“Now let’s show you a video,” Zeenat said quietly to no one in particular. “We could start with Aristocats before somebody reports us.” She picked up a video from the floor without paying attention to the title, rubbed it on her shirt roughly, and then forced it into the video player. Mendaus had picked up a book and relaxed into the couch in a pose that backed the television; I sat on the same couch in the opposite direction, which faced the television. The book was small and red, and the cover read:
MEDITATIONS
BY MARCUS AURELIUS
“What’s your real name, Lester?” Zeenat asked as lights flickered on the television.
“Ihechiluru. Or just Ihechi.”
“Well, it’s okay if you don’t get the words at first. Just follow the pictures and it’ll make sense. After a while you’ll get used to everything, the way they sound and what they’re saying.”
We sat quietly, enjoying Marie, Berlioz, Toulouse, and of course Thomas O’Malley, the alley cat. With time, I learned this was how it was for them. Mendaus spent most of his time reading volume after volume of his father’s books, very abstract titles that really should not have concerned him for any reason. And Zeenat, much more alive, would always lie entranced by sample VHS videotapes that had not been released to the public, which Mendaus’s father procured for his mother by means we never knew, even though his mother spent more time traveling than lazing at home in front of the screen. Mendaus was a scrawny ten-year-old who lumbered a dictionary from one chair in the room to another as he tried to wrap his sense around the vocabulary of Emerson and Goethe; while Zeenat, at twelve, had her attention irretrievably indulged by explicit scenes of adult romance with the same entranced interest as with animated films more suitable for her age.
It was the very setup in the room that day that defined the colors of our childhood in Omole, the unison of white and blue, and not all of those other things I mentioned earlier. White because we were still pure, unmarred by the dangers of trying and the fear of failure. At that time of our lives, we were masters of our dreams, our very own kingdoms, without the bordering walls society would later place around us. A pearly slate tinted with a little blue, just enough so the brightness of our futures did not overwhelm our spirits, merging to form an umbrella of protective tranquility as we led our unassuming lives, just like the morning sky.
My childhood was not only pretty colors that described fancy, albeit infrequent, bits and pieces of the popular media of those days, or I would have ended up in art galleries and not prison cells, yes? To an extent, the idle presence of my parents at home impressed certain patterns on the person I turned out to be, with an influence that rivaled anything football, literature, or film could ever conjure.
My father, despite spending barely three waking hours with me every day, was ever present in spirit. To appease whatever regard you may have for facts, he was unforgettable in the flesh, which made it difficult to let go of any of his instructions. Most prominently, the man was a severely hairy somebody; patches of thick black curls flourished on his head when not curtailed on Saturday morning, but he usually kept it to a well-groomed turf of even blackness worn like a cap, with his beard joining at the jaw like a knotted scarf. His gait was almost as remarkable; he was a huge black mammoth of a man, though more pudgy than firmly built, who moved about with the same destructive tendencies of an ancient beast in spite of a limping right leg.
In speech he was a man of few words, not always sensible in logic but always with such confidence in tone, which possessed the occasional pause of the thoughtful and husky-voiced slur of the powerful. Deep down in all of our hearts, I think we knew that destiny had meant for him to be a soldier or something of that order; he probably would have been richer if he had not missed his step somewhere along the line and ended up a banker.
My mother was somewhat easier on the eye and the mind. She was like a palm tree, tall and thin enough to be frail but strong and beautiful enough to be adored. Unlike most others, she was not a deity weaned on praise. She barely left her home, preferring to be isolated from everything in her studio, which nobody else ever entered. In fact, she was the only one I had seen move in or out of the room for years, and when she was in, nobody bothered to get her till she was out of her volition. Once upon a curious day, she had managed to explain after many attempts that she needed to be alone to get her work done. I lost interest eventually; the fleet-footed memories I had of the studio portrayed a shabby room breeding clutter and hoarding air. The only area with any semblance of order was her working table, which had neatly arranged stacks of letters and blank papers and the carved statuettes of the òrisà, sacred spirits, which she prayed to.
She did leave the house on Fridays, to submit the articles to her editor for her weekend column in The Daily News, but she usually preferred to meander from one chore to another in a single ankara wrapper tied along the valley of her back, adding a shirt only when people visited and my father insisted. If you asked me, I would say it created a little more appeal than the ordinary that she had fair skin. Not as fair as Jackie Shawn from the Shampoo movie I watched with Zeenat, but more like that Bianca Ojukwu lady whose picture, anywhere, at any time, would choke my father’s thoughts until he vomited at least a smile. My mother’s fair skin was with a long nose and bold cheekbones, just like mine, which was in stark contrast to her full spread of darkened lips, which were also just like mine. She always wore her long clumpy hair packed into a full bun above her head like a wool crown, which was rather unlike mine, because I was male and expected to wear my hair trimmed.
