All those years ago, after Taiye went away to London for university, it was just me, Mami, and Sister Bisi in the house for almost a year. I’d applied for a Canadian student visa and had to wait many months before it was approved. The house was stifling. Mami seemed to be grieving Taiye’s absence; she always seemed to be grieving something, or someone, that wasn’t me. Once, she called me by her name, and I shouted with all the fervour of my teenage angst, “I’m sorry I’m not your precious Taiye!”
The truth is that Taiye had something of our father in her face and gestures. And though I’d been punishing her since the bad thing, I quietly mourned her absence. Alone in my room, I cried for not seeing her face, and my father’s, echoing in the subtle mischief of her half smiles, in her leaning gait, in her eyebrows.
That year, our great-aunt visited with massive Ghana must go bags filled with yams, tomatoes, smoked fish—and plantains. She tried to teach me how to make mosa. But without Taiye around to halve the weight of her expectations, they were too heavy for me. I did everything Aunty Akuchi said, and it yielded glorious puffs. Yet they lacked the lightness of Taiye’s touch.
I have not said the word or thought of mosa in years. It’s so odd to think that I forgot how much I love the yeasty plantain puff-puffs. We used to have them every Sunday after church. It was a tradition Aunty Akuchi started, when she visited after our father died, and after the bad thing. She promised to reward me with a feast if I got dressed for church. Taiye never needed much convincing; she was always ready on time, quietly waiting in the parlour, while I cried to be left alone.
“No! I don’t want anything,” I’d sob.
“Not even meat pie?” Aunty Akuchi would ask.
“No.”
“Not even jollof rice and chicken?”
“No.”
“Chicken suya?”
“No.”
“Not even mosa?”
I behaved for mosa.
Letter no. 101
October 28, 2015
Agricola St., Halifax
Dear Kehinde,
I miss you very much. But sometimes I don’t know if I miss you or if I miss the person I’ve needed you to be. The sister I’ve wanted since you turned cold. I would like to know you as in the you that exists in real life. The one just living her life in Montreal, going about the mundanity of her every day. Anyway, how is Farouq? You live together now, yeah? How’s that going?
I’m doing all right. Halifax is beautiful, I can’t complain. Culinary school is all right, I can’t complain. Although I might be going a bit mad. There’s this melody that’s following me. I no longer know if it is real or imagined. I don’t know what song it is, like if it is a popular tune or something that I’m just not familiar with. The first time I heard it (maybe it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, but it was the first time I noticed it), Elodie, the woman who owned the teaching restaurant I worked at in Montpellier, she hummed it a lot. I heard it again in London, after I moved out of Aunty Yemisi’s place. I was waiting for my friend in a café near campus, and the barista started to hum it just as I was leaving. Again, the last time I was in Lagos to see Mami, on my way from the airport, the cab driver was humming it as well! And just this morning, after Mass, I saw one of the altar boys smoking behind the church, and he was humming the same fucking melody. I don’t remember it until I hear it again. I’ve tried humming it myself, but it’s always wrong.
Someone told me something about sacred geometry, do you know what that is? I’ve been thinking that maybe there is a tear in my mind from all my fucking about with drugs, and I’m perceiving this universal melody. I may very well just be mad, but I don’t know how else to explain it.
How are you today?
It’s our birthday tomorrow, I’ll be thinking of you. I’m always thinking of you.
Always,
Taiye
Kambirinachi
DURING HER THIRD YEAR AT QUEEN’S COLLEGE, Kambirinachi befriended a gaunt, wide-eyed girl named Mercy. The poor thing suffered frequent and harrowing crises because her blood cells—distorted by inherited abnormal hemoglobin—took the shape of razor-sharp sickles and clumped together to block the small vessels in her wisp of a body. On top of that, she was just really quite strange. She mumbled to herself often, with her eyes closed. Kambirinachi worked, to no avail, to decipher the meaning of Mercy’s murmuring.
“What are you saying?” she would ask, interrupting Mercy’s quiet babbling.
“Eh?” Mercy would respond, her face, meticulously scarred with diagonal lines flaring from the corners of her small lips like wings, a picture of innocence.
“Just now now you were saying something,” Kambirinachi would insist.
“I wasn’t!” The girl really didn’t know she was doing it.
Kambirinachi wondered about Mercy; she didn’t recognize her from before before.
Were they the same? Was she lost? Had she forgotten?
The other girls accused Mercy of witchcraft, which was typical of teenage girls. Yet Kambirinachi was astonished at the extreme points of emotion that their collective pendulum hit. Mob mentality, groupthink, call it what you like, but one day their classmates would be moved with sympathy for Mercy the sickler—they’d offer to take biology notes for her and fetch her buckets of water to bathe in the morning—and the next day, after she’d suffered a seizure or screamed from the acute pain of a crisis at the chapel during morning Mass or after lunch break, they would again be sure that she was an á»gbanje, or a witch, or possessed by an evil spirit. She was just sick.
Once, at break time, not too long after one of Mercy’s crises, the girls who’d chosen not to go spend their pocket money at the tuck shop behind campus eyed her. Mercy often spent her breaks asleep with her head on her desk, cradled in the nook of her elbow. The girls whispered silly things like, “Better not wake her up, or she will do juju for you.”
“She’s not a witch,” Kambirinachi said, her small voice calm and even. “You people should just leave her alone.”
“Who was talking to you? Anyway, how do you even know? Are you a witch as well?”
“Maybe.” Kambirinachi shrugged. “Maybe I’ll cut you in your dreams, and you’ll never be able to climb out of sleep.”
The girls squealed, aghast. They rushed out of the classroom shouting a trail of prayers behind them:
“Tufiakwa!”
“God forbid bad thing!”
“I reject it with the blood of Jesus!”
“No weapon fashioned against me shall prosper!”
“Back to sender!”
SOMEWHERE IN THE FOUR HOURS BETWEEN the French and physics exams in the middle of the junior secondary school certificate exam week, Mercy was in sick bay, writhing in the throes of a violent fever that came upon her suddenly the night before.
The school nurse called the bank where her mother worked as a secretary. The nurse did her best to sound calm, but her voice shook. “Mrs Awoniyi, we are going to rush your daughter to the general hospital this afternoon. Please, ma, will you meet us there so that they can admit her quickly?”
Kambirinachi was sitting on a plastic chair with her legs folded underneath her small body, the skirt of her blue pinafore tucked under her knees, neck-deep in physics revisions. She was in the dappled shade of a mango tree by the science building with several of her classmates, cramming the Assumptions of Kinetic Theory, when she looked up and saw Mercy waving at her from across the quad, a big smile on her face.