little gods

Part One: Heaven on Earth

Moji clutched her diary and inched barefoot across the patio overlooking the driveway. She loved the cold feel of marble against her soles but knew she would have to sink her feet into the icky, rain-wetted lawn when marble ran out. Just like it was two nights ago, the rain had turned the lagoon into a curious gem, a jewel that mirrored the moon’s shine. She was tired of poring over it from the first floor of Lara’s two-story Lekki Beach home and had waddled downstairs to see if she could touch those emerald glitters, driven by a hunch that a dust road lit up by fireflies would take her straight through the brick wall and into a lake paradise.

She held her diary firmly against her side, as if it were a banister she could cling to if she fell. She wrote in it each day and never went anywhere without it, a habit she had developed over the last ten years. Keeping records had become necessary now that her memory had failed her a few times; she needed proof that certain things had happened, things she might one day doubt. Also, it was her way of talking to herself when she had no one to talk to. Her lonely days were getting lonelier as the onset of widowhood stretched by the year.

Standing at the edge of the patio, Moji lowered a leg onto the grass and felt water pool around it. The trident lamp post loomed as she squelched towards the garden roundabout in the driveway. The dark patches on the three globes of light crackled. Something landed on her neck and she slapped at it. She pressed her hand against her neck and rubbed. Nothing. She caught nothing. Locusts in their hundreds swarmed around the globes, taking the shape of dark patches where they settled, their wings sounding together in crackles and pops.

Moji opened her diary and raised it to the light with one hand, her arm shaking like a leaf as she leaned forward. She lost the diary pen, trying to remove it from its holder in the book’s spine. So, she swiped below the diary and found it dangling from its leash. Locusts landed on her face and on the pages she held apart. Carefully, she wrote a few lines, describing the locusts as umbral fairies coaxing her towards the magical lagoon. She wished she could tell Lara about it, but they no longer talked like they used to.

Lara no longer entertained her recollections of Taiwo. In fact, ever since Femi died, almost ten years ago, Lara seemed to resent her for still thinking about the boy she loved before she loved her father. Her daughter couldn’t understand why she would dwell on a jilt instead of a husband. It wasn’t fair to Femi, true, but it wasn’t something Moji could help. Taiwo was the love of her life. And you can only have one love of your life. So, of course, she missed him more. Yes, Femi had loved her dearly and had always been good to her, but Taiwo was her twin soul. You can’t compete with that. Back when Lara was younger, Moji’s teenage romance had been their mother-daughter secret, their special bond. It wasn’t exactly a secret. Femi had known about Taiwo. He just hadn’t known how strongly Moji felt about him, or that she never stopped thinking about him even when she was with him.

The last time she spoke to Lara about Taiwo, Lara had shocked her by remarking, “I thought they were fairy tales, Mama, just love stories you made up for me when I was young.”

Taiwo? A made-up story? Why would she fabricate a story and put herself in it?

“When you said both of you could… you know… Heal each other with a touch. Were you speaking metaphorically?” Lara had asked.

And when Moji replied with a firm ‘no’, she said, “Oh, Mama. I don’t know what to think, but, please, I beg you. Let’s give Taiwo a rest for now. It’s only been two months since Daddy died.”

Her daughter’s skepticism did not shock her. Lara was forty-two, after all, far from the child she once was. She was a pediatrician who worked at the prestigious Macaulay Memorial on Lagos mainland. She was all grown and all science. For years, she had insisted on Moji coming to live with her, with her and Yemisi. It was only last year that Moji succumbed to her request. But it wasn’t because she needed her care, no, no. She came to Lagos, to Lara’s Lekki beach home, to help Lara get through a painful divorce.

A dark shape gave her a start. It came out of nowhere and rubbed against her legs. It was Simi, Lara’s white Yorkshire terrier. Moji reached down to pat her furry little head and felt her wagging tail instead. The lamp posts in front of the house didn’t illuminate the driveway enough. Or perhaps it was her cataract making everything darker than it was.

