Jasmin Paul is beautiful. She is brilliant. And in testament to her beauty, she is the current Miss Numan, that sprawling town of the Bachama, a warrior tribe that was never conquered in all of her history, hence it has most befittingly remained the protective gateway city, so to speak, to Adamawa, from Gombe axis.

Jasmin is wearing the coveted crown after beating a bevy of other beautiful young ladies to the title. At 21 she is a charming second-year student of medicine in the University of Jos. However, her charm and effervescence were always dampened by one thing, she never met her father. All these whiles, she never knew who he was as her mother closely and protectively guarded it from her until such a time all the muddled-up issues pertaining to her paternity were cleared up.

 He parents had met in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria where they were both students and had related until about 21 years ago they went their separate ways on completing their studies. Thereafter, her mother, Pwavi, realized she was on the way. By the time she was born, they had lost all contacts. Then, telephony had not penetrated as it is today as there was no GSM yet. Her father, John, was all the while unaware of her existence having long relocated and settled in Lagos with a new family. Jasmin was made to believe another man, an acquaintance of the family, was her father. When the man eventually died, her mother was compelled to tell her the truth. Then John had become untraceable.

Jasmin was growing up into a beautiful but very unhappy young woman who occasionally slipped into moody spells that led to bouts of rebellion. Her mother intensified her secret search. Fortuitously, they reconnected through her mother’s younger brother who had met and befriended John in Abuja where he had later relocated, unknown to both something beyond the occasional drinks they shared as they hung out in the evenings, had connected them. Resemblances each saw on the other’s face roused their gnawing curiosity.

While to John his friend uncannily resembled this lady, one Pwavi, he had met and briefly befriended in Jos as a young graduate, his friend on the other hand never stopped marveling at the striking facial features his friend shared with his beautiful niece back home, Jasmin. Then they just voiced this out one day, only to realize their hunches were no mere curiosities but realities that were set to resolve in the most dramatic of ways.

When Pwavi finally reached John with the news of the baby, understandably, he received it with some shock and a tinge of little misgivings. He cautiously offered to accept paternity only after a positive DNA test. Meanwhile, Pwavi busied herself with the immediate task of raising her daughter, ensuring she lacked nothing she deserved and needed to grow into a happy and well-behaved child.

Jasmin however increasingly felt uncomfortable and secretly intensified her quest to track down her father. She neither knew his name nor what he ever looked like. Then an idea struck her. She would go to her mother’s Facebook wall and start looking at all of her male friends. She did this for years. Then somehow, there was a little improvement in communication between the two, John and Pwavi, as they became friends and followed each other on Facebook, after Pwavi had herself searched him out and requested.

“The day I saw his picture on my mother’s Facebook wall, I immediately knew I was looking at my father. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest in over excitement. I sent him a friend’s request and for six anxious months I watched it every day. He did not respond. Then one day after thinking hard about it, I sent him a message, ‘daddy hi’, and he immediately replied ‘I am fine my daughter’. I asked him how he knew I was his daughter, then he said he knew, just the way I also knew he was my father. Feelings! Blood! We mutually felt our connection.”

Then he asked for her number and they started talking. When she told her mother she had found her father, she was surprised and also relieved. John, while speaking to Words and Shots said all the DNA test he needed was her picture. She not only looked like him she looked like his other two younger teenage daughters.

The long phone conversations did so much to assuage her feelings and but she was not prepared for what happed one beautiful afternoon, the day the doors of the office where she did her vacation job slid open and some people walked in. They had pretended to be clients and as she very courteously received them, she suddenly got to her father. She immediately froze.

Shock was an understatement. As she flew into his arms, she broke down in tears and cried her heart out, in grief for those shoulders she had not had to lean on in the 21 years of her life, and then in relief it was all over, as he would be there for her, for the rest of their lives.

So, earlier today, as she watched the clock and it struck 12 midnight, she dialed his number. He picked and she whispered, the first person to call him, and for the first time in her life, “Happy birthday daddy!”