By BAMIDELE JOHNSON
Until about five years ago, if I called this chap before 11am, he never answered. He would, of course, call back, beginning with the flex-drenched explanation that he was exercising. I often disregarded this information. If I needed to call him before 11am, I called. The result was usually the same: the phone rang into silence.
I envied his devotion to the routine. I was, and remain, an infidel when it comes to physical exertion. Even so, I was trimmer than him and probably still am, although my weight has long been flirting with scandal. These days, he has quit the early-morning torture. He is not much bulkier than he was.
Both of us, however, are paying for decades of indulgence. Catfish pepper soup, nkwobi, cow leg by other means, tilapia, shawa, peppered ponmo and enough lager to float an ocean liner. Around Surulere, he has taken me to places. Many of them are amala cathedrals where, when you watch him eat, you are reminded of NURTW barons.
Meat atop meat atop meat. Goat, beef, bokoto, ponmo (black and white), turkey and eja kika. He would urge me to embroider my amala in the same fashion. But I am a modest man in that department. I will do five or six balls of amala, two pieces of meat and two ponmo. My friend will do two balls of amala and an industrial quantity of protein. His plate sometimes looks less like lunch than a livestock census.
But Oluwaremilekun Aboderin, Abod for short, is surprisingly nimble for a man of his weight. Very nimble, actually. He walks like a drill sergeant and possesses an almost unreasonable amount of stamina. Ask anyone who knows the domestic boxing circuit, where he is a big man as Secretary-General of the Nigerian Boxing Board of Control, and you will hear the same thing: Abod has the stamina of a long-distance runner, even if his physique is that of a successful butcher (not much difference between us).
That is the thing about Abod. The body tells one story. The legs tell another. Abod paddy mi ajilarinrin, wa gbo. Wa to. O ni subu daanu. Aseyi samodun o. Happy birthday.
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