fortunate almost all the time, stubbornly refusing to be held back by the simple test of an initial denial.
Earlier that month, Mr Lanre had refused him a room in one of his estates in town. Imisi could piece together from the man’s demeanour that he still carried a grudge against his late father, who had been his colleague at the university and had had altercations with him weeks before he breathed his last. From that day, Imisi disliked Mr Lanre, but his refusal to help him did not dampen his spirit.
When he accosted the landlady thereafter, inquiring and begging her for a space, he had smiled. He had tried not to look destitute, and had let it stick with him that it was the only way to survive from then on.
Tola and Delola found Imisi’s early attempts at getting close to them suspicious and were reluctant to let him into their world. For a week, Apartment One was devoid of a soul. Imisi discovered that its occupants had travelled and measured the great torture that lay ahead. Its chief occupant, more mature in mind than the other tenants, had kept all grievances in check. Her congenial voice, in the mix during disagreements, had been helpful. The quadrangular set of flats was her empire, and she had tried as fervently as she could to hold them together.
Imisi had known the day would surely arrive when the lady would, temporarily or permanently, desert the place that she had managed to keep sane. He had feared the walls she had tried to rip apart would once again be mounded tall by the echoes of altercation. The day did come, so quietly that it wasn’t quickly suspected.
Imisi had finished cleaning his room, emptied the dirt he had gathered into the trash can at the back of the house, and inadvertently drained all the water left in the reservoir that fed the row of rooms in his wing. He turned on the bathroom tap to fill his bucket so he could take a bath.
Not a drop.
When he lurched out of his room, frustrated to his marrow and his forehead furrowed with anger, none of the other guys in the house displayed the faintest demeanour of concern. One by one, he saw them stroll out of their apartments and hit all the tanks. Confirming they were empty, they hung their heads sideways and returned to their apartments like the folkloric tortoise whose refuge from troubles is its shell.
Imisi’s repulsion for his new place grew. But he knew he had just survived resisting the men whose silence had made his new place uninhabitable. He would press on until the group eked out the only wisdom in all their travails for themselves: that they were all humans after all.
Kehinde Adedayo is a writer and digital content specialist. Born more than three decades ago, he has devoted a large chunk of his life to being a creative writer, an observer of nature, and a literary critic. He currently teaches literature at Adeyemi Federal University of Education, Ondo, Nigeria. His work appeared in Sevhage’s Prized Anthology of Avoidable Disaster Deaths in 2025.
