We meet in trying times. Such times link foes and friends together and tell how close we are.
Why is it difficult now to say who we are to each other? Siblings born of the same womb, or serpents who delight in seeding their ancient foe with venom? You said once that the story of sapiens and serpent is as old as being human. Ours is ancient too. Cain and Abel. Ishmael and Isaac. Esau and Jacob. And we have done to each other what they started. I have sown my venom, you have sown yours. It is only a way of continuing an old thing in a modern manner.
We are not the serpent children Bro Yadilichukwu preached about in children’s church that Palm Sunday. We are sisters. Not sons. He said the sons of Satan long to bruise the head of the woman’s children, and you put up your hand and asked who would attack first, the woman’s seed or the serpent’s. I cannot remember whether he answered. Now that we have become foes, I would like to know where you would have hit me. My head, or my breast, the breast that came late, long after yours had stood out prosperously like a balloon tied to a wedding chair.
Our home-lesson teacher used to gaze at it. He would ask you to sit on the floor below his chair so that he could look down through your slack-necked blouse, at the green bra mother bought you. You never said anything about it. I have wondered since whether you did not notice, or whether you noticed and decided that noticing was not useful to you.
Your life is above mine. Why was it so difficult for you to admit that you were better than me? You came out first and you were born intelligent. Your beauty was peerless; it puzzled our teachers that we came from one womb. Perhaps you did not want me to feel bad. But it was never your place to worry about what I feel. That is mine.
I came late to many things. I came late even to becoming a girl. Or a boy. Or whatever it is that I am.
You must have wondered why I went into the bathroom, locked the door and came out an hour later fully dressed. Mother complained about the time I spent in there and threatened to drag me out. I have wondered whether she knew, and whether her threatening was a way of not knowing. You never saw my nakedness. It is nothing like yours. Perhaps mother told you and you decided not to ask me. You were clever enough to have worked it out. You simply never cared to.
You always had cause to smile at how the world handled you. I had only cause for sadness. Even mother never hid her preference for taking you to market. Bumi is good luck, she would say, she buys everything at half price, as though you were a coupon code. At first, I ate the things bought with you like a bread of sorrow. Then mother told me I had never attracted anything, that my mouth was only good for eating what you attracted, and I stopped eating at the same table as you.
You beamed when she praised you. You arranged pity on your face when she bashed me, and underneath it your stomach rumbled with pride.
You were a point of contact. Women who wanted children touched you and touched their own wombs and said words over themselves. May God make my child as beautiful as you. They looked at me and passed on without touching. Do you remember the Hajiya who breathed at me heavily, with that mournful disdain? I complained to you and you said she had not aimed it at me.
It does not pain me any longer, sha. I have healed from those wounds. I have come to accept that swimmers who break the water at the same point do not reach the wall together. We shared a womb, a mother, one source of ova and sperm, and we came out entirely different. Perhaps I drank earthly water and took an ugly form, and you drank celestial water and took the angel’s.
You were just like our father in his seraphic beauty. His skin glowed. He knew how to conduct himself in the manner of the most handsome men. His haircuts belonged on world-class footballers, and he used the most fashionable creams although he had no money. Mother settled our school fees and the house bills. We both know this.
We both witnessed the drama the Saturday morning mother tripped over the receipt with Amalinze Linda written on it. You were the one who read the name to me. Mother cried and screamed and slammed herself onto the bed, rolled from the bed to the floor, gave herself slaps, gave herself knocks, ran her fingers through her hairline and pulled, then knocked her own head deliberately, as though lice had lodged there. Her body was arrayed with a constellation of sweat, like someone who had met an ancestral spirit.
Monkey no fine has killed me.
Arakunrin yi ti pa mi oo. This man has killed me.
Baba e ti se mi lese. Your father has injured me.
Father had warned her never to speak Yoruba to us. He did not want us adding an h to our English, saying h-ask, h-us, h-eat. He did not want meyo for measure or pleyo for pleasure. It irritated his ear. He wanted us speaking the Queen’s English. But that morning the heaviness in her chest was too much to be carried in English, so she put it in Yoruba, and we joined her on the floor with our eyes clear and dancing and drowning, and my tears ran into my mouth tasting of salt and sugar.
Mummy, what is it?
Your father has finished me oo. Mo ti ku ooo. I am dead.
What will I tell bank people? Who will hear this?
