The first time I heard my father swear, was when his best friend died and was buried immediately. The family didn’t budge despite my father’s plea to let his friend’s body get cold before they placed him in greater bondage than death. The family didn’t budge. They claimed it was their religious tradition to bury him before nightfall. With rage in his eyes and voice, my dad cursed the Alfas and clerics for being heartless and incorrigible. My head snapped to my dad as I heard the word. He didn’t use words like that in an uneducated environment, and he couldn’t disrespect the elders, even in a language they did not understand. My head slowly turned to the elders; a cap was on each head with white cloths wrapped around it. The silver tooth in each of their mouths snickered at my dad whenever he countered their words.
“Fuck!”
I heard my dad swear before leaving the scene in anger.
One of the Alfas had shouted after him, “May Allah forgive you.”
I was perplexed. I thought Allah was supposed to forgive them for burying a man immediately after death. What if he didn’t die? Or if he fainted or if it was a prank? I didn’t understand, but I ran after my dad, hoping he could smile at me and say, ‘Mama, Uncle Chi is dead. I know you miss him, and I miss him too.’ A smile crawled through my face at the mere thought of that. Instead, I met my dad cuddled up to a broken mud wall near him. I heard the sniff before I saw the tears as my dad held his chest tightly, and his face contoured as if he was in pain. “Dad?” I had called slowly. With his back turned, I barely saw him wiping his tears; he turned to me with a big smile on his face. My heart skipped a beat at my dad’s appearance; I didn’t know which looked more broken; the wall he was leaning on or himself. I took a step closer and embraced him in a tight hug, no words were said, just two hearts communicating. My dad didn’t utter a sound, but I understood his pain and fears in a thousand words, for soon my back was soaked in tears.
Slowly I detached from him.
“I’ve lost her,” I heard him mumble.
I was confused because his friend who had just died was a man.
“I’ve lost your mom,” he said in a wobbly voice.
It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but his eyes explained to me. Uncle Chi was the middleman between my parents. After my mom left us seven years ago when I was barely five, my dad and Uncle Chi persuaded her to return, but she was intransigent; she didn’t want to desert her family again. After all, it was my mom’s mistake to get pregnant as a Christian. My mother’s family was unrelenting for her to marry a Muslim. To make this happen, they had already accepted her bride price from a rich Alhaji who was ready to marry her. My parents battled this for several years before my mother eventually succumbed to family pressure. Of course, she had to pay the price because Alhaji, who had already married another woman, took her in as a second wife.
Regardless of this, my parents still loved each other, and they were always skulking in their relationship. This drama was up until my mom got pregnant again. To her dismay, she didn’t know who the child was, but she had already made up her mind to give the baby to her husband. My mom cut all ties with my dad, and she didn’t want him to sabotage her marriage, and only Uncle Chi could talk to her whenever they met in the mosque. Luckily for my mom, her child is a replica of her; she refused to do a DNA test, so my dad couldn’t claim the child also because he didn’t want to destroy her marriage. The last time my dad heard from Uncle Chi was last week, and he had told my dad that my mom and her husband were relocating to Dubai with the kid. Uncle Chi had driven to the airport so he could at least get my mom’s contact before she left, which he did. Unfortunately, he had an accident on his way back to Abuja, which cost him his life, and before my dad even saw him, he was already buried six feet under the ground.
My father didn’t stop crying on our way back home, and he didn’t stop crying that night. Or the next night or the nights after. From the conspicuous torture in his eyes each day, I knew I had lost my dad.
“Wole, don’t do this to yourself, if not for anything but for your twelve-year-old child. Pity this little girl joor nitori oloun,” my grandma had appealed one morning.
I stared at my dad behind the curtain and saw his rebellious countenance; I knew my dad was missing something. The sudden knock on the door startled the three of us, especially my Nana, as she let out a frightened yelp.
“Who’s there?” Nana had called out.
“Madam, na me, Ahmed. Somebody dey for gate. She say she wan see oga,” our gateman’s little friend’s voice rang through the house.
Garba was our gateman but Ahmed, a little boy often came to visit him. My dad called him the amiable little aboki. He said he didn’t look exactly like the others. I couldn’t see the difference. Although, he had been around only recently, but just like the others, Ahmed sometimes ran the streets looking ragged and dirty. I thought he often came around because he would have enough to eat at Garba’s corner; it was true. Beyond his intermittent visits to our gateman, little else was known or could be said of him.
Nana, surprised that Garba had left the gate to be attended by his little friend, asked, “Where is Garba?”
“He dey toilet. He say make I come tell you before I open gate,” Ahmed answered, scratching his head. The quizzical look on Nana’s face drew another response from him. “Sorry ma.”
“No problem, let her come in,” Nana told Ahmed, who left at once.
“When this lady comes in, you will act like a man and welcome her. You can’t keep mourning like a spoilt brat. Shogbomi?” She looked at my dad sternly, daring him to counter her instruction.
Nana scolded Dad as she would me if I refused to go to bed after 8 PM.
The loudest noise we’ve heard in the house since Uncle Chi’s death was probably the footsteps approaching us. Nana was staring at the door with a slight smile on her face, and my curiosity spiked. Could it be that Nana has brought home another woman for my dad? Am I going to have a stepmother?
Questions kept swirling in my head, and my heart became heavier each second. The smile on Nana’s face dropped as she saw the woman, my eyes refused to leave grandma’s face, and I was forced to stifle a peal of laughter. She looked like she had just seen a ghost. I lazily dragged my head from Grandma.
“I have a letter from your lover.”
