5

AN ORCHESTRA OF MINORITIES

GAGANAOGWU, the daily life of lovers often begins to share

resemblances, so that, in time, each day becomes

indistinguishable from the one that came before it. The

lovers carry each other’s words in their hearts when apart

and when together; they laugh; they talk; they make love;

they argue; they eat; they tend to poultry together; they

watch television and dream about a future together. This

way, time slips and memories accrue until their union

becomes the sum of all the words they have said to each

other, their laughter, their lovemaking, their arguments,

their eating, their work with the poultry, and all the things

they have done together. When they are not with each

other, night becomes to them an undesirable thing. They

despair at the masking of the sun and wait eagerly for the

night, this cosmic sheet that has separated them from their

beloved, to pass in fervent haste.

By the third month, my host realised that the moments

he’d come to value the most were the times when Ndali

tended the poultry with him. Although many things about

poultry keeping – like the smell of the coop, the way the

fowls defecate nearly everywhere, and the killing of the

ones sold as meat to restaurants – still bothered her, she

enjoyed tending to the flock. Even though she worked with

my host without complaint, he remained worried about her

perception of the work. He often recalled the university

science lecturer at the poultry market in Enugu who hadcomplained bitterly about the habit
among poultry keepers

of holding the birds by their wings, calling it cruel and

insensitive. Although Ndali herself was training to be a

pharmacist, sometimes wearing lab coats in some of the

photos she showed him, she displayed no such sensitivity.

She plucked with ease the overgrown feathers of the fowls.

She harvested eggs whenever she visited in the early

mornings or stayed over at his house. But even beyond the

birds, she took care of him and his house. She poked her

hand into the dark and secret places of his life and touched

everything in it. And in time, she became the thing his soul

had been yearning after for years with tears in its eyes.

In those three months, this woman he’d met on a bridge

in a chance encounter, and who is the reason for my

premature testimony this night, transformed his life. Without

warning, Ndali arrived one afternoon with a new fourteen-

inch television and an iron. For weeks before that she’d

laughed at him as the only person she knew who did not

watch television. He did not tell her that he had had one

from his parents’ time till recently, only weeks before he

met her again, when in a rage at Motu’s disappearance he

smashed it to smithereens. When, later, he realised what he

had done, he took it to the neighbourhood electronics

repairman. After fiddling with it, the repairman told him,

with much head shaking, that he should buy a new one. The

cost of the bad part that needed replacement was the cost

of a new set. He decided to let the TV remain with the

repairman, in his small shop along the busy highway,

surrounded by ziggurats of electronics in different states of

dysfunction.

Even beyond bringing the new things, Ndali ensured that

his house stayed clean. She mopped the floor of the

bathroom constantly, and when a frog leapt in through the

drainpipe after a heavy downpour, she brought in a plumber

to cover the mouth of the pipe with netting. She scrubbed

the white tiles on the walls of the bathroom, which he had

not cleaned in many months. She bought him new towelsand hung them not on the top of the
door – Because that

must be dust y! – or on the bent nail on the interior of the

door – Because the nail was rusting and now stained them –

but on a plastic hanger. As time passed, it seemed she

improved something in his life on a daily basis, and even

Elochukwu, to whom he now gave little of his attention,

attested continually to the enormous change in his life.

Although my host appreciated these things, he did not

give deep thoughts to them until the end of the three

months, when Ndali travelled with her parents to Britain, the

land of the White Man. The reason for this is that people do

not see clearly what is positioned before them until they

regard it from a distance. A man may hate another because

of an offence, but after a significant passage of time, his

heart begins to warm towards that individual. It is why the

wise fathers say that one hears the message of an udu

drum clearer from a distance. I have seen it many times. It

was thus in her absence that my host saw all she’d done for

him more clearly. It was during this time also that all the

things she’d told him became more audible, and he noticed

all that had changed in his life and how the past before her

coming now seemed like a different age from the present.

And it was during those days alone, thinking about these

things, that the desire came to him with all the bolting

powers of a persuasion that he wanted to marry Ndali. He

rose to his feet and shouted,

‘I want to marry you, Ndali!’

Ijango-ijango, I cannot describe the joy I saw in my host

that evening. No poetry, no language can fully describe it. I

had seen, long before his uncle came and asked him to find

a wife, that he had been seeking this – since the day his

mother died. I, his chi, was in full support. I had seen this

woman, approved of her care for him, and even received the
testimony of her chi that she loved him. And I was

convinced that a wife would restore the peace he had lost

since his mother’s death because the early fathers, in their

most gracious wisdom, say that once a man builds a house

and a compound, even the spirits expect him to get a [Link] days after he made this decision,
Ndali returned to

Nigeria. She called him once she arrived in Abuja with her

family, whispering into the phone. As she was speaking, he

heard the sound of a door opening somewhere in the house

where she was, and the call ended that instant. He was

picking eggs and replacing the floor of the main hennery

with sawdust when she called. When she reached Umuahia

later that day, it happened again. This time he’d just

finished a meal at a restaurant he supplied eggs and

chicken meat to, a place where he ate every once in a while.

