Like COVID-19, like Grey

• Published date: 03 February 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Umar Turaki's novel, 'Such A Beautiful Thing To Behold', reminds me so much of those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, those days when farmers couldn't farm, those days drivers couldn't drive, those days friends couldn't hug, those days Mecca was closed to pilgrimage, those days the world went on holiday. The novel will amaze and excite you in equal measures.

Unlike the COVID-19, what afflicted the people Turaki wrote about is called Grey, and it is an epidemic because it affects a town. Grey holds it by the jugular and is draining the blood of its inhabitants.

Nothing warned the people of Pilam that a strange sickness was about to unfurl across their lives with impunity. They were a happy people until Grey put things asunder, fell things apart and compelled the centre not to hold.

The sickness has no seeming cause, or remedy. It makes it difficult seeing colour again. It makes everything drab and leaden, like black-and-white films. It makes people kill themselves with knives, ropes, just anything capable of taking life. Wrists are slashed, rat poison is consumed and so on.

Corpses litter forests and birds and the weather makes faces indistinguishable.

Men are forced to form groups to sneak across the barricade in search of food for their families.

Some go looking for missing loved ones only to get missing too. Fathers and mothers go in search of each other and fail to return. Only children are immune from the disease.

Neighboring communities are scared and frown against people from Pilam escaping.

When the residents realise that their village is the sole site of the epidemic, many try to leave but they meet a wall of soldiers sent by the government. Those who dare to ignore the commanding officer's instructions to turn back are massacred.

Borders are fortified to keep them enclosed. But since water always finds its level, three siblings, Dunka, Panmun and Panshak find their way out of death's enclave. Their youngest sister, Rit, however, refuses to flee. The plague has killed their parents and their fates hang in the balance. Running, they believe, will save them.

When Panshak flees, he finds himself in an orphanage run by a woman with so many myths woven around her life. One day she is killed by a boy she took like her own. The boy assumes leadership of the home, allows the children to eat whatever they want and roam. While out one day, they attack a vehicle conveying a man and a lady. The lady is Panmun, the man is Zumji, her lover whose child she is...