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After Ima ran into the forest to hide from the eyes of whispering villagers, she remained there until it was dark. Even when her father, Okon went followed her into the forest to persuade her to come back home, Ima refused. She had seen how the villagers looked at her with terror in their eyes, and she insisted that she would remain there until night. So, her father had to stay there with her.
Eventually, when night came and the village was dark, Ima followed her father out of the forest but refused to go home with him. After she heard all her mother said about her in her presence, Ima could not bring herself to go back to the same house.
Seeing that his daughter’s mind was made up about not returning home with him, Okon decided to take Ima to a small room where he stored palm wine and kept some of his palm wine tapping equipment. Since he usually tapped palm wine around the forest area, the room was not too far from the forest. That night, Okon did his best to set up the room for Ima, and once Ima settled down, he returned home to get her some food, the mat she would sleep on, and other things she would need.
About two hours after Okon left Ima in the room, he returned with a pot of nicely cooked soup, some clothes, a rolled-up mat, a pillow, a wrapper, and a gallon of water. Indeed, Okon was truly sorry for the way Uma and Ima’s sisters treated Ima and wanted to make things up to her. Each time Okon looked at Ima, he was heartbroken, and he couldn’t understand why her mother hated her so much.
After watching Ima eat to her satisfaction, Okon asked Ima if she wanted him to spend the night with her just in case she was afraid of staying alone, but Ima insisted that he return home. The whole time, Ima had been holding back her tears because she did not want to cry in her father’s presence. As soon as her father left, Ima sat on the mat she was sleeping on and began to cry. She even cried more when she recounted how her mother and sisters maltreated her in the locked room, the horrible things her mother said to her, and how the villagers looked at her with fear. Then she slept off after crying for hours.
The following morning, before Ima woke up, her father had already arrived with another pot of food. This time, he cooked her pepper soup rice with her favorite bush meat and encouraged her to drink some fresh palm wine. From the way Ima looked, it was already apparent to Okon that she had been crying all night, but he knew it would be insensitive to talk about it, so he remained quiet. Again, he watched as Ima ate the food in silence, and the only time she spoke was when she thanked her father.
“Do you want me to tell you a story? I know you love stories,” Okon asked Ima. He had been looking for a way to start a conversation with her, so he thought of telling her a story.
As soon as Okon asked the question, Ima looked up at her father and nodded slowly.
“Ok, this is a very special story, my daughter, and I want you to pay attention, ” Okon said before he began the story.
“Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who looked different from the people around her. Because the people were ignorant, they used to laugh at her and mock her for her appearance, but no one knew she was special. As the girl grew older, people realized she was very special, and because of what she did, they no longer laughed at or mocked her. The end,” Okon said, smiling.
“What did she do?” Ima asked.
“She was very brave, and she saved the life of the king’s son during a flood when others abandoned him,” Okon answered, but Ima didn’t say anything again. Somehow, Ima suspected that the story was about her and that her father had just created the story just to make her feel special and less of an animal. But she didn’t say anything. After her father left, Ima remained in the room until he returned with another special dish for her in the evening.
For many weeks, Okon continued to visit Ima with her all her basic needs. He knew that his wife, Uma and his other daughters whom Uma had turned against Ima, would never agree to visit Ima, talkmore of cooking her food everyday, so he did everything himself.
Uma was so less concerned about Ima, and even though she knew Okon was cooking and taking all the food and clothes to Ima, she never asked about Ima. Instead, she even began to complain that Okon had been neglecting her and his other daughters. She claimed he was focusing more on his beastly child than his normal children. Right from the day Okon had an argument with Uma about Ima, he stopped talking to her and his other daughters, and he wouldn’t respond to any of them, even if they greeted him or spoke to him.
After several weeks of caring for his daughter, Okon had a hard conversation with Ima. Aside from feeling remorseful for how her mother and sisters treated her. Okon did not like that Ima was always in hiding. He tried to explain to Ima that even though she looked different, she had the same freedom of movement as every other Ota villager. Okon did not want his daughter to spend her entire life hiding in a room. In fact, to him, there was almost no difference between Ima being locked up in a room by her mother and Ima deliberately remaining indoors because she was afraid of being seen by the villagers.
When Ima understood that her father was telling her to go out and walk around the village like other villagers, she kicked against the idea immediately. She explained to her father that the villagers saw her as a animal, so there was no way she would go out on her own for the villagers to laugh at her and mock her. Though Okon understood where Ima was coming from, he knew that if he didn’t do something about Ima’s mentality of hiding in the room, she would end up there forever.
“Ok, how about we walk around the village together? If the villagers laugh and mock you, they will not only laugh at you, but they will laugh at me too,” Okon said. At that point, he was determined to do anything to help his daughter work on her fear of people.
“Would you do that for me?” Ima asked.
“Yes, I will. I would do anything for you,” Okon answered, and immediately he said that Ima got up from where she sat and hugged him tightly. She could not control her emotions, so she cried while hugging Okon.
That afternoon, after almost four months of Ima hiding in her father’s store room, Ima went on a walk with her father. To show his love and support to his daughter, Okon held her hands tightly as they walked around the village. When the villagers saw Okon and Ima, whose face and whole body was covered in long hair, they stopped and stared in shock. While people who were working on their farms had to stop working just to get a good look, others who carried heavy loads on their heads had to drop the heavy loads so they could spend as much time looking at Ima and her father.
