Omelogor
Early morning in early January, with the air so crisp and dry as if it might crack.
I am in my front balcony, looking at the new day.
A sheen of ocher dust has descended on the world, all hazy light, and the hills in the distance are now blurry spectral shapes.
Harmattan brings its nuisances—cracked lips and hacking coughs, itchy eyes and lethargy—but something of this season has always appealed to me, with life dried down to a spartan state that seems purer, truer, stripped of excess, as if the earth is telling us that there is so much we do not need.
Wind is astir.
Soon dust-whirls will sweep across and leave on the trees and cars and signboards an even thicker glaze.
My windows stay closed in January, because to seek fresh air now is to find fresh dust.
The loud blare of a truck’s horn sounds at the gate and Mohammed hurries out of the gatehouse, sliding his feet into his slippers.
You can tell if he’s in by the blue rubber slippers that lie outside by his door.
From above he looks like a thin column of white cloth blowing in the wind.
He glances up and waves and calls out, “Good morning, Madam.”
“Well done, Mohammed!” I say.
He opens the gate and the diesel-supply truck edges in, old and noisy, whirring and burping.
Exhaust fumes blended with dust probably destroys the lungs, but I inhale in gulps because it is a scent I like.
Mohammed shouts to the truck driver, to stop and then steer to the left, to avoid Madam’s flowers.
My long-limbed harmattan lilies are in their orangish bloom.
I love their hopeful probing shape, and how they survive year after year, and how they dare to flower without the rain.
Mohammed must think it a silly indulgence, my extreme fussing over plants.
Not that he shows it, with his lean face always free of expression in that stoic reassuring way.
He should have seen my mother’s fevered guarding of the flowers in our campus compound when I was growing up.
He motions for the truck to stop, away from my plants but close enough to the diesel tank.
The tank is almost empty: I can see through the white plastic, mounted aloft above the generator.
The truck driver jumps down and begins to unfurl the hose.
Aunty Jane’s words are swirling in my head.
Don’t pretend that you like the life you are living.
She called this morning—the phone buzzing woke me up—to say there was something important she wanted to discuss.
Everybody is talking about the virus in China, but this is her concern, calling me at dawn to say I should adopt a child.
“, I wanted to talk to you in the village but you said you had to return to Abuja for an important meeting.”
You said. As if I didn’t have an important meeting.
“Yes, Aunty, I had a meeting.”
“You are doing so well and we thank God, but all that work has chased men away and left you childless at the age of forty-six. It is unfortunate that your time has passed, and the only option now is to adopt a baby. I have prayed over this and I have made inquiries at a very good motherless babies home in Awka.”
I should not have been so surprised.
Nosy, nattering Aunty Jane, who draws dark rectangles on her forehead in the name of eyebrows and talks nonstop about the most inconsequential things.
How she and my father came from the same parents I will never know.
At our Christmas reunions, her words always float over our heads and dissolve into the forgotten like background music.
For many years she kept asking me if there were no men in the places where I worked, then about two years ago she stopped asking, perhaps defeated by the reality of my age.
And now from nowhere she calls, with the urgency of a secret revelation, to say I should adopt a child.
“Aunty, mba, thank you, I don’t want to adopt,”
I said, with that mellow tone best used on the unhinged.
“In fact, it’s better to adopt two and raise them as twins, so they can play with each other.”
How did she go so quickly from adopting a baby to adopting two?
“Aunty, I don’t want to adopt.”
“It is the only option left to make sure your life does not remain so empty,”
she said, as if we had previously agreed on the emptiness of my life.
“Just because a husband did not come for you, it doesn’t mean you must live an empty life.
Even in the olden days single women could adopt.
You perform some ceremonies and if the child is a boy, he will become a full member of the lineage and inherit property like any other male in the family.”
“Aunty, I don’t want to adopt a child.”
“,”
she said, sighing. “Don’t pretend that you like the life you are living.”
Those words pierced and sank in and cut. Don’t pretend that you like the life you are living.
My driver, Paul, walks into the compound, fastidious as ever in his fitted jeans and buttoned-up shirt.
He’s a little late.
With those watchful sneaky eyes, I know he has seen me up in the balcony, but he acts as if he hasn’t.
He never gives me change from errands run unless I ask, and lately keeps sending long-winded texts begging for money.
I suspect he is drowning in sports betting, the way he is always furtively glued to his phone.