They’d started to talk when she ended the call abruptly at

the sound of a door opening.

My host put down the phone and washed his hands in the

plastic bowl he’d filled with the bones from the bonga fish

served with egusi soup. He paid the daughter of the caterer,

whose habit of wearing a scarf that folded into the shape of

a bird’s tail often reminded him of Motu. He picked up a

toothpick poking out of a plastic vase and walked into the

sun. He waved down a peddler, who went about carrying

water in small sealed bags, hawking his wares: ‘Buy Pure

Water, buy Pure Water!’ Agujiegbe, this buying and the

selling of water has always amazed me. The old fathers

would never have imagined, even in the time of drought,

that water – the most abundant provision of the great earth

goddess herself – could be sold the same way hunters sell

porcupines! He bought one Pure Water and was tucking the

ten-naira change into his pocket when his phone began to

ring again. He removed it from his pocket, considered

flipping it open to answer the call, but put it back in. He spat

the toothpick away and bit open the bag and drank till the

bag was empty, then he threw it into the nearby brush.

My host was angry. But anger, in a situation like this, often

becomes a multiparous cat who bears litters of offspring,

and it had already birthed jealousy and doubt in him. For as

he walked back to his van, he kept wondering why he was

giving himself to a woman who did not seem to care about

him. I flashed the thought in his mind that there was noneed to be annoyed with her and
suggested that he wait till

he’d heard her explanation and the full story.

He did not respond to my suggestion, but simply entered

his van and drove past the large pillar along Bende Road,

which bore the name of the town, still raging. He came by a

rough intersection where a three-wheeled vehicle wedged

itself between his van and another car and would have been

run into had he not hit the brakes. The driver of the small
vehicle cursed my host as he pulled to the shoulder of the

road.

‘Devil!’ he shouted at the man.

‘This is how you people

die. You dey drive ordinary keke napep, but you dey do laik

say na gwongworo you dey drive!’

His phone began ringing as he spoke, but he did not reach

for it. He drove past the Mater Dei Cathedral, where he had

not been for a long time, and, cutting through a small street,

arrived at his farm. He turned off the engine, took the phone

and dialled her number.

‘What are you doing?’ she shouted into the phone.

‘What?’

‘I don’t …

’ he said, and breathed hard into the phone.

‘I

don’t want talk to you by phone.

‘No, you must. What did I do to you?’

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and wound down

the window.

‘I was annoyed that you did it again.

‘What did I do again, er, Nonso?’

‘You are ashamed of me. You did not phone because

another person was coming into the room.

’ He could catch

his voice rising, starting to turn loud and vehement, a tone

she often complained about as harsh. But he could not stop

himself.

‘Tell me, er, who opened that door that time you

ended my call?’

‘Nonso—

‘Answer me.

‘Okay, my mother.

’‘Er-er, you see? You are denying me? You don’t want your

family to know about me. You don’t want them to know that

I am your guy. You see, you are denying me in front of your

people, Ndali.

She tried to speak, but he pushed on, forcing her into

silence. Now he waited for her to speak again, worried even

more, not just because of what he’d betrayed in his tone but

also because he’d referred to her by her name, something

he did only when angry with her.

‘Are you there?’ he said.

‘Yes,

’ she said after a pause.

‘Then, talk naw.

‘Where are you now?’ she said.

‘My place.

‘Then, I’m coming there now.

He dropped the phone into his pocket, and a silent joy

rose within him. It was obvious that she had not planned to

meet him until after a few days, but he wanted her to come

as soon as possible. For he missed her, and it was partly this

that angered him. He’d also been annoyed by the anxiety

that planted itself in him while she was away and became

even more persistent after he developed the idea to marry

her. As often happened to him – and to most of mankind – a

questionable idea had formed in his mind with the power of

a persuasion. At first people believe these ideas, but after a

while their gaze becomes sharper and more penetrating so

that they begin to see all the deformities of their plans. This

was why, hours later, he became aware – as if it had been

concealed from him all this while – that he was not rich, not

particularly good looking, and not educated beyond

secondary school. She, by contrast, was on the cusp of

completing university and becoming a doctor (even though,

Egbunu, she had told him many times that she was going to

be a pharmacist, not a doctor). He needed her to come, to

reassure him in some way again that he’d been wrong, that

he was not beneath her but in fact her equal. And that sheloved him. Although she did not know
it, this was what she

had done for him by agreeing to come.

