Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

  Kambirinachi shuffled into the kitchen. Her socked feet muffled her steps, but Taiye knew her mother’s smell.

  “So, madame chef,” Kambirinachi said, perching herself on the edge of the counter, “did I do well with the chicken?”

  “You did well, Ma.” Taiye smiled and turned to wash her hands.

  “I’m sure your brother-in-law is handsome under that bush he has on his face. Do you think that is his normal look?” Kambirinachi tried to appear sombre, but the smile in her voice gave her away.

  Taiye burst out laughing and doubled over at the sink. “You know what? I have no idea, but abeg don’t ask him that.”

  “Well, I’m just wondering what kind of charm he has if that’s what he is carrying on his face.”

  “Oh my God, Mami!”

  “Anyway, I hope he eats normal food.”

  “I’m sure he eats normal food.”

  “I don’t know.” Kambirinachi raised her shoulders and spread her palms up as if in surrender. “Is he not oyimbo? He might be one of those fussy eaters with all the allergies and special diets, or am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know for you, o.”

  “Ehen, what if he’s a vegetarian?”

  Taiye thought for a moment. “There’s efo in the freezer. I’ll cook it without meat.”

  “Okay. I just can’t believe you haven’t met him before.” Kambirinachi was being troublesome. “All that time you were in Canada. I thought you went there so you two could be closer.”

  “We were in different provinces, Mami. It’s a big country.”

  Taiye hadn’t meant to sound derisive, but that was the tone her words took. She began pouring the rice into the simmering stew and was about to apologize when Kehinde walked in. The small talk that followed felt odd to Taiye. There was so much else to say, so much catching up to do. But then it was decided: they would make mosa.

  This is how you make mosa with your sister on the day she returns home. You are happy to occupy yourself with this task, as it keeps you from asking if she read the letters you wrote over the years but never intended to send. You will need the following ingredients: several overripe plantains, six heaping tablespoons of flour, four teaspoons of fast-acting yeast, a quarter cup of warm water, Atarodo peppers to your heat preference, a tablespoon of salt, and vegetable oil for frying.

  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 w
ould 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.

  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 Ọgbanje, or a witch, or possessed by an evil spirit. She was just sick.
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  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.