“Mama.” Moji heard a voice call. It sounded like Lara.

“I’m here,” the voice said.

The wide-hipped silhouette of a moderately tall woman (Lara in trousers) rose from her crouch and waved a large hand at Moji. Lara was in the garden roundabout. Her hands were massive. She took them off and Moji realized they were gardening gloves.

“Going somewhere?” Lara asked.

“Not really. Just want to feel the damp soil between my toes, that’s all. Is my granddaughter back from school?”

“She’s been back a long time. She said you were sleeping, and she didn’t want to wake you. She’s in the children’s parlor doing her homework.”

“Alright then.” Moji turned to go back into the house. “Mama?”

“Yes.”

“About Yemisi. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about her.” Lara came into the light. “Mama, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want you putting ideas in her head.”

“What ideas?”

“You told her about the Ibeji when she came home yesterday, didn’t you?”

“It was for her Social Studies homework. She said she was asked to write about the ancient practices of the Yoruba and she asked me if I had ever witnessed twin babies being starved to death. I said no, but I was aware it was happening. I didn’t tell her about that bit of history. They teach that in schools these days.”

“But you said more than that, didn’t you? You know what? Forget it. Forget I brought it up.”

“No, tell me. What did I say?”

Lara took a long while. Finally, she said, “You told her twin souls, and not twins per se, were what people were afraid of back then. She said you said people were scared of them because they were like heaven on earth, too perfect for our world. And that they had magical powers that upset not just the natural cycle of reincarnation but the essence of creation.”

Moji sighed. She remembered that evening. She had rambled on about the zero-sum existence of the spirit world with the real world.

“The natural cycle of reincarnation, Mama? Do we practice Ifa now? If you’re a traditionalist, then let me make it clear to you that I want to raise my daughter a Christian.”

“I said that only because she asked why only one twin was starved to death. I wasn’t the one who told her that. They teach that in schools these days. I didn’t tell her I’m a twin soul, or that I’ve met my other half, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Lara made a guttural sound. She gave her a look that mourned her and returned to her gardening.

Moji rubbed her eyelids and wrung out tears. Taiwo, look what you’ve done to me: everyone thinks I’m crazy. Why did you come into my life? Why?

Taiwo was a boy she first met at the hospital where her mother was being treated for fibroids. As her mother didn’t like the food there, every morning she took breakfast to her before she left for school. Taiwo was not like most of the other in-patients. He wasn’t bedridden or sickly. He seemed fine—well enough to play Hide-and-Seek. She was eleven at the time and he was thirteen. Even now, she could still see him rolling around in the grass and laughing as he recalled the angry remonstrations of a washerwoman, who was talking to herself, thinking no one was watching. They had crawled away from the washerwoman in the laundry, keeping their heads low, and scurried to the guava tree that supported one end of a washing line. Taiwo had slumped on the ground and cackled. That was when Moji had asked him the question that was foremost on her mind.

“Are you sick? You seem quite well to me.”

“I have appendicitis,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when food gets trapped here.” He points to the right side of his belly, a little above his waistline.

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when you press it.”

“Like this?” She jabs him in the ribs and he flinches, twisting his body away.

“Don’t,” he blurts. After a while, he says, “Funny. I didn’t feel a thing. Touch me there again.”

She pokes him in the same spot and this time he doesn’t budge. He tells her to do it again. And again. And again. Each time, he wrinkles his brow, looking more confused. Finally, she pinches him and he yells.

The next day, she learns Taiwo has been discharged.

A week passes. She hopes he will come to the hospital to look for her. Eventually, her mother too is discharged from the hospital. Moji concludes she will never see him again. But a few days later, while she is chattering and squealing with her friends on her way back from school, someone calls her name. It’s Taiwo. He’s not alone. There’s a man with him. A lanky man with bushy hair, an afro with a side part and sideburns. He moves with the aid of a walking cane.