He stepped out of the van and walked into the small farm,

stopping halfway between the rows of the growing tomato

plants to observe the ears of corn on the other side. Perhaps

seeing him, a rabbit emerged and began hopping away into

the cornfield in rapid, prodigious leaps, its tail swinging as it

went. It would go a few steps, then stop, raise its head and

glance about, and then run on again. He spotted a singlet –

perhaps blown there by the wind from some compound –

lying over one of the corn plants, bending it. He took up the

singlet. It was covered with dirt, and on it was a black

reticulated millipede. He shook off the millipede and was

headed to dispose of the singlet in the dump behind the

brick fence when Ndali arrived.

EZEUWA, the wise fathers in their cautionary wisdom say

that whichever position the dancer takes, the flute will

accompany him there. My host that evening had received

what he wanted: that she come to him. But he had achieved

it by protest and dictated the tune of the flautist. So when

he went into the house, she was on her feet, her fingers

splayed over her wearied face. She turned away once he

came in, and with her eyes cast downwards, she said,

‘I

have come not to argue but to talk in a calm way, Nonso.

Fearing that what she said might require him to focus on

her for a long time, he asked to feed his flock first. He

hurried out into the yard, wanting to return to her quickly.

He opened the coop door, made of wood and netting. The

chickens poured out, calling enthusiastically. They made a

sprint with expectation towards the foot of the guava tree,

where he’d spread sacks but had not poured feed. Once

they began to peck, piping, he walked back into the house

and put the main door against a wedge, so that only the net

door was closed. He scooped up one last big cup of millet

and tied up the nearly empty bag which he kept in one of

the cupboards in the kitchen to prevent the birds fromdevouring it. He returned to the yard and
poured the feed

on the sack at the foot of the tree. At once the sacks were

covered by a gathering of hungry birds.

When he returned to the sitting room, Ndali was seated

and was looking at the camera she had brought from the

White Man’s country, which she called a ‘Polaroid camera’

.

Her handbag was still by her side, and her shoes, which she

referred to simply as ‘heels’

, were still on, as if she was

poised to leave soon. Egbunu, while one can often tell the

state of a person’s mind from the expression on their face, it

is now difficult to tell with the daughters of the great

mothers. This is because they now adorn themselves in

ways unlike the mothers. They have shunned uli , the

elaborate braiding, the wearing of beads and cowries. And

now, a woman can cover her face with colours of all kinds all

by herself, with a single paintbrush, and one in misery can

wear so much colouring on her face that she might even

look happy. And this was how Ndali appeared that day.

‘So tell me,

’ she said once my host sat down.

‘You want to

meet my family?’

He’d settled into the weakest of the sofas so that his body

sank low and he could barely see her complete figure, even

though he was right in front of her.

Conscious of the anger in her voice, he said,

‘That is so, if

we want to marry—
’

‘So you want to marry me, Nonso?’

‘That is so, Mommy.

She’d closed her eyes as he spoke, and now she opened

them, and they appeared reddish. She adjusted in the sofa

so that her legs came forward towards him.

‘You mean it?’

He gazed up at her.

‘That is so.

‘Then you will meet my family. If you say you want to

marry me.

Egbunu, she said this as if it was a painful thing to say.

And one could see then, without needing a diviner’s eye,

that there lurked in her heart something heavy which,

concealed in the veiled compartment of her mind, she wouldnot reveal. My host saw this, too,
and this was why he drew

her to sit by him on the big sofa and asked why she did not

want him to meet her people. To this question she pulled

herself from him and turned her face away. Then he saw

that she was afraid. He saw it even though she had turned

away from him, and all he could see were the big earrings

that drooped down almost to her shoulders, forming a ring

big enough for two of his fingers to slide through. For fear is

one of the emotions that clothes the primal nudity of a

person’s face, and wherever it presents itself, every

percipient eye can recognise it, no matter how adorned the

face.

‘Why is it making you sad, Mommy?’

‘It is not making me sad,

’ she said almost before he

finished speaking.

‘Why, then, you fear?’

‘Because it will not be good.

‘Why? Why can’t I even know my girlfriend’s family?’

She looked at him, her eyes firm against his own,

unblinking. Then she turned away again.

‘You will meet

them. I promise you that. But I know my parents. And my

brother. I know them.

’ She shook her head again.

‘They are

proud people. It will not be good. But you will meet them.

Confounded by what he heard, he did not speak. He

wished to know more, but he was not one who asked too
many questions.

‘When I go home, I will tell them about you.