Three million naira, borrowed from First Bank so that father could begin a building-materials business and lessen her burden. He bought an iPhone 16 Plus for his girlfriend. I know because I listened at the door while mother and her friend from the bank discussed how the money would be repaid.
We have not set eyes on him since.
***
Do you know why I did not resume school with you the following term? You believed it was because I came last and you came first. It was the receipt. Mother needed to squeeze my fees into the repayment, and she begged me, because she knew you would never have agreed.
I did not blame you. I want you to know that.
I liked being in the shop. At least it gave people a reason to speak to me. Customers sent me for beer and told me to buy a mineral with the change. Mother’s customers advised her to add beer and cigarettes to her stock and Bro Yadilichukwu told her it was sin and would halt divine blessing, it will corrupt your daughters and make them worldly, and she sold it anyway and sent me to fetch it, and I have never understood how both of those things lived in her at once.
Mother said my cooking would hook a husband’s heart, that other girls lacked the skill. I wondered why father barely finished her food, if it was true.
I thought I might go back the following term, though not to Kings and Queens. To Yayaguzou Girls, perhaps. I liked their green hijab. It would have covered my stunted hair and the arid part in the middle of it.
Your hair was beautiful. The strong hairline, the long-stretched strands, the colour of over-burnt bricks. Mother wove it into shuku, police cap, koroba, abbeti aja, all-back, two or three styles mixed in one week, telephone wire or Eko Bridge at Christmas. Mine could only grow in dreadlocks, which that school does not allow, and it was never full enough for her to twist. You remember the day she forced didi on me and said it would make the hair grow faster. It hurt so much that you helped me loosen it before morning.
That is the thing I keep returning to. You helped me loosen it before morning. You did that.
***
Do you remember the day Bro Yadilichukwu asked all the boys to raise their hands and I raised mine? People laughed. You came over and lowered my hand.
You never asked me why I raised it.
When Uncle Tunde asked whether I was a boy or a girl and I told him I did not know, you laughed. When I asked him what makes a boy a boy and what makes a girl a girl, he did not answer either, and he decided I was not clever. That is what everyone decided.
You knew. Not all of it, but you knew. And you never asked me. That is the silence I am talking about. Not the silence after. The one before, which was longer, and which we both kept, and which I have come to understand was a kind of agreement between us.
***
My uncertainty began on the Sallah holiday, when Alhaji invited us to celebrate with him.
Mist rose off the wet earth that morning and reddened the sun and widened it. The air was cool and there was no sand in the wind because it had rained in the night. That is how Sokoto is when it rains. Our sixteenth year in that town, and we had been born in it.
You were more shrivelled than shivering when we walked into that air-conditioned parlour. Nothing had ever taken your attention like that crystal room, weightless with its transparent furniture. You turned your headtie into a hijab and began adjusting it the way the Arab women do. I was thinking how a man with a house like that came to eat in our fly-fettered buka.
Where is your family? mother asked him.
My wipe and children hab gone to celebrate Sala in the billage at Illela, he said. Illela is a small billage near Niger Republic.
We sank into the red sofa like balloons losing air. I held your hand to look at the henna Aisha had drawn the night before, black on yours and red on mine. Using black henna on your hand is like writing with charcoal on a blackboard, Aisha had told me. It will not show.
I was looking at the pattern on your left hand when I froze, and our eyes locked, and something went through me that I had no name for and no defence against.
I understood two things in the same second. That I was not what I had been told I was. And that whatever I was, it had turned itself towards you, of all the people in the world.
I went to the bathroom and locked the door and sat there a long time with my hands over my face. I was not crying. I was doing arithmetic, trying to work out how long I could carry this before somebody saw it on me.
You knocked.
Bimbo. What are you doing?
I said nothing.
Bimbo. Bimbo. Bimbo. Mother is calling you.
I’m coming.
What have you been doing inside? You dey born pikin? You asked it without looking at my face, and I did not answer, and I took a long gulp of the Fayrouz they had served me to drown the thing I had gone in there to flush away.
That night I did not sleep. I lay beside you in the dark with my hands pressed flat against my own chest to keep them where they were, ashamed of myself in a way I had not known was available to me, and I have never told anybody this until now, and I am telling a dead person, which is the only safe place to put it.
I dreamt that you and mother and I were on one bed and father came in and found us. My daughters. My wife. His mouth slackened. The blanket had fallen and our bodies were mixed together like groundnut and popcorn, and he was screaming, who is male, who is female, whose arm is whose, whose skin is whose, whose leg is whose.