Just before Christmas, one of the cleaners at work came to me, crying like an actor, to say he had lost everything on Nigerbet.
“Madam, I will drink Sniper if I don’t find help for my children’s school fees.
I have Sniper in my house and I swear I will drink it.”
“Then go quickly and drink the rat poison!”
I said, to match drama for drama, but later I called him and transferred some money into his account, telling him it was the first and last time I would. I must speak to Paul before he gets to that stage of a cunning fool who expects somebody else to pay his debts.
The diesel truck is backing out of the compound and Paul begins waving and shouting at the driver.
“Wait! Let me move the car before you climb Madam’s flowers.”
A performance for me.
If I wasn’t up here watching, he would leave the car exactly where it is, hoping the diesel truck’s maneuvering would crush my plants, so he can hurry in to tell me with relish what a useless man the truck driver is.
I lean forward, looking down, and touch the railings covered in finely powdered dust, and when I take my hands away, the metal bears the soft imprint of my fingers.
My ixora plants are dry and shorn of their flowers, but in a few weeks they will burst out in a thousand clusters of the brightest red, almost too beautiful to bear.
The bougainvillea has finally crept and spread itself in full, every inch of my compound walls wreathed in leaves, and each time I come home I feel the ethereal enchantment of an intimate secret garden.
White stars are printed all over the green tarpaulin awning of the carport, and the high hunched backs of my two SUVs stick out from beneath.
The diesel truck is gone, a misty silence falls, and I am moved to be standing out in my balcony on a new morning in this new year.
I am mistress of all I survey.
Actually, Aunty Jane, I do like my life.
I flail for meaning sometimes, maybe too often, but it is a full life, and a life I own.
I have learned this of myself, that I cannot do without people and I cannot do without stretches of sustained isolation.
To be alone is not always to be lonely.
Sometimes I withdraw for weeks merely to be with myself, and I sink into reading, my life’s great pleasure, and I think, and I enjoy the silence of my own musing.
Sometimes I revel in long spells of satisfying sexlessness, unburdened by the body’s needs.
Sometimes my house lights blaze brightly with dinner parties and game nights, and I bring together my different friend groups who otherwise might never meet.
People I grew up with in Nsukka meet friends from university in Enugu, and people I met in the many permutations of my job here meet other Abuja people I know from outside work.
Many of my friends are dependable and trusted and close.
Jide is the oldest and closest, and of course Hauwa.
In the past few years, Hauwa.
It makes me happy to think of the high peal of her laughter and the focus of her brows as she deep-inhales her Loud.
These days I have fewer nights out, but I still enjoy my whiskey neat, and dancing in lounges till dawn, and returning home with my eye makeup smeared, tired and happy and high.
I should have said to Aunty Jane, “There is always another way to live, Aunty, there are other ways to live.”
—
Philippe knocks and hovers at my bedroom door in his shuffling manner that feels insincere, asking if he can dismantle the Christmas tree today.
I tell him he can and ask what he plans to cook.
Some friends are coming at eight, a smaller group than usual, as not everyone is back from holiday travel and some are stuck, with local flights being canceled because of the harmattan haze.
Kano is so bad that people are driving in the afternoon with their headlights on.
Or so Hauwa said, even though she didn’t go to her hometown this season; she went with the children to Dubai, and the husband joined them for a few days.
She will be here early for dinner because she has to leave early too; she never stays past ten thirty when her husband is in town.
She will arrive wearing that oriental vanilla scent, as if she is my cohost, my planning partner, and we can have a leisurely gossip by ourselves before the others arrive.
“I should bring Madam breakfast?”
Philippe asks.
“Yes. Downstairs.”
On my phone a text appears from my father, that beloved man who often now asks “Has anyone seen my glasses?”
even when he’s wearing them. He and Mummy want to know if my cough is better. I reply yes, chewing bitter-kola helped, I will call them later, and end with a heart emoji. Emojis, of course, never feature in his meticulous messages, which never have missing full stops or commas. I text my mother a heart emoji as well, knowing she might not see it for days, inept as she is at using her phone for anything other than calls.
I scan the news headlines before I search out coverage of Kadiatou’s case, as I have been doing every day, as if in vigil, as if by reading these articles I might somehow shield her. One headline asks, “Kadiatou Bah, angel or demon?”
Another speculates about whether she is part of a setup by the political opponents of the man who raped her.