’ She tapped

her feet in an undecipherable act of discomfort.

‘This night, I

will tell them this very night. Then we see when I can take

you home.

Once she said this, as if she had relieved herself of a great

burden, she leaned back into the couch towards him and

drew a deep breath. But her words remained in his head. For

words as strong as the ones she’d spoken –

‘It will not be

good’; ‘So you want to marry me?’; ‘You will meet them. I

promise you that’; ‘Then we see when I can take you home’

– are not easily dispelled from the mind. They have to bebroken down slowly, over time. He was
digesting them when

he heard a distinct sound from the backyard that startled

him.

He leapt to his feet and was in the kitchen in the blink of

an eye. He grabbed his catapult from the windowsill and

opened the net door. But it was too late. The hawk had

mounted its thermal by the time he got to the yard, flapping

its wings violently against the updraft, with one of the

yellow-white chicks clasped in its talons. Its wings hit the

laundry rope as it lifted, rattling the rope so that two of the

pieces of clothing he’d hung on it fell to the ground. He

slung a stone at it, but it fell far away from the bird. He’d

put another stone in the catapult when he saw that it was

no use. The hawk had glided into an unreachable thermal

and had started to gain momentum, its eyes no longer

glancing downwards but ahead, into the colourless

immensity of the sky.

Chukwu, the hawk – he is a dangerous bird, as lethal as

the leopard. He craves nothing but flesh and he spends his

life chasing it. He is an unspoken mystery amongst the birds

of the sky. He is a soaring deity, borne on violent wings and

merciless talons. The great fathers studied it and the kite,

its close sibling, and made proverbs to explain its nature,

one of which captures what had just happened to my host’s

chickens: Before every attack the hawk says to the hen,

‘Keep your chicks close to your bosoms, for my talons are

soaked in blood.

My host was gazing at the fleeing hawk, full of rage, when

Ndali opened the net door and entered the backyard.

‘What happened? Why did you run out so fast?’

‘A hawk,

’ he said without looking back. He pointed in the

distance, but the sun forced his eyes into a squint. He held

up his hand to shade them as he stared in the direction the

bird had gone. But the image of the attack was still so clear

in his mind, still so vivid, that he struggled to believe it had

concluded. There was nothing he could do now to save one

of his flock from being torn apart and eaten up. Thechickens he reared with his own hands and
sweat – one had

been taken away from him, again, without a fi ght .

He turned about and saw that the rest of his flock – with

the exception of the one whose chick had been stolen – was

cowered in the safety of the coop. The bereft hen pranced

about with a stutter in its gait, cawing with what he knew

was the avian language of anguish. He did not speak but

pointed in the direction of the empty sky.

‘I can’t see anything.

’ She cupped her eyes and turned to

him again.

‘It stole a chicken?’

He nodded.

‘Oh, my God!’

He turned his gaze to the evidence of the attack: the

ground stained with blood and strewn with feathers.

‘How many did it take? How did it—

‘Ofu ,
’ he said, then, reminding himself that he was talking

with someone who preferred not to speak Igbo, he added,

‘Only one.

He set the catapult on the bench and followed the wailing

hen around the yard. It eluded him at the first attempt to

catch it. But he dashed forward with his two hands in front

of him and clasped it by the wing closest to its left shoulder,

then trapped it against the wall of the fence. Then he lifted

it by its leg, gently feeling its spur. The hen went quiet, its

tail upraised.

‘How did it happen?’ Ndali said as she picked up the fallen

clothes.

‘It just came—

’ He paused to stroke the hen’s earlobe.

‘It

just land on them and catch the small one of this mother

hen, Ada. One of her new chicks.

He set Ada, the hen, back into the coop and closed the

door slowly.

‘Very sorry, Obim.

He dusted his hands by slapping them against each other

and went into the house.

‘Does it happen all the time?’ she said when he returned

to the sitting room from washing his hands in the bathroom.‘No, no oh, not all the time.

He wanted to leave his answer there, but Chukwu, I

nudged him to unload what he bore in his mind. I knew him.

I knew that one of the things that can heal the heart of a

defeated man is the story of his past victory. It soothes the

wound caused by the defeat and fills him with the possibility

of a future victory. So I flashed the thought in his mind that

hawks did not usually come here. I suggested he tell her it

didn’t always happen. And in a rare instance of compliance,

he listened to me.

‘No, it doesn’t happen every time,

’ he said.

‘It cannot

always happen. Mba nu! ’

‘Er,

’ she said.