“Taiwo,” she screams and stops short of hugging him. “You’re here. Are you a new pupil?”

“No. I came to see you?”

“Me? How did you know I was here?”

He laughs. “Have you forgotten I asked you what school you went to, and you told me? Well?” He gloats. “I didn’t forget.”

Her friends are waiting for her at the stall where they usually buy stationeries. She waves them goodbye and they leave.

“Is she the one?” the man asks Taiwo.

“Yes, Papa,” Taiwo says.

“The one who what?” She remembers her manners and bows to the adult.

“Young girl, do you know what you did?” the man says. Moji doesn’t know what to make of his expression. Is he upset or pleased? And what did she do?

“You cured me,” Taiwo says.

“I didn’t do anything.”

The man flags down an ice-cream vendor on a bicycle and buys two ruby-red ice lollies, one for Taiwo and one for Moji.

Moji thanks the man.

“Meet my father,” Taiwo says.

“Call me Baba Kayode,” the man says to her.

They move away from the mammy market and head for the shade under the palm tree beside a provision store. They sit under the tree and Taiwo and Moji lick their ice lollies in silence. Baba Kayode gives Moji sporadic glances. He smiles at her when she catches him a second time. Moji plans to turn down whatever reward they might offer her, certain she is not deserving.

When they’re done eating their lollies, Baba Kayode asks Taiwo to show Moji something. Taiwo unbuttons his shirt. He has a coarse fold of darker skin on the left side of his tummy. It’s scar tissue.

“I was running from two boys who were going to beat me,” Taiwo says, “and was trying to climb over a wall with broken glass.”

“The wall had glass barbs made from broken bottles,” Baba Kayode clarifies. “He had heaved his belly on top of it and was trying to wriggle over it.”

“I was bleeding badly. I was rushed to the hospital.”

“He almost died.”

“When you touched my appendicitis, you touched my scar too. And it shrank.”

Baba Kayode points to the scar tissue. “Touch him there,” he says to Moji.

Moji hesitates.

They wait.

She palms the wound, spreads her fingers apart, and rubs. Not knowing what else to do to satisfy their curiosities, she keeps rubbing. Taiwo moans and asks her not to stop.

She rubs until she is conscious of the weight of her arm. Fortunately, Baba Kayode asks her to remove her hand.

When she pulls her hand away, the scar is…

Gone.

Gone without a trace.

She gasps.

No one offers her an explanation. Baba Kayode rolls up his trouser and asks her to touch his shin.

She obliges him.

“I don’t feel anything,” he says to Taiwo.

He asks Moji to stop and start again. She scrubs his shin with both hands.

“Still nothing,” the man says with his eyes closed. “Now both of you hold hands. Taiwo, you touch my leg.”

Moji and Taiwo do as he says. It takes a few minutes, but he soon begins to rock back and forth like someone in a trance. When Taiwo stops waxing his leg, he stretches it and stares at it as if it just reappeared. He puts his foot down, stands on both feet, and hops on that leg, laughing and singing praises.

Moji was not sure of it now, but when she first met Baba Kayode, he may have had tribal marks—three long lines that stretched from the corners of his mouth to his temples. She can’t remember that far back, but she was sure she and Taiwo had done something to his face. It could have been to strengthen his facial bones, fix his teeth, remove his tribal marks, or all three. She visited Taiwo often to talk and play just like they did at the hospital. On one of her visits, Taiwo gave her a present. It was a wooden carving with big eyes and small breasts.

“What’s this?” she had asked.

“It’s something I keep for good luck,” he replied. “I don’t need it now. Now that I have you?”

She would later learn that it was an effigy of Kehinde, his late twin sister, who had died shortly after she was born. Twins share combined souls, so, when one died it left an imbalance that put the life of the other in danger. Ere Ibejis were the effigies of deceased twins. They were surrogates or substitute souls. They were not considered dead objects and were kept by living relatives to curb the imbalance their deaths created and—to make their lives less fraught with danger, generally speaking.

