He was a young lad, probably seven years old. He looked malnourished—bearing a striking resemblance to the haunting images of children from the Biafran war era. His legs were painfully skinny, and his skin, though dark, had taken on a pale, whitish hue—the kind of dryness harmattan gave my own skin, no matter how much oil I applied. It was as if harmattan itself was his birthright, the only force active within him. I didn’t know his name, so I simply called him “Boy.”

Anyone could tell when Boy was nearby. He carried with him an unmistakable stench of decay, like the dead rat I had discovered in the hostel a few weeks earlier. His odor was a murderer, a destroyer of peace, and I couldn’t help but wonder why a young child would smell that way. Boy’s head was nearly bald, save for a few stubborn strands clinging to his scalp. And if you looked closely, you would notice four large, swollen ringworms comfortably settled among the sparse patches of hair.

One thing was certain: every ten seconds, Boy would suddenly spring up—as though stung by an angry bee—and plunge his hands into his shorts, scratching his groin area with a kind of desperate, almost desirable violence. He would let out a moan of relief, a drawn-out “Ahh!” that told anyone watching just how much solace he found in scratching. When I asked him one day why he scratched so much, he cried out in his native tongue, “Aunty, ihe m na akọ m’ụkọ!” before struggling to translate it into English: “My pim-pim is growing pimples, it's scratching me!” I stood there, frozen and speechless. It was obvious: Boy’s endless scratching was the cry of a body trapped in dirt and neglect.

“Mama”—meaning mother—“I think Boy has an infection!” I blurted. Speaking to her would later become one of the worst decisions I ever made.

Today, I saw Boy again outside the hostel, dressed in an oversized white checked shirt and blue shorts—probably his school uniform. It was barely 6:30 a.m., yet there he was, already carrying a bucket of abacha mmiri—what the English might call cassava flakes. Whether his infection had been treated, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that no one seemed to care for him. Boy was only a child, yet life had already forgotten him.