‘I don’t allow it. Not so long ago, in fact, one tried to

attack my fowls,

’ he said, surprised by his sudden slide into

the corrupted form of the White Man’s language. But it was

in this language that he told her the story of his recent

victory, and she listened, transfixed. Not too long ago, he

began, he’d let out the flock, almost all the poultry except

the occupants of one of the cages of broilers, and had

started to peel yams into the sink in his kitchen, looking out

every now and then, when he noticed a hawk hovering in

the air above the flock. He opened his louvres, grabbed the

catapult, and pulled a stone from the windowsill. He blew

the stone with his mouth to clear off the red ants on it. Then

he unhooked one of the louvres to allow his hand enough

space and wound the handles so that the louvres stood in

straight horizontal layers over each other. Then he waited

for the bird to strike.

The hawk, he informed her, might be the most watchful of

birds and can hover for hours on end, priming its target,

making an effort to strike as precisely as possible – so one

strike might be enough. So he, knowing this, waited for it,

too. He did not take his eyes away from where it hovered for

a second. It was why he caught it in that very moment when

it made the daring plunge into the yard, picked up a small

rooster, and attempted to mount the updraft. The missileknocked the raptor against the wall of
the fence, making it

drop the chick. The hawk slid down to the foot of the wall

with a thud. It hoisted itself up, its head momentarily lost in

its spread-out wings. It had been concussed.

He hastened out into the yard as the hawk tried to stand

erect, then pinned it to the wall, unfazed by the violence of

its beating wings and its riotous squawks. He dragged the

bird by its wings to the cashew tree at the end of the

compound, beside the rubbish bin. He could not, he

emphasised, describe the anger he’d felt. It was with this

great anger that he bound the hawk by its wings, its head

blood soaking the strong fibres of the twine. As he tied the

bird to the tree, he spoke to it and all of its kind – all who

stole what people like him reared with their sweat, time and

money. He walked into the house and returned with a few

nails, sweat bleeding down his back and neck. As he

stepped back into the yard, the hawk called with a strange

fury, its voice piercing and ugly. He picked up a big stone

from behind the tree and held up the bird’s neck against the

tree. Then he struck the nail into its throat with the stone

until the nail burst out on the other end, spitting splinters

and unbuckling a coat of old bark from the tree. He spread

one wing, his hand and the stone now covered in the hawk’s

blood, and drove it, too, deep into the flesh of the tree.

Although he saw that he’d done something extremely

violent and unusual, so overwhelmed with rage was he that

he was determined to complete what his mind had conjured

up as the deserving punishment for the bird: a crucifixion.

Thus he put together the feathery legs of the dead bird and
nailed them to the tree. And it was finished.

He sat back into the chair now that he’d finished the

story, entranced in his own vision. Although he’d been

looking at her all the while, it seemed that he had just seen

her for the first time since he began the tale. He became

conscious of the weight of what he had told her. And he

feared, now, that she must think of him as a violent man. Inhaste, he looked up at her, but he
could not tell what she

was thinking.

‘I am amazed, Nonso,

’ she said suddenly.

‘By what?’ he said, his heart quickening.

‘The story.

Is that it? he wondered. Is that the way she would view

him from now on? An irredeemably violent man who

crucifies birds? ‘Why?’ he said instead.

‘I don’t know. But – in fact – I don’t know. Maybe the way

you tell it to me. But – I just see you, just a man who loves

his fowls so much. So very much.

Ebubedike, my host’s thoughts swirled at this. L ove , he

thought. How could love be what she thinks about at this

given moment after he’d just exposed himself as capable of

such senseless brutality?

‘You love them,

’ she said again, now with her eyes closed.

‘If you didn’t love them, you would not have acted this way

in the story you just told me. And today also. You really love

them, Nonso.

He nodded without knowing why.

‘I think you are really a good shepherd.

He looked up at her and said,

‘What?’

‘I called you a shepherd.

‘What is that?’

‘It is one who keeps sheep. Do you remember from the

Bible?’

He was somewhat perplexed by what she’d said, for he

had not given it much thought, just as men do not often

give deep thoughts to the things they do every day, things

that are routine to them. He hadn’t considered that he had

been broken by the world. The birds were the hearth on

which his heart had been burned, and – at the same time –

they were the ashes that gathered after the wood was

burned. He loved them, even if they were varied while he

was one and simple. Yet, like everyone who loves, he wished

that it be requited. And because he could not tell even if his

singular gosling once loved him or not, in time his lovebecame a deformed thing – a thing
neither he nor I, his chi,

could understand.

‘But I keep fowls, not sheep,

’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter, so far you keep birds.

He shook his head.

‘It is very true,

’ she said, drawing close to him now.

‘You

are a shepherd of birds, and you love your flock. You care for

them the way Jesus cares for his sheep with so much love.

Although what she said had puzzled him, he said,

‘That is

so, Mommy.