Every Friday, Moji accompanied Lara to Macaulay Memorial Hospital, hoping perchance she would brighten somebody’s day or lessen their trauma. Or perhaps she would bump into someone from her past. It was rather optimistic of her, she knew. Still, it was better than nothing.

The charge nurses had grown tired of her asking them to go through their patient roster for a ‘Taiwo Kolawole Adetokunbo’.

“Have you tried the mortuary?” a rude middle-aged matron said to her.

But Moji knew Taiwo couldn’t be dead. If he was, she wouldn’t still feel his life force coursing through her. Even though their hearts now beat considerably slower, their combined heartbeats produced pulsations unlikely for people their age. Lara said so herself. She once remarked, after examining her, “Mama, you have an impressive heart rate for someone her age.”

Mrs. Felicia Makata was already in the chapel when Moji entered. Felicia was a woman in her sixties. She came very often to the chapel to pray. She came every weekday, after dropping her husband off for his weekly chemotherapy. She avoided people, especially those she knew, anyone who wasn’t hospital staff. She seemed to avoid widows even more—they were not the company she wanted to keep. She probably saw Moji’s overtures as a sort of co-optation into a sisterhood of widows, and she didn’t want that. She became more receptive after overhearing a nurse address her as ‘Iya Dokita’ (Doctor’s mother).

Moji knelt beside her and fixed her eyes on the brass monstrance on the altar. They were the only ones in the chapel. She said a short prayer and whispered to Felicia, “Can I tell you a secret?”

Felicia neither spoke nor gave her a sign that she had heard.

“Once upon a time, I could heal people with a touch.”

Felicia wound sideways to look at her.

“I lost it.” Moji shrugged.

“That must have been very hard on you,” Felicia said.

Moji was expecting her to ask her how she lost it and not patronize her.

“I lost him, that’s why I can’t anymore,” she volunteered. “I lost the man with whom I could do it, that’s why. Together we were healers. I ended up marrying another man.” Now, even she thought she was crazy.

Felicia returned to her meditation. She didn’t ask questions.

Moji couldn’t blame her: she was equally disbelieving herself when Taiwo proposed. When he proposed they marry—other people.

Bosom friends since the day Baba Kayode made them realize what they were, their union was like the spit they spat into each other’s wounds. Their spits were balms that healed and renewed. They improved and sustained each other’s bodies. They went through puberty together and blossomed into perfect specimens, healthy and beautiful, their bodies in the right shape and proportion. People told Moji she looked like her mother in angelic form. Naturally, eventually, they caved into their lust. Moji never knew she was capable of such undisguised hunger. She wanted him in her. Wanted him every single day, in every single way. The end of every orgasm marked the beginning of a new one or, at least, the promise of one. Every smile he gave, every gesture he made, every teeny show of affection, propelled her into a vortex of longing that only another orgasm could douse. It was an addiction she didn’t want to give up.

The first time he filled her, she was fourteen. She had collapsed on top of him and they had fallen asleep ‘like two snakes sleeping through the dry season,’ that was how Baba Kayode described them. They were out for hours. Worried after banging on the door and getting no answer, Baba Kayode had burst in and woken them. He could have said something then, but he didn’t. Whatever he might have said, he said to Taiwo alone. And Taiwo said nothing to her until 1958.

In 1958, they were at St. Stephen’s Comprehensive Grammar School, Akure. Moji was in her penultimate year at the school and Taiwo was in his final year. It was Prep Time, and they were alone in a classroom studying when Moji, after reading her mother’s letter, shared the good news that her old aunt was finally getting married. Their conversation took an awry turn after Moji said she was looking forward to her wedding and Taiwo said he couldn’t say the same. Shocked, Moji forgot about being coy and asked him if he wasn’t excited about starting a family with her.

