First things first, you’ll have to activate the yeast. You can do this while failing to share with your sister the fact that Banke took it upon herself—without your consent or any sense of boundaries whatsoever—to mail the shoebox full of letters that you had poured yourself into with no intention of sharing ever ever. Taiye had never spoken to anyone with as much loathing as she did to Banke after the girl presented her with the mailing slip like it was a gift.
Second, step aside to keep from getting mushy plantain splatter on your kaftan as your sister enthusiastically mashes the plantains in a bowl.
Third, add the salt as your mother sifts the flour into a large stainless-steel bowl.
Fourth, let your sister add the yeast solution and mashed plantain to the bowl of flour, as she seems the most excited of all three of you about this mosa situation.
Fifth, cover the bowl and let the mixture rest for ten to fifteen minutes.
GOLDEN SUNLIGHT POURED THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOWS, making bright swaths on the counter around which the women lingered, waiting for the mosa batter to rise and the rice to cook through. Kambirinachi interrogated Kehinde about Farouq, and Taiye continued to wonder about the letters. The question danced on the tip of her tongue. But how would she ask?
Are you going to ask, Taiye, or are you just going to carry on torturing yourself?
She didn’t want it to matter so much, but it did.
Time had done what it does; that feral, desperate loneliness that led her to begin writing them had shifted. It had shifted her.
“Such a dreamer.” Kambirinachi interrupted Taiye’s thoughts with her teasing. She and Kehinde looked at her with identical expressions of amusement. “Where has Taiye gone now?” her mother asked.
“I’m here.” Taiye smiled, and ran a finger over the scar on her chin. “Sorry.” She stood up. “Let’s check on the batter.”
TAIYE FILLED A CERAMIC SERVING PLATE WITH RICE AND CHICKEN, and a small bowl with mosa, and handed them to Hassan from the kitchen window.
“Na gode, sister,” he said, the words finding their way out through barely parted lips.
“No wahala.”
Taiye imagined it was the smell of the food that roused Farouq from sleep. He had changed into a faded blue T-shirt and jeans cuffed just below his knees. The droplets of water trapped in his beard told Taiye that he’d attempted to rinse the sleep off his face. His eyes searched for Kehinde as he descended the stairs. He planted a kiss on her forehead and, looking at the spread on the dining table, exclaimed, “What a feast!”
The four of them sat at the round glass table, set with raffia placemats and cutlery wrapped in batik napkins. Taiye flitted in and out of the kitchen with tray after tray of dishes to be shared. Rice bejewelled with large pieces of smoked fish, crayfish, and aromatic efirin; gorgeously browned chicken; small balls of mosa; and that obscenely decadent chocolate cake. Far more food than the four of them could reasonably consume in one sitting.
Looking unabashedly at Taiye’s face, in her eyes, Farouq said, “You’re identical, yeah.” His eyes darted from Taiye to Kehinde. “But you look so different.”
His slight lisp endeared him to her, made his beauty less intimidating. She found him beautiful in the same way that she did the pearlescent life-sized marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary at the side entrance of the Falomo Catholic church. The statue was gorgeous to see and easy to fear, but never open to touch. Quite the opposite of her typical instinct upon seeing a beautiful thing. A beautiful person.
“It’s the scar,” Taiye said, averting her eyes from Farouq’s intense gaze. That was it: she found him intense.
“You’re acting as if you’ve never met twins before,” Kehinde said, slapping his arm, “Stop embarrassing me, jare.”
“No, it’s not that,” Farouq said.
“Maybe it’s because they’re different people,” Kambirinachi offered with false innocence.
Farouq caught on and smiled. “Ah, I don’t know what sort of magic you women have …”
“Maybe it’s because I’m fatter,” Kehinde said, and rolled her eyes.
“Oh, darling, why would that matter?” Kambirinachi cooed.
“It seemed to matter a lot when we were small,” Kehinde’s tone was cold, “and you loved pointing it out.”
“Keke, I’m your mother. It’s my divine right to tease my children!” As she served herself a generous slice of cake, Kambirinachi added, “Anyway, a bit of fat never killed anyone. Your sister loaded this with butter!” She ate a large forkful and moaned dramatically.
Kehinde looked away.
“Babe, you’re perfect,” Farouq offered, an attempt at easing the sudden tension.
Then, silence but for the scraping of cutlery on dishes.
Taiye got up and walked to the corner of the living room where old movies on VHS and VCD, and music on cassette, CD, and vinyl were stacked against the wall in precarious towers.
“I found Popsie’s records,” she said quietly, slipping a shiny black disc from its dusty sheath.
Moments after the needle dropped, the fluid voices of the Lijadu Sisters gliding over a mellow bass on the song “Amebo” filled the room.
“Remember this?” Taiye asked.
Kehinde nodded, a faint smile easing the tightness of her face. “Yes.”
Kehinde
TAIYE AND I THOUGHT WE WOULD ALWAYS BE TOGETHER, when we were small and held hands and whispered secret stories about what must be wrong with our mother. After secondary school, we would go to live with our aunty Yemisi in South London. We would do our A levels together and go to university together and have a flat together. She would cook, and I would run all the errands that required speaking to other people, because back then, she only really talked to me and our parents.
But then a bad thing happened when we were still small, and the plan changed. What I mean is that I changed the plan. I peeled myself away from her rather savagely. One of the multitudes of things I regret.
Our relationship has always struggled against our twinness. “Resentment” is too sharp a word—it’s just so unforgiving—but not long after we turned twelve something close to it stained and spread between us, like ink on wet paper. Our mother was plunged deep in one of her episodes—one of the places she sometimes hid when she refused to take her medicine—curled up on the floor or cradled between her bed and the wall, muttering about voices and refusing to be touched.
She was grieving our father’s sudden death. All three of us were stunned into a heavy kind of hushedness. As children, Taiye and I didn’t understand how our mother blamed herself for it, but we felt that our life, as we knew it before the singular fact of his death, was over. We knew that the season had shifted, that the joy that permeated the air around us because our parents were in love—whatever that meant, we knew it was a gift—had faded. The gorgeousness of our mother’s voice when she sang, all of us going swimming at Ikoyi Club, mashing overripe plantains to fry mosa together, the firmness of the ground, the certainty of morning, the assurance that time would wind forward, and mangoes would ripen, all of that was out of our grasp, just as the final wisps of a vivid dream dissipate at the first breath of morning.
Our mother is not well. I can scarcely remember a time when she was. She is a vast garden of water-hungry flowers in a land of perpetual drought. Our father, I imagine, wanted to have something he could save every day, so he married her, narrow-waisted and massive-eyed. She was beautiful in an impossible way, a delicate thing. Too soft for this world, too soft for Lagos and the madness that is its throbbing motor. Too soft for London and its cold, accusatory glares on the narrow sidewalks, in the supermarkets, on the buses. They slayed her, they smothered her, they battered her tongue deep inside of her so that in the eight months we spent there after our father’s death, she spoke only to us, at home, in rapid Igbo whispers, until we came back to Lagos. She is flighty, that woman; there are whole worlds inside of her that call for her. It seems the calls have been steadily growing more insistent. Our father kept her tethered to us—he and the quetiapine tablets prescribed by Dr Savage.