Agbatta-Alumalu, my host was so confounded by the

things Ndali said that day that even long after they’d

finished making love, eaten rice and stew, and made love

again, he sat in the bed listening to the sound of crickets in

the farm and barnyard while Ndali drifted off to sleep. His

mind lay solidly on the cryptic things she had said about her

family as if caught there, like a bird on birdlime. He was

peering directly at the wall across from him, gazing at

nothing in particular, when he was startled by her voice.

‘Why are you not sleeping, Nonso?’

He faced her and slid downwards into the bed.

‘I will, Mommy. Why did you wake?’

She shifted, and he saw the silhouettes of her breasts in

the darkness.

‘I don’t know oh, I just wake like that. I did not sleep deep

before oh,

’ she said, with the same weak voice.

‘Er-he,

Nonso, I have been wondering all day: what is the sound

that the chickens were making after the hawk took the small

one? It was like they all gathered – er, together.

’ She

coughed, and he heard the sound of phlegm within her

throat.

‘It was like they were all saying the same thing, the

same sound.

’ He started to speak, but she spoke on.

‘It was

strange. Did you notice it, Obim?’

‘Yes, Mommy,

’ he said.

‘Tell me, what is it? Is it crying? Are they crying?’

He inhaled. It was hard for him to talk about this

phenomenon because it often moved him. For it was one ofthe things that he cherished about
the domestic birds – their

fragility, how they relied chiefly on him for their protection,

sustenance, and everything. In this they were unlike the wild

birds.

‘It is true, Mommy, it is cry,

’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘That is so, Mommy.

‘Oh, God, Nonso! No wonder! Because of the small one—

‘That is so.

‘That the hawk took?’

‘That is so, Mommy.

‘That is very sad, Nonso,

’ she said after a moment’s quiet.

‘But how did you know they were crying?’

‘My father told me. He was always saying it is like a burial

song for the one that has gone. He called it E gwu umu-

obereihe . You understand? I don’t know umu-obere-ihe in

English.

‘Little things,

’ she said.

‘No, minorities.

‘Yes, yes, that is so. That is the translation my father said.

That’s how he said it in English: minorities. He was always

saying it is like their “okestra”

‘Orchestra,

’ she said.

‘O-r-c-h-e-s-t-r-a.

‘That is so, that is how he pronounced it, Mommy. He was

always saying the chickens know that is all they can do:

crying and making the sound ukuuukuu! Ukuuukuu!’

Later, after she drifted back to sleep, he lay back beside

her, thinking about the hawk attack and her observation

about the fowls. Then, as the night prospered and his

thoughts returned to the things she’d said about her family,

the fear slithered in again, this time wearing the facial mask

of a sinister spirit.

IJANGO-IJANGO, the ndiichie say that if a wall does not bear

a hole in it, lizards cannot enter a house. Even if a man is

troubled, if he does not become broken, he can sustain

himself. Although my host’s peace had been meddled with,

he went about his business with serenity. He deliveredtwenty-nine eggs to the restaurant down
the street and

drove to Enugu to sell seven of the chicks and to buy a few

more brown hens and six bags of feed. He had only bought

a bag of mash when he came by a man playing uja , the

flute of the spirits. The flautist trailed behind another man

whose torso was painted with nzu and uli and camwood, and

who clenched a strand of young palm leaf between his

teeth. Behind the two men was a masquerade. A group of

people were gathered as the iru-nmuo , wearing an antlered

mask that bore the scarification of a slit-eyed ichie, danced

to the sound of ancient flute music attended by a rattling

twin gong. As you know, Egbunu, when one encounters an

ancestral spirit – the corporeal manifestation of one or more

of the great fathers – one cannot resist. Gaganaogwu, I

could not hold back! For I had lived in the days of the great

fathers when masquerades were a frequent sight. I could

not hold back the temptation to listen to the mystical tune

of the uja , the flute crafted by the best among the people
who live on the earth. I shot out of my host into a frantic

crowd of spirits of all kinds and climes which were gathered

around this area, making deafening noises, their feet ticking

on the soft grounds of Ezinmuo. But what surprised me even

more was what I saw above the other part of the bustling

market. A group of small human-shaped spirits – of children

killed at childbirth or conception or of twins killed long ago –

stood playing at an elevation of about four hundred metres,

the distance at which ekili , the mystical transport system of

astral projection and bird flight, are rendered possible. This

group of spirits was held above the human crowd by a force

beyond the knowledge of man (except dibias and the

initiated), so that it seemed as though they were on the

ground. They were stamping their feet, leaping and

snapping their fingers as they played the ancient game of

okwe-ala . Their laughter was loud and cheerful, ringed with

the hollow thread of the ancient language long lost among

men. Chukwu, although I have witnessed things like this

before, I was again mystified by the fact that, despite thedozen or so childish spirits playing, a
market went on

undisrupted below them. The market continued to teem

with women haggling, people driving in cars, a masquerade

swinging through the place to the music of an uja and the

sound of an ekwe . None of them was aware of what was

above them, and those above paid no heed to those below,

either.