Surprisingly, that day, no one laughed at Ima or mocked her like she had expected. The villagers were so overwhelmed by the surprise of Okon walking hand in hand with his animal child that they could not say anything. Somehow, this relieved Ima a bit.
When Okon took Ima back to the room she stayed in, he returned home. As soon as he got home, Uma began to yell at him for embarrassing their whole family because he walked hand in hand with Ima. Though she had not seen Okon with Ima, the news of what Okon did reached her and her daughters in the market where she sold. After yelling and yelling at her husband, Uma warned Okon not to try such a thing again or else she would take action.
Unfortunately, her threats did not work on Okon. In fact, in the days that followed, Okon and Ima would walk around the village every day. Sometimes, Okon would purposely say hello to some of his acquaintances just to show that he wasn’t ashamed of being seen with his hairy daughter.
Aside from the little children who began to follow Okon and Ima around whenever they walked in the village, Ima did not face any verbal discrimination from the villagers whenever she walked with her father. As time passed, Ima became comfortable with walking around the village, and her self-esteem began to improve.
Months after Ima got comfortable with publicly showing up in the village, the season for the singing competition she had always dreamed of contesting came. At first, she contemplated participating in the competition because of her looks since it was an intra-village competition. But when she told her father about her fears, he encouraged her to participate, and she registered for it.
As expected, the news of Ima’s Registration for the singing competition spread in the village like wildfire, and it got to her mother, Uma, who was very angry when she heard it. Uma had warned Okon several times to stop going out with Ima in public, and her husband refused to Listen. So, this time around, instead of yelling at her husband as usual, Uma and Ima’s sisters devised a plan to finally get rid of Ima.
The competition was meant to last for three weeks, and in those 3 weeks, Ota, alongside its neighboring villages, would compete. Since the competition had the rule of only one participant per village, the village of Ota had to collaboratively choose one singer to represent them in the competition that year. On the day the villagers were to select their representative, Ima’s mother and her sisters came to the location where Ima, her father, other participants, and the villagers were. As soon as the voting began, Ima was surprised to see that everyone there, including her mother and sisters, voted for her to represent the village.
When that happened, she was very happy, but she did not know that her mother, her sisters, and the villagers all had an ulterior motive. On the first day of the competition, Ima’s mother and sisters believed that Ima would fail woefully in the first round, and their whole purpose for choosing her as Ota’s representative was to ridicule her and have other people from the other villages laugh at her.
But to everyone’s surprise, Ima won the first round of the competition. In fact, the villagers of Ota and people from the other villages had goosebumps on their bodies when they heard Ima sing. In the history of their intra-village singing competition, no one had ever heard any singer sound as melodious and angelic as Ima.
When Uma saw that her plan of publicly ridiculing Ima so Ima could either run away from the village in shame or remain in hiding had failed, she was bitter and mad at herself. If she had known that Ima was such a great singer, she would never have convinced nearly the whole village to vote for her animal child.
After two weeks of the singing competition, to everyone’s surprise, Ima made it to the top three, meaning that the village of Ota also made it to the top three villages. Angered that Ima was slowly rising to Stardom under her watch, Uma, her mother, decided to devise a dangerous plan. This time around, she planned on killing Ima once and for all. She just could not stand that almost every villager she bumped into was singing praises and saying good things about Ima when she had other normal daughters.
To carry out her plan. The day before the final competition, while Ima and her father had gone for their usual walk around the village, Uma sneaked into Okon’s store room, where Ima slept. When she entered the room, she saw a gallon of fresh palm wine, which looked like Okon and Ima had drank out of it. So, she suspected that the Palm wine was Ima’s own. Without thinking about the consequences of what she was about to do, Uma poured a white powdery substance into the gallon of palm wine, and she left.
Hours after she left, Okon and Ima returned from their long walk. Uma’s suspicion was right; the gallon of palm wine she saw belonged to Ima. But since Okon was too tired to pour palm wine into another gallon so he could take it home, he decided to take Ima’s palm wine; then he told her to pour another gallon if she wanted more.
That night, since Okon returned home quite late, no one drank the palm wine until the following day. Also, the next day, when Uma saw the gallon of palm wine Okon brought home, she did not suspect in any way that it was the exact palm wine she had poisoned. It wasn’t until her youngest and favorite daughter out of her four daughters began to scream and hold her stomach in pain that Uma realized that her evil had backfired.
It wasn’t just that; that day, Uma and Okon lost two of their daughters, as they were the only ones who drank the palm wine. When that happened, Uma was so heartbroken that she confessed her evil deeds to neighbors who came to help her when they heard her cry for help.
Meanwhile, earlier that morning, Okon left the house very early to prepare Ima for her final competition, and luckily, Ima won. She won the grand prize and was awarded the Singer of the Year. By the time Okon returned home, calamity had struck his house, and when he found out that Uma’s original intention was to poison Ima, he packed his bags and left the house in anger after confronting her.
Thankfully, one of the things Ima won in her competition was a brand new house situated on a big plot of land, so Okon and Ima moved into the new house. After the burial of her daughters, Okon traditionally divorced Uma, and she was forced to return to her parent’s house.
Though Ima never got the opportunity to feel or experience her mother’s love just because she didn’t look like her sisters, she was grateful for her father, who loved her more than he loved himself. As for the villagers of Ota, they stopped discriminating against Ima after the competition and gave her the sense of belonging she had always yearned for. They also learned through a scholar who had come to their village that Ima was suffering from a rare genetic mutation that causes excess hairs to grow on the body, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with her.
The end.
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