“Moji, I think it would be best if we married other people,” Taiwo says.

Moji studies his expression and realizes he isn’t joking. “What do you mean ‘marry other people?’” she asks.

“You’re shouting,” he says. “Will you lower your voice? Please?” He scampers over desks and benches to get to the classroom door and shuts it. Still not satisfied, he locks all the windows too.

The windows are shutters made of metal with three small slits for ventilation. (They’re metallic to keep students from breaking them.) The classroom is dark now, even though it’s sunny outside. Moji is oblivious to her rapid breathing. She is only aware of Taiwo, who is like a metal window himself, opaque and inscrutable, depriving her of sun and air.

He looks at her staidly and says, “You know what we are.”

“Taiwo, you’re scaring me. I am not the reincarnation of your late twin sister.”

“How would you even know that? But even if you’re not Kehinde, you are my soul, the part of me that completes me. We are perfect together.”

“Yes. We are. Is that so bad?”

“Moji, listen to me. We must find perfection on our own. There will be no heaven for us unless we are deemed worthy, separately.”

“And we will. We are still two very different people.”

“If we marry, we will always have each other to touch and heal. We will always be healthy and never grow old and die. And if we never die, how can we cross to the other side? We’ll be stranded here forever. My father says we won’t even have children.”

“Why won’t we have children?”

“Because we would be starting a new race, a race that heaven doesn’t approve of. For as long as we’re together, we will always be beautiful, but we’ll be barren, too. That’s what my father says.”

“I don’t care.”

“For God’s sake, Moji, we may never die. The only way we will is, if one of us is fatally wounded and dies before the other can get to him, or her. When our mates are eighty, we’ll still be looking like this. That’s when everyone will know we shouldn’t be here.”

“No,” she screams and covers her ears. Her heart pleads for him to stop talking.

“Moji, we need to live apart so we can fall sick and die. Like everyone else. We can’t keep living in our own little heaven. This is not our place.”

“Can you really say goodbye? To me?”

He looks her straight in the eye and waits a while before he says, “As long as one heart beats, the other will feel it. We will always be in each other’s heart for as long as we live.”

“But I can’t… I don’t want to live without you. Taiwo, I love you so much.”

“And I love you too. You’re my life. But I must make you my other life, not this one. I take comfort in knowing, ahead of time, whom I will be spending eternity with. I have you to look forward to, Moji, and when that time comes, we won’t have anything to fear because we won’t be… different.”

“You say ‘different’ like it’s a bad thing. If anything, I feel special, like a little god. Don’t you like healing those in our prayer group when we ask them to hold hands and form a circle?”

“Yes, but if they knew it was us, our lives won’t be the same. The Ifa teaches that wherever people like us are found, one of us should be starved to death. That’s how to make it right.” He lowers his head and adds, “That’s what they did to Kehinde. She was the mischievous one, they said, the one likely to rebel.”

There were tears in his voice even though Moji knew he could not remember his sister.

She hugs him. They cry in each other’s arms and dry each other’s eyes. From the core of her being, Moji swears never to leave him, never to let go, no matter what. She can tell he’s conflicted; his heart feels the same but he’s too afraid to listen to it. But Taiwo will disappear from her life and she will learn that Baba Kayode has sent him off to a university whose identity no one is willing to tell her.

A year will pass and Taiwo will not return. All she is left with to remind her that what they shared isn’t something she imagined is a heart that beats stronger because of him.

Angry at the world, she cuts ties with Taiwo’s family. How can they treat her like kin, yet do the most horrible thing to her? She returns Kehinde’s effigy and makes it clear that this will be the last time they see her. It’s a threat she hopes will work. Where is Taiwo? Tell me. Baba Kayode leaves the room. Taiwo’s mother, Iya Adenike, and his sisters, Jumoke and Tinuola, weep. Moji cries too. It is then she realizes that they have no clue where Taiwo is. Only Baba Kayode did.

Continued…