THE WINDOW

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Iloje looked at the window and saw nothing. 

She stopped her packing midway and stared at it a little longer before shaking her head and going back to packing. 

Trash this frame. Keep this other one. Wistfully touching the vase her late friend got her as a gift that year, with flowers. Then, looking at the remains of the plant that she could not for the life of her keep alive, and on and on it went.  

To anyone else entering Iloje’s self-contained apartment, it was just a window, the largest one in it. Most of the friends she invited came and went without sparing it a glance. But some more perceptive of the few would go close and stand in front of it and say something about how it was “perfect” or “good for breeze in this heat,” and Iloje would nod in agreement or grunt her acquiescence, if she had more energy. 

Before that week began, the window was a place of solace for her. She took her pictures beside it because it had a way of spreading a halo and a shadow across her background in the most photogenic way. She did her makeup close to it. She stood and looked outside it with a hot cup of coffee on good days and it gave her a birds eye view of her neighbourhood. She had seen some of the most ridiculous things that people do when they think nobody is watching them, all from that window. 

But things are different now. For Iloje, the window now meant trauma. 

It started that night when the sounds of screams woke her up in her darkened room to the shape of a man, all black, outside her window. It escalated when the figure kept hitting at the barricade on the outside and stabbing and slicing at the net to get inside. It got worse when the screams outside and the banging doors finally registered in her head and mind. “Yeeeeeee!” “Ejoor, joor…” A gunshot sealed the deal, with three rapid shots after that and the merge of a scream and a thud. The intruder was now moving from her window to the back door of the apartment. 

In all of this, Iloje remembered her heart beating faster than any drumming she had ever heard. She remembered her body going still as the dead from shock and unable to move. She remembered vividly being unable to even make a sound, like all her fears were stuck like a big raging ball in her throat. She remembered how the prayers in her head came in clean cut English repetitions of “God please!”. Not Igbo. Not Pidgin. Clean cut English words filled with the weight of her dread.  She remembered crouching that way for three hours straight, while the figure moved from window to door, cursing all through and promising havoc  in a language she could not understand but from which she knew enough to know that she was dead if he ever got in. She remembered how she counted the hours, praying like someone on the brink of insanity for daybreak, still crouching in that same position, till it came and the thieves also seemed to fade away with the night. 

She was in a new place now, bringing out the new things she had just bought and a pack with things from the former place. She looked at the window of the new place and saw nothing, just a black figure struggling to get in and the sounds of screams and gunshots.  Then, she would blink and the sounds and the images would suddenly dematerialise and leave. 

It was hot. The place was dim. But Iloje stood up and closed the window with a curtain before continuing to pack again. 

THE UNSUNG MATRIARCH

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Ugonma means beautiful eagle and that was my Aunty’s name. She is late now. 

In my child’s eye, when I remember her, she was perhaps one of the adults that fascinated me the most. She was not perfect, not in the least. She made it a point of duty to make us eat the things we hated the most – vegetables! She would put them in noodles, in stews and make up all sorts of soups, when our age mates at the time were swimming in capri-sun and biscuits. She liked to harp on sleep – where had anyone ever seen 5 to 6-year-olds and sleep in the same sentence? But she expected it, pushed for it and made comments like,  “when you grow up, you would really want to sleep but you would have a lot to do then, so better sleep now.” To be honest, it felt more like a curse than a statement of fact. She wasn’t “cool” in the sense of what kids saw as “cool” then. Things like her fashion, or her choice of TV shows and all sorts were what 6-year-old me saw as weird. Her idea of things that were cool and ours were always at polar opposites. So, no, she was not perfect, not in the least.

But she was spectacular!

She could hold a lizard with her bare hands. I remember screaming and crying and begging her to throw it away, while she was all the while laughing and having the time of her life, touching the scales and muttering things to the little animal. It was the scariest day of my life but it was also the coolest thing I had ever seen an adult do in real life. No, she was not Dr. Dolittle, but in my eyes then, she was close! Another time, She was able to get a bird to fly into her hands and entered the house with it singing. You needed to see us running around for our dear lives till she took it back outside and it flew away. You could have told 6-year-old me that she was a witch and in that moment, I would have believed you with all my heart. 

Stories sounded so real with her. She was my first experience of bedtime stories – no, not the kind read from storybooks – but the kind that people inherit, you know, stories from memories of herself as a child, sitting close to a fire and hearing the same stories from another person. The stories ranged from the tales of warriors, to kingdoms with the most beautiful princesses, to periods when animals could speak and the sky was much closer to the earth, to lands with mystical creatures and witches and beasts. Every story had a song, every song had a response and we had favourites that got repeated – songs that we would know for life, moments that felt more magical than Disney, just with the way she said them, but which also felt so real that when we slept we dreamt of them. 

My first experience of genuine affirmations came from her. I would make doodles of the fine girl I could see on Glo recharge cards then. I remember drawing faces that looked like hearts and bodies that were largely more triangular than human but she would look at them and scream with glee. She would take them and paste them in booklets and tell me to draw more and make them even better. My little heart would glow with so much pride at my accomplishment not because it looked good in my eyes but because someone so much older and so much wiser found them fascinating enough to scream about. 

She liked to laugh. It was the kind that rang loud and came from deep inside her chest.  Her face would animate into something so childlike, and it was so easy to make her do so. Whenever she laughed widely, her dimples would sink in deep, the wider her lips went, the deeper the dimples went as well. And sometimes, she would laugh so loud and so long while talking to our other Aunty, Ada, that tears would literally roll down her eyes as she laughed. And I would wonder, is she crying or laughing?

Most of all, she was mischievous in her own way – we would take long walks, detours from errands that should have taken seconds stretching into a few more minutes. She would tag me along to make small talk with other people she called friends and I would get to hear the juiciest gossip:  about the lady down the street that was married to a ritualist and the fine boy in the house beside the road that was slowly resorting to drugs (he was my biggest crush then by the way, so imagine how my little heart cried at hearing that my crush was now a bad boy, like my mum would say) and the pregnant woman that was killed by her own gateman, the seemingly kind man we used to greet on our way to school and two women fighting over a man and so many other things that I kept secret in my little head. And, as was usual in such detours, we would buy the sweetest and tangiest things with money squeezed out of our haggling for the things we were able to buy at a lower price and so on.

She is dead now. 

Not many people experienced the sides of her that I met as a child and grew to appreciate as a teenager. Not many people know that my love for illustrating dresses started from her simply taking interest and screaming with glee at the awful replicas I was making out of the beautiful models on old recharge cards. 

Not many people know that my love for reading and fiction started with simply sitting on our bed at night while she told stories and I tried to imagine them the best I could. Now, I have a little sister who is just 7 and who I have retold those same stories to and I wonder if I tell them half as well as she did. 

Not many people know that when I don’t have time to sleep these days, I remember what she said and sometimes, I still wonder if it was a curse (lol, I know it isn’t and well, I make time to sleep). 

Not many people know that while I found her relationship with animals fascinating, I still can’t bring myself to touch any animal of any kind and that I run away even if it’s a chicken that is chasing me, I make way for a goat to pass and I scream and tell my younger sister to kill bugs whenever we see one because I literally can’t hurt a fly (not out of the goodness of my heart, just that I’m terrified of them hehe). 

Not many people know that all those gists I got to hear in passing have made me quite fascinated with humanity and people – reading people, seeing that even the most beautiful people can have flaws, that even the loftiest feelings and lead to the basest actions, that  even the wealthiest people have their own pains and that even the best people are capable of the worst things. 

Not many people know. So, I hope this story lets many people know about Ugonma, the beautiful eagle. Now that I think about it, the name just fits.