NUMBERS
The spirituality, life and its odds
‘Some people will say that I am a pastor, and I am playing gamble.’ Uncle Davis the Yoruba teacher paused to nod his head and smile sagely. ‘They do not know.’ His English lacked brevity, and he picked his words off the plate of his thoughts, little by little, like a sweet grainy meal.
‘They don’t know,’ he stressed, ‘it is God that ministers to us — when we sleep, even while we dream. He is the one that reveals the numbers to us.’
His face hid something, and made up everything. It was carved into an oval, with long and intricate tribal carvings hiding underneath the threshes of his low beards. His head settled into a large Adam’s apple that shrivelled as he spoke into his neck. He smiled widely, and scented like most of his problems were confronted at the bottom of several bottles. A portion of his skin was pale. But in some shiny places, darker tones revealed a sort of leaving — a story of a younger Uncle Davis that had passed — and the enthronement of the current future that he lived.
I had earlier likened Uncle Davis to a black Creed, a character from American sitcom The Office. Since then, more motifs have formed between them along the fabric of their comparison.
With his essence of calm spirituality and resourcefulness, he had sworn that he gave people numbers to play every week and the results would always come back correct. I wasn’t one to believe — or in any case, not believe. It was my lodge mate, Mike, who had hung himself on that balance, not quite understanding how anyone could understand and predict such complex numbers. I, on the other hand, was indifferent. At the most, I was barely intrigued.
I was intrigued about most things. Especially the stories he told: The one he told his students about how the Fulanis had tricked Afonja, and conquered the city of Ilorin; and there was one he had told Mike about how some Yoruba people had migrated from Ife and could be found in a Ghanaian tribe named Ga. And how Baba Ijebu was, at one point, the richest man in Africa. With wide eyes and wide gestures, he described the large room where the rich man had stacked his wealth in bales upon bales of foreign currency, filled till the door-mouth. He never gave any reliable sources for his claims, but I personally never cared for it. These stories made for something interesting to hear in between strenuous classes. However, we had also guessed that with the half dozen books he lodged underneath his arm to school, he had some credible pages to show us if we ever needed verification. But I never asked.
The Yoruba teacher is a meticulous man, making it easy for him to be read, studied. As he picked his stack of books apart, his brows were twisted to meet each other, but when he looked up to the people around, the shades of his temples were calming. The effect this posture had on me was elusion — like there was something else running away in many colours at the hem of cotton soaked in water, that I couldn’t grasp and hold to myself.
He picked one of the notebooks and opened it, and they are lined with sequences of numbers. Just like the next book, and the one after that. Uncle Davis sequences respected orange margins but flouted blue lines. A few could be found running along the back covers too.
‘This is the key,’ he announced.
I closed my eyes to a tint and tried to focus them on the pages, and the numbers morphed into milling bugs, crawling into a space of incongruity in my head.
‘You don’t understand it?’ We nodded. Then he proceeded to explain it.
The numbers are part of something way bigger than just a lottery, or a lucky guess. The numbers are a matrix. The matrix is a question to life. There exists a cult, Uncle Davis claims, that keeps this matrix. They are the guardians of the complexities of life, extracting questions from several conduits. They present these questions to the world in the form of lottery draws, and reward those who can provide the answers.
The game itself requires a sequence of five numbers to be predicted. The lowest number is 1 and the highest is 90. There are also different levels of odds and its measurement of leverages for each kind of prediction. It reeks of chances and consequences, the very fibres of life. All these complexities were programmed carefully and uploaded into the huge red box with buttons that we see in wooden stalls at the street corners.
Uncle Davis believed that the key to answering the question was in calculating and being well versed with your environment. He showed us his rows of calculations, and days where he had succeeded at winning.
‘Not just anybody can understand the numbers,’ he claimed. And this suggested to me that the winners of the game are sought from a specific sort of genius. ‘We can as well say that it is a divine gift from the holy spirit.’
Before I had a chance to be averse to this new declaration, he explained how the base numbers he started his calculations off were communicated through dreams, visions and omens that were quite vivid. He was a pastor, he reminded us. If only we were in superb terms with the spirits he knew.
He had once dreamt of several sticks of Coaster biscuits and when he woke up, he arrived at three letters — BXT. Uncle Davis explained how those letters told him to play numbers from the family of 2, and how he ended up winning a thousand naira with a stake of N20.
It was astonishing at how crazy both the house and gambler would be to deal at the odds of 50 to 1. I was thereafter devastated that he hadn’t staked more than N20. Staking more would have done a lot of good for him. It was the very concept of chance, and I believed that he had missed his. But he assured me that it will come again.
He opened the back of his book and I could see a boldly written sequence of numbers derived from a short calculation above it.
‘These are the numbers for Saturday King,’ he announced, ‘write it down!’
I picked up my phone to save this golden code to immense wealth, but after looking at it, I did not bother. I realised that I didn’t need to. The numbers were all from the family of eight. I was catching on to the gist quickly.
Saturday came with no plans to play the game. I, however, had planned to check the results online as soon as it was evening. Finding a page that shows lottery predictions and results was easy. I found a quite expository one on the first result page of Google. It had a description of the game at the bottom of the webpage and its explanations correlated with Uncle Davis’.
I scrolled up to see the results represented in block noninteractive blocks. The results for Saturday King have only one set of numbers from the family of eight in its sequence. The remaining four sets of numbers on the sequence represented other families.
In a large way, Uncle Davis was right; considering that I could have won a whole of N900 if I had staked N100. The odds were always in his favour, and they weren’t.
I wonder if he had more to say. More secrets about the numbers that he could reveal. I still do not know. I have not seen Uncle Davis since then, but I would like for him to know that I had tried his numbers and they won. I would like to let him know that life had a challenge for itself whenever it encountered him. Because whenever it threw a question, he was ready to pick up his pile of books to scribble numbers and answer it. The odds were never in his favour, of course. But he could still have those dreams where he saw his omens plain and clear. He still woke up to missed calls from people calling him for predictions. And he, still, often won.