I had been so carried away by the frolicking spirits that

the masquerade and its entourage were gone by the time I

returned to my host. Because of the fluidity of time in the

spirit realm, what may seem like a long time to man is in

fact the snap of a finger. This was why, by the time I was

back into him, he was already in his van driving back to

Umuahia. Because of this distraction, I was unable to bear

witness to everything my host did at the market, and for this

I plead your forgiveness, Obasidinelu.

A short distance from Umuahia, my host received a

message from Ndali that she would come that night briefly

because she was preparing for a test the following day.

When she came that night, wearing her lab coat, he was

watching Who W ants to Be a Millionaire , a TV show she

loved and had introduced him to.

She removed the coat and revealed a green shirt and

denim trousers that gave her the appearance of a teenager.

‘I am just coming from the lab,

’ she said.

‘Please off the

TV, we need to talk about coming to my family house

tomorrow.

’
‘The TV?’ he said.

‘Yes, off it!’

‘Oh? No vex, Mommy.

He rose slowly to turn it off, but stopped at the

intensification of a peculiar sound. He stood watching again.

‘In fact let us go to the backyard, it is stuffy here,

’ she

said.

He followed her to the yard, the air thick with the smell of

the poultry. They sat on the bench, and she was about to

begin speaking when she saw a long black bit of plumagestuck to the wall as if glued to it.

‘Look, Nonso!’ she said,

and he saw it, too. He picked the feather off the wall and

sniffed it.

‘It is from that stupid hawk,

’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Ah, how did it hang there like that?’

‘I don’t know.

’ He crumpled it and flung it over the fence,

his anger erupting at the memory of the previous day.

She drew a deep breath, and, pushing herself forward, she

spoke as if she’d been thinking about every word, and every

one of them had been measured and planned for so long.

‘Chinonso Solomon Olisa, you have been a great person, a

godsend to me. Look at me, I have been through hell. You

met me in the worst place. You met me, I was on the bridge.

I was on that bridge because – because what? – because I

was tired of the bad treatment. Because I was tired of being

cheated and lied to. But God! He sent you into my life at the

very appointed time. Look at me now.

’ She splayed her

hands open for him to see.

‘Look at me, look at how I have

been transformed. If anyone told me or even my mum that

her daughter would be working with poultry, touching agric

fowl, who would believe it? Nobody. Nonso, you don’t even

know who I am or where I am from.

She seemed to smile, but he could tell that it wasn’t a

smile. It was something her face had done to help her

conceal the difficult emotion that was welling within her.

‘So what am I saying? Why am I talking like this? I am

saying that my family – my mother and father, and even my

brother – may not accept you. I know it is hard to

understand, Nonso, but look, my dad is a chief. Onye Nze .

They will say I am not suited for a farmer. It is just that, they

will say that …

’

Egbunu, my host listened as she said the same thing over

and over again to try to neutralise its effect. He was shaken

by the things she’d said, for he’d been afraid of these

things. He’d seen the signs. He saw it on the day at the

watch shop on Finbarr’s Street, when she’d told him that she

was born overseas,

‘in the UK’

. Her parents and her olderbrother had been schooled there, and it was she alone who

had chosen to do her schooling in Nigeria.

‘But,

’ she had

added,

‘I will do my master’s abroad.

’ He remembered

another time. They were driving past the old part of the city,

tearing through the storm wind that massed against it, when

she asked if he had gone to university. He’d been struck by

it, and his heart had begun to beat rapidly.

‘No,

’ he’d said,

as if with a dead tongue. But Ndali had simply said,

‘Oh, I

see.
’ He remembered how, afterwards, she’d pointed past a

group of multi-storey buildings lined shoulder to shoulder on

the side of the road around Aguiyi Ironsi Layout, a tall new

solar-powered streetlight sticking up above one of them,

and said,

‘We live somewhere among those buildings.

‘I am not trying to make you afraid,

’ she said presently.

‘Nobody can decide who I want to marry. I decide for myself.

And I am no longer a child.

He nodded.

‘Obim, i gho ta go ?’ she said, her head tilted sideways,

her face anchored in the valley between smiling and crying.