Despite our differences, whenever we did spend time together, the contrasting shapes of our persons dovetailed into a seamlessly woven embroidery of an ideal family. No matter how many football matches I played in a day, I always managed to get home before dark: This was one of my father’s many instructions. So by the time he had returned from work, not too long after it was dark, I would have washed myself, changed into cleaner clothes, and set out my parents’ dinner on the center table in the parlor.
My father instructed that I have my own meals on the dining table, but I did not mind, because it was in the corner of the same room. From that vantage point, I could enjoy the heated arguments between my father and the man telling the news on the television from a distance, without becoming collateral damage. My mother was the only acknowledged mediator between the two suited men at either side of the room, even though my father occasionally took off his suit and folded up his sleeves if the nature of his dinner required it. So each night when the clock struck nine o’clock, over a sonic salad of traditional instruments blaring from the television, it went pretty much thus or some variation of this sort:
Good evening, I am whichever unlucky reporter the station fielded against my father that night, reporting live from Lagos, the federal capital territory, and this is NTA nine o’clock network news. Today, the head of state hosted government officials from India . . .
“You see! You have come again. Your oga is dipping his hands into our pockets again,” my father would begin in midswallow.
. . . in the first of what would be a three-day parley discussing matters central to convening a memorandum of understanding that would have the Asian powerhouse invest in the revival of Nigeria’s health system . . .
“But deep down in his heart, you know if your oga wanted to do something about the health system, he would go to America or Germany. Abi, that is where everybody travels for operation. Nobody ever travels to India for operation.”
. . . in a reception held for his guests at the Lagos Airport Hotel, the head of state declared that . . .
“You see! What does the health system have to do with parties at hotels? The house we built for him, is it not for hosting guests?”
“Cletus, eat your food before it gets cold, you know spaghetti doesn’t taste nice when it’s cold,” my mother would say, always interrupting a few sentences into the dialogue with a total anathema to the matter at hand.
> “It is as if these army people breed their recruits at the devil’s feast, the devil’s feast of Ilmorog,” my father would reply, more often than not oblivious to the statement my mother had directed at him, “all of them, their motto is: ‘Reap where you never planted, eat what you never shed a drop of sweat for, and drink what has been fetched by others, shelter from the rain in huts you never carried a single thatching grass for, and dress in clothes made by others,’” getting increasingly agitated with each declaration.
“And make sure you eat that cow leg. I’m tired of throwing away money in this house. If you don’t eat it, I’ll warm it again tomorrow and put it back on your plate,” my mother would continue. And then, when she noticed my father quiet a little, she would cool his flames with a warm reminder that Esu would only act on our behalf: “Don’t worry, Cletus, Elekun n sunkun, Esu n sun eje, Esu is shedding blood when the owner of the problem is shedding tears.”
Esu was one of the òrisà my mother prayed to. “Esu is the gateman to the land of the òrisà; the bearer of sacrifices to the òrisà; bringer of blessings from the òrisà; and messenger of Ọrunmila, the godhead of all òrisà” were some of the first words my mother had me memorize when she started teaching me the ways of Ifá about two years earlier, when I turned eight. The very first words were “Ifá is our way of life; through Ifá we commune with Esu, and through Esu we commune with Ọrunmila.” Traditional religions had never been part of my school curriculum, and my mother was bent on remedying the situation. So on weekends when there was neither school nor football to arrest my concern, she taught me the practices of Ifá: the songs and stories and the prayers of divination. She told me how some people would eat sweet potatoes so they could be nourished with good fortune, and how people made different sacrifice offerings, from pounded yam to rats, to appeal for blessings from the òrisà. She shared the order of ranks of Ifá, from the ògbèri—people like me, who were untrained—to the Awo and Iyanifa, the male and female priestesses who could recite the over two hundred verses of divination from memory. My mother was an Iyanifa, and a passionate one at that. When she spoke about Ifá, she was not brash and reactionary like my father. All of her words seemed to originate from a personal agenda so cleverly concealed that sometimes it left an aura of the sinister, like when she told me about the place of the Yoruba king in Ifá.
“The kings are Olóri Awon iwòrò, head of priests, and they are next in power to the òrisà; their political position is a secondary duty. Just like passing in school is your primary duty, and questioning me and your father, as you always do, is your secondary.” I was never sure if her references to me were cues for me to comment, so more often than not, I kept on silently. “But the kings we have now in Yorubaland, they have things mixed up. They haven’t taught their children what they learned from their parents, and that is why things are falling apart. Some of them have even left Ifá for Christianity. So now our faith is in our own hands, and we have to be our own priests. And if we are our priests, we might as well be our own kings, too.”
Her most frequent words when she spoke to me about these things were “Never forget you’re a king, and you answer to no man, only to the òrisà.” But that whole king business sounded like much more responsibility than I was ready for. At the time my circle of interests contained football, school, the wonders within Mendaus’s house, and listening to the curious tales of the man on the television when night fell. There was room for nothing else.
Awkwardly enough, things were much cozier on nights when we suffered the double tragedy of power outage and having no fuel for the generator. It was an infrequent occurrence, and we would all sit around and play ludo under the flickering bright orange canopy of the kerosene lamp after dinner. The winner—usually me—would be in charge of sharing portions of whatever biscuit or chocolate my father brought out of his special suitcase on such nights.
