years’ experience, armed with a treatment chart, I can hold a ten-minute ward-round conversation with a comatose patient, particularly with a dozen student nurses and doctors clustered around me, trying to pick up useful hints for their viva exams. But there was something about that Kreektown parlour that threw me off my stride. This did not seem the proper forum to review the pessimistic prognoses of cerebrovascular accidents.
Then she returned. She did not have any facts, figures, or documentary evidence, but she had painted her face, and although she still looked like my mother’s marginally younger sister, she no longer looked like the mother of a woman whose funeral dirge we could hear from the square. Then she came and sat next to me on the sofa, close enough for me to perceive a rather rancid variation on the eau de parfum theme. ‘As I was saying,’ she began, and there was something else in her voice, which was when I looked at the sadness in the eyes of the Igarra man and realised that, president or no president, this fieldwork was ending right there, right then.
‘By the way,’ I interrupted kindly, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Ruma,’ she simpered.
‘Ruma,’ I said, ‘good night.’
SHEESTI KROMA-ALANTA
Kreektown | 19th April, 2000
Ruma aged suddenly and it took the villagers by suprise. It happened in the weekend her headmaster husband died. He had not said a word in the twelve years of his stroke, in the twelve years of his retirement from Kreektown Primary. He was a presence in the house that many imagined she was better off without. Yet once he died she went to pieces, weeping without a break, in spite of how old it made her look.
I came alone for the burial, without my children and my husband. I stayed at the Kilos Inn at Ubesia, missing most of the silly ceremonies. In the evening when he was already buried, I slipped in to comfort my mother and to leave her the provisions I had bought. Then I left for home.
I had buried him a long time ago, after all—before his stroke, in fact, on that day that he flogged me after hearing about my kissing the son of Lazarus. After the things he himself had done to me.
And that would have been it: one more attachment to Kreektown pulled out of my life, leaving just that shrivelling root of my mother. One final visit left to pay . . .
And then I had the strange meeting with Mata Nimito.
* * *
THE DRIVER had been driving fifteen minutes towards Ubesia when I remembered the ukpana leaves. By this time my anger was gone, the anger I needed to walk coldly through my old haunts. The anger I needed to look boldly at my flesh and blood, who had buried me alive.
Our first son, Moses, was prone to eczema. It had defied Denle’s creams, and I had had a bet with him: Menai children did not live with eczema; they had a weekly bath with ukpana leaves for a couple of months, and that was that. Yet I did not have the Igbo word for ukpana, or the English word either. Didn’t have a clue how to ask for it in any herbal market in Onitsha. I just knew where the ukpana bushes grew in Kreektown, near the abandoned church.
I had Razak turn around, and we returned to my old hometown. I could not stop thinking of my mother. We had probably had all of an hour together. Ruma had gone from dressing up in skirts to pining for her grandchildren. She did not say a word, but I knew it, now that I was a mother as well. She had made three clothes for them. She had never made me clothes and the lack of practice showed. I had thrown them in the boot, and I will throw them in the bin, but I could not stop thinking of her.
We got as far as the car could go and I told Razak to stop. It did not occur to me to ask for his protection. Safety was not something one ever thought about in Kreektown. Even in these days of the roughboys, I am not really bothered. I was nearly raped once, outside Kreektown, but he ran away when I lied about my AIDS status. Anyway, the ukpana bushes were still some distance by footpath, so the quicker I left, the better. And I wanted to walk out the silly feelings in my head, not sit in a car and let them fester.
I saw his singate even before I saw him. He stood in the path, on the bend just before the first clump of bushes. Behind him was the purple-blue of the ukpana sprays, but there he stood, not quite blocking the way, though his presence was enough to have turned me around, had I not walked so far already. Here then was the man I loathed most in the entire world.
Leaving the People for marriage was not the great unnameable offence it used to be. Too many Menai had died; the end was clear. I had had measles during the Lassa fever outbreak of the ’80s and so did not get the vaccine that had doomed my people. It was obvious that I had to make a future with someone outside my dying nation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have looked the other way with Denle and me, but no, he had to bring the weight of our archaic traditions down on the life I could have had. And that was the first nineteen years of my life excised . . . and now here he was, before me.
The anger blinded me to the obvious questions: what was he doing there, why was he without the helpers who took him around in these latter days of his ancientness? His eyes were shut, as well they should be. His Menai heaven would probably fall at the taboo of a mata locking eyes with a ‘dead person.’ I steeled myself and walked up to him and started past him.
‘Sheestumu?’ he whispered. I froze. Mata Nimito named all Menai. He was an old man that the town mostly forgot, until there was a need to remember him: burials, namings, disputes . . . Nobody would ever consider him a friend. There were too many generations between him and us. But he did have that playful way with my name. He let his singate fall and lifted his arms . . . raising the bag of ukpana from his red robes, the leaves plucked just below their nodes, to preserve their potency. I took them, too. It did not seem likely he had a problem with eczema. I put his ceremonial staff back in his hand. His eyes were pinched so tightly shut I wondered if he were now blind. ‘Eniemute?’
A warm glow started in me. The love for a husband comes from a region of the mind. The love for a father comes from another. There is no crossover. I felt a glow building from a hearth I had thought was terminally broken. I told him of my children, their names. He shook his head impatiently. ‘Eniemute!’
With a dry mouth, I described Moses: the long limbs he owed to his father, his quick temper . . . Ameizi, he said. I described Cynthia, who looked so much like my baby photograph . . . Anosso, he said, and then I described my baby, Patricia, who had the nurses pledging their sons in marriage . . . Ogazi, he said.
The naming was complete.
Then he began to sing my torqwa! I that was dead to Menai! I fell on my knees, enthralled again by the antiquity of my lineage. I knelt there, streaming tears as the poetry of my identity bore me from the caravan of the exiled crown prince through the dunes and the deserts and the savannahs and the forests and creeks of their sojourn. I listened to the descendants of young Auta, trumpeter in the court of the crown prince, Xera, and his wife, Aila, daughter of Numisa, until
Rumieta Kroma the trader of cloth
married Teacher Gaius from Igarra
to birth Sheesti, little mother
who, with Denle, son of Alanta,
scion of Esie, built pillars for Menai:
three pillars of Ameizi, fierce athlete,
Anosso her mother’s