‘I understand, Mommy,

’ he said in the language of the

White Man, surprised by her switch to the language of the

old fathers. Although he’d heard her speak it on the phone

with her parents, she hardly spoke it with him. She’d said

she did not like to speak it except with her parents because,

having lived abroad for a few years, she did not think she

was fluent in it.

‘Da’alu ,
’ she said, and kissed him on the cheek. She rose

and went into the kitchen.

Later, while they ate, she said,

‘Nonso, you truly love me?’

He was starting to answer when she said,

‘That must be why

you would want to marry me?’ He murmured something that

dissolved away in an instant because she quickly added,

‘It

must be because you love me.

He waited for a moment before saying,

‘It is.

’ He expected

her to say more, but she went to the kitchen to wash the

plates, carrying the single kerosene lamp in the house. It

crossed his mind to put on the rechargeable lantern, but heremained seated instead,
contemplating all she had said

when she came back into the sitting room.

‘Nonso, I ask again, do you love me?’

In the near darkness, although he wasn’t looking at her,

he could tell that she’d closed her eyes as she waited for his

answer. She often closed her eyes whenever she expected a

response to a question, as if afraid that what he might say

might hurt her. Then, after he had spoken, she would try to
slowly take in what had been said.

‘You say yes, Nonso, but is it true?’

‘It is so, Mommy.

She returned to the room with the lantern, set it on a stool

beside her, and turned it low so that their shadows sketched

by the incipient darkness swelled.

‘So you truly love me?’

‘It is so, Mommy.

‘Chinonso, you always say you love me. But do you know

that you need to really love someone before you marry the

person? Do you know the meaning of love?’ He was starting

to speak.

‘No, just tell me, first, do you know what love is?’

‘I do, Mommy.

‘Is that truth? Really, is that the truth?’

‘It is so, Mommy.

‘Then, Nonso, what is love?’

‘I know. I can feel it,

’ he said. He opened his mouth to

proceed, but he said,

‘Eck,

’ and then fell silent again. For he

feared that he could not answer her correctly.

‘Nonso? Do you hear?’

‘Yes, I feel love, but I cannot lie that I know everything

concerning it, every single thing.

‘No, no, Nonso. You said you love me, so you must know

what love is. You must know what.

’ She sighed and let out a

tsk.

‘You must know, Nonso.

Gaganaogwu, my host was troubled by this. Although I,

like every good chi, often allow my host to make use of the

talent I have chosen for him from the hall of talents by

interfering minimally in his decision-makings, I wanted tointerfere here. But I was stopped by
what he resorted to: the

effective tool of silence. For I have come to know that when

the peace of the human mind is threatened, it often answers

with benign silence at first, as if stunned by a withering blow

whose impact it must allow to dissipate. And when this

dissipation had been completed, he mumbled,

‘Okay.

’
He leaned back into the chair and recalled what she had

told him about one of her friends who laughed at a man who

told her friend he loved her after just meeting her for the

first time. He’d wondered at the time why she and Lydia, the

friend, had thought it completely ludicrous and that it

deserved mockery. This reminded him of when Miss J

laughed at him when he said he loved her. At the time, he

had been surprised, as he was now. He looked up at her

silhouette, and it struck him for the first time that he’d not

properly weighed what it would entail to be married. She

would have to move in with him into the compound. She

would ride with him in his van to deliver eggs to the bakery

on Finbarr’s Street and meat to the restaurants where he

delivered live chickens every now and then. All that had

come to belong to him would now also belong to her –

everything. Did he hear himself say it correctly? Everything!

And if, in time, he plants his seed in her, the child that will

be born – even that child will belong to both of them! Her

possessions, her car – he would benefit from her studies in

the university, her family, her heart, and all that was her,

hers, and all that would be hers would all be his, too. This

was what marriage comprised.

In light of this new understanding, he said,

‘Actually, I
don’t, I can say—

She must have said the ‘Okay’ after she opened her eyes.

‘But you …

’ she started to say, but fell silent.

‘What? What?’ he said in a frantic effort to prevent her

from holding back that which she had prepared for release,

for she often did this: pause on the verge of saying

something, then draw back and seal it up again in the jar of

thought, to be released later, and sometimes never.‘Don’t worry,

’ she said almost in a whisper.

‘You will come

to my house next Sunday, then. And you will meet my

family.

Oseburuwa, you know that a chi is a font of memory – a

moving accretion of the many cycles of existences. Each

event, every detail stands like a tree staked into the bright

darkness of its eternity. Yet it does not remember every

event, only those which impact its host in memorable ways.

I must tell you that my host’s decision that night is one I will

always remember. At first he’d waited for her to say these

words he dreaded, that ‘it will not be good’

. But she did not

speak. So, in a faltering tone, he said,

‘That is so, Mommy. I

will meet your family next week Sunday.