After dinner and the things that came along with it, I would sleep and then dream about school and football, the cloak of strength in my father’s demeanor that eagerly awaited me at the end of my childhood, and the comforting feel of creation that cushioned my palms when I oiled my mother’s hair before she herself went to bed; about Mendaus’s shelves of books and the view of the world through his thick glasses; about Zeenat’s films and her view of me.
And it was not long before I had a proper chance to understand what that view was like, dreams aside. Not too long after my first visit to Mendaus’s place, Zeenat started coming along with him to the football field in the afternoons. She would play around the borders of the field, allowing herself to be distracted by the street vendors on the other side of the road or the occasional food hawker, hardly ever paying any actual attention to the football. Mendaus did not seem to mind her presence at all; he always appeared passive about most issues until his opinion was demanded.
Maradona would bicker about my lack of focus, which affected my performance as soon as she started coming around. His claim that I often stood staring toward her whereabouts, instead of marking the opposition whenever we lost possession of the ball, was not entirely false, but it never became a big deal because Pastor’s son counterclaimed that Maradona was just jealous, since every time he looked toward Zeenat with hope of catching her gaze, it was already fixed on me. I never seconded his claim, but before his mention of it, I believed the images of her fleeting gaze were just tricks of my imagination.
When we lost a game or were on any kind of break, I would casually drift in her direction and we would cram as much of a conversation as we could into the few minutes we were stringently afforded. She would brush the dust off my elbows and shins, and I would poke at her belly button till she squeezed my finger and refused to let go. It was during these few minutes she told me about her origins: about Kano, the city of her birth, and her devout Muslim upbringing that permitted nothing more than domestic chores and fidelity to the faith; her father, who had mysteriously slumped to his death while involved in land disputes with his stepbrothers; her submissive mother, who had become slightly unstable after her father’s death. She was taken in by one of her father’s stepbrothers, and her three older sisters were married off in an annual sequence before their teenage years were over. She told me of the year she was expected to be married off, how her mother managed to persuade one of her father’s oldest friends to kidnap her littlest daughter and promise to provide for her the closest semblance to a normal childhood and fair life that he could manage. And how, as a result of that ordeal, she was misplaced in Kano and later found hidden in the home of one of her father’s oldest friends in Lagos.
This new man was unlike all the others she was used to, especially her father, to whom he was apparently very close. He was the first man in her life who did not care at all about Allah or anything at all pertaining to being a Muslim. He had loosened his grasp on faith when he lost his first two wives and five children in a car accident. And though he did marry another wife, he barely had time for family. He allowed his business interests to lead him around the world in pursuit of solace while providing enough for his wife in Lagos to furnish a lifestyle of whatever nature she pleased. His young wife, bored with lonely married life, adopted an orphan from her village named Mendaus to busy herself, but she soon got bored of him, too, leaving him in the care of the house steward, Mr. Thomas.
All this history of Zeenat’s new family transpired before her arrival. She and Mendaus became cousins by their own definition. They were to each other as bread was to butter despite their difference in personalities: He enjoyed going to school and loved to read; she did not believe in school because her parents did not believe in it; and she was sold to anything in a VHS videotape.
Some days she would convince me to forfeit football for whole afternoons so she could show me a new movie she had fallen in love with. When I finally yielded to her unending troubling, we sped off like chickens relieved of their heads at the abattoir down the long dirt road, through the large gates, and in deliberate aversio
n of Mr. Thomas, barely stopping for a moment till we held the black screen of the television in our sights. I watched her fiddle with the player for a while and then take a seat beside me on the floor. And just before it felt awkward, the television flickered alive. I remember the first of such afternoons, lost in the darkness till the consecutive images of script scrolled down the television:
. . . LITTLE CIGARS are hazardous to your health . . .
. . . American International Pictures Presents . . .
. . . The LITTLE CIGARS mob, starring
ANGEL TOMPKINS . . .
It did not take me any reasonable time to figure out who Angel Tompkins was. Her face had that brilliance of the sun which could not be indulged for more than a moment, with golden rays of effervescence gracing her from the top of her head to just beyond her shoulders. The fact that she spent most of the movie running around with a faithful clique of grown men the size of children, the Little Cigars mob, in all kinds of criminal adventures, did not quench my interest for a bit. Nothing at all quenched my interest until I noticed Zeenat staring at me as I stared at Angel Tompkins in a close-up scene. And just as the raging tides of panic and guilt made a confluence in the rivers of my soul, Zeenat leaned in and whispered into my ear: “You don’t have to be my Lester anymore. If you like, you can be my little cigar.”
1986
Meanwhile, of all the colors in the world, green soon became the theme of my family. If there was a particular day I could single out as the start of it all, it would probably be the night the man on the television had shut my father up. Everything leading up to the incident was as usual; nothing had happened to warrant any suspicion of my father’s humbling.
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