I snort reading that, Kadiatou as part of a dark political plot indeed.
I will call her in a few hours, when she’s awake, to see how she is.
She never says much when I call, not that she ever said much before.
I often think of her expression that day in December when the police brought her to Chia’s house, how she looked as one might look at the precise moment of being struck by lightning.
Philippe serves my breakfast on a lacquered tray that Chia bought for me in Seoul, its edges decorated with images of long-necked birds in flight.
He folds the paper napkin into a miniature tent.
Breakfast is always moi-moi and fruit, a meal I approach day after day with my pleasure undimmed.
Philippe has learned to make moi-moi exactly as I like: no crayfish and no eggs, just pureed beans and tomatoes steam-cooked in fresh leaves that unwrap layer by layer like an exquisite gift.
I would happily have pineapple every day, but Philippe sometimes makes ambitious fruit salads, with cubed mango and bananas, and the bananas I always quickly eat first because bananas exposed for too long feel to me like a health risk.
Philippe is from Cotonou; every chef in Nigeria seems to be from Benin Republic, but I cannot imagine any with more Francophile pretensions.
For years he has tried to convince me to eat what he calls “cuisine,”
as if that word might apply only to food made by the French.
“Madam eats only moi-moi, garri and soup, jollof rice, yam and stew. Every time the same thing.”
As he lists the foods I eat, he touches the tips of his fingers, to show the appalling paucity of so few options.
“I can make soufflé for Madam,”
he says from time to time.
“I know you can, Philippe, but you won’t.”
“What of bouillabaisse for Madam. Madam will like it.”
“No, Philippe. I prefer fisherman soup from Cross River.”
Only when I have dinner parties do I let him do as he likes, but jollof rice must always be made. Years ago, when Philippe had only just started working for me, my mother visited and brought me okpa, not just any okpa but Ninth Mile okpa. No better okpa exists than from those agile women hawking at Ninth Mile with basins balanced on their heads. I was so excited I told Philippe I would have it right away, for breakfast, and in response Philippe mumbled, “Sauvage.”
Standing in the middle of my large kitchen, the ceiling fan spinning above, trim in his short-sleeved white uniform, he said, “Sauvage.”
A swift scattering in my head followed and I heard myself screaming at Philippe as I have never screamed before. “Idiot! Ignorant fool! Go and pack your bags and leave now! You are sacked! Get out!”
Philippe stood with his eyes and mouth rounded from shock. Or maybe confusion. More confusion than shock. My mother had just gone up to take a bath. My cleaner, Mary, came running; my young relative, who was in Abuja to take a job aptitude test and was staying at the time, came running. Atasi was away in boarding school then.
“Madam, what happened?”
Mary asked.
“Aunty, what happened?”
the relative asked.
Already they were looking at Philippe with eyes narrowed in condemnation, because it had to be that he had stolen something from me.
I told them he had said I was a savage for wanting okpa for breakfast, and they looked baffled and soon shuffled away.
The story became that Philippe insulted Madam and she nearly sacked him.
But it wasn’t the true story.
Later I told Philippe I had nearly sacked him because I will not have African self-hate in my house.
“Do you know that okpa is much more nutritious than your crêpes?”
I asked.
He meekly said yes, but only because he was still in shock at having almost been sacked.
He didn’t believe me and he still doesn’t, but he’s canny enough now to express his Francophilia without showing his contempt for African food.
Jide has told this story many times to friends at my dinner parties and it always makes them laugh.
The poor man must have thought his madam had gone mad!
, you have come again!
This is the problem with reading too many books, ; after all, is okpa not bush?
I laugh along too, not because I agree but because I see why they are amused. Only once did my reaction pale, when Jamila said to me, “It looks like you get very angry about small things.”
“They are small things only to small minds,”
I replied, and made a face to show I was only playing with her, even though I really wasn’t. She had the calibrated charm of a person who can turn fully nasty in a heartbeat. I tolerated her, but barely, because she was Hauwa’s childhood friend.
“Ouch!”
Ehigie said.
“Jamila, they said your mind is like groundnut,”
Chinelo said.
“Your own mind is like coconut,”
Jamila said, too brightly, to show how unaffected she was. It was the first time Hauwa had heard the story and she laughed along, but later she looked at me with tender wonder and said, “You’re so passionate. You really believe in what you believe.”
It is still one of the loveliest things I have ever been told.