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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 would 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