I woke to mother screaming the same words.
She never told anybody what she saw that morning. Not even Bro Yadilichukwu. Perhaps she told her friend at the bank. She has told that woman everything else.
And after that you would not talk to me.
***
Now let me come to the part I have been walking around.
Four months later it was you feeling what I had felt in Alhaji’s parlour, except that yours had a cause and a direction and a name, and you would not give me any of the three.
The constant urination. The swollen breasts, the swollen ankles, that appetite that came on you like a fever. The women whose prayer point you used to be now turning their heads when you passed. You carried it the way you carried everything, as though managing it well were the same as it not being there.
You never told me who.
I have made the list. I have made it so many times that I could recite it in my sleep, and every name on it is a name that was in our house or near it, and not one of them can be crossed off.
The home-lesson teacher who made you sit below his chair. Uncle Tunde, who could not say what makes a girl a girl but was alone with us three afternoons a week for two years. Bro Yadilichukwu, who preaches that women are subtle as serpents, who divorced a wife after one night and told everybody it was because she was made like me, a story I know to be false, because mother’s friend at the bank tells everybody everything and that particular story arrived too neatly, and a lie that convenient is usually standing in front of a door. Alhaji, whose wife and children were in Illela, who had a house that blurred the boundary between form and function, and who came to eat in our buka more often than a man with that kitchen needed to.
Or a boy from Goronye market whose name I never heard, and who was seventeen, and who is now walking around Sokoto not knowing that you are dead.
I do not know. That is what I am left with. I know the shape of my ignorance so precisely that I can draw it, and I still cannot fill it in.
Here is the worst of it. If you had told me, I could have hated one person. Instead I have to hold all five of them in my head at once and keep every one of them possible, and I go on carrying men I cannot convict and cannot acquit, and this is a weight you handed me without meaning to, and I cannot put it down, because putting it down means choosing, and choosing without knowing would be its own kind of lie.
You will say I could have asked. I asked. I asked in the room and you looked at the wall. I asked in the yard and you told me to go and turn the meat.
I think you were protecting somebody. I have thought that for a long time. I have not been able to decide whether the person was him, or mother, or me.
***
I saw your face the morning you drank the dark thing mother gave you after devotion. It was bitter. She said it would settle your morning sickness. She had given us that sort of medicine all our lives and called it agbo iba, and we took it the way you take what your mother hands you.
But that one came with rules. Nothing to eat until twelve noon.
And then she left the house early, for Goronye market.
I want to be careful here, because I have gone over this too many times and I no longer trust the shape my memory has settled into. She did not look at either of us as she tied her wrapper. She said the thing about noon twice. She took her basin and she went out, and the door made the sound it always makes, and she did not come back until evening, and she has never once mentioned the medicine since. Not that day. Not at the burial. Not once.
I have decided not to decide about my mother. That is a separate silence and I am not strong enough for it yet.
By eleven you were bent over. You said it was nothing. You said it the way you said everything, as though saying it well would make it so.
It did not occur to me to send for Bro Yadilichukwu, and I have wondered since whether that was oversight or judgement. Instead, I used the mustard seed. He had taught us it works at any age if you dare to practise it, and he told us about the boy of twelve who spoke to the rock behind their house, and how the following week the federal government began the road and the rock was crushed. We have since heard other versions of that story. I believed his.
I prayed silently. Then aloud. I believe I was louder than the boy.
Your breathing got worse. You held your chest, then your stomach, with those hands the henna had finally left. Our eyes met.
And I felt a tightening in my gut and my mind went white, and I watched you go.
***
So, I will not ask you who it was anymore.
I am asking something else now, and you can keep quiet about this one too, since it is what you are best at, and since I have finally understood that your silence was never emptiness. It was always full. It was carrying something the whole time.
Did you know I loved you?
Not the way I was supposed to. I am not asking about that, and I have made my peace with never being forgiven for it, and in any case, there is no longer anyone left to withhold the forgiveness.
I mean the other way. The way that made me hold your hand in Alhaji’s parlour to look at the henna. The way that let you lower my arm in front of the whole children’s church without either of us ever saying a word about it afterwards.
You knew what I was. You never told anyone. In sixteen years, not once.
I have only just understood that this was you protecting me, and that you did it the same way you did everything, without announcement, without credit, and without ever letting me know it was happening.
I am sorry that I only worked out how you loved somebody after you were finished doing it.
***
Image: Generated