To the Past

The last time you were in this compound, you were a bespectacled teenager with a quirky, high-pitched laugh. The mango tree that now looks menopausal still bore fruits. Your cousin, Nike would recruit you –and your other cousins, if they were around—to aim stones at the fruits because your grandmother would not let any of you climb up.

The climbing was reserved for those distant cousins who lived there in the village. The ones your grandma called local fowls, in praise of their toughness. She called you ‘agric’, in the lilting tone you considered illiterate. You liked neither the tone nor the implication that you were weak. But if you’d complained to her hearing, she would have gathered your lips in her hand and wrung it dry of all insubordination. So, you stayed silent and bore your ‘agric’ tag.

There was a basenji that your mother joked—or maybe it was not a joke, you could never tell with her—had watched her lose her milk teeth. The dog’s eyes looked sad and serious, like an elder mellowed by age.

Tin-tin was the name you gave it, even though you don’t remember exactly why. Tin-tin would watch you while you went along with the games Nike bullied you into playing with her, and you’d avoid the dog’s eyes because something about them reminded you of your mother. She had that look whenever she talked about how you needed to socialize more, or stand up for yourself more, or sleep more, the list was long.

And when you’d finally get a chance to just sit, Tin-tin would be right at your feet, falling into deep sleep almost as soon as her body relaxes.

You don’t remember much about that last holiday. It is a vague, mostly blurred picture with only a few random patches untouched by time’s blurring hands. And your personal efforts to forget. Now, the compound looks like one forgotten in a game of hide-and-seek by the one that was meant to seek. It has an air of waiting. Like if you say, “I’ve caught you” just now, it will all lapse back into that frozen period in the past.

But your grandma is dead. Your mother too. Nike is halfway across the world. And you don’t even know why you are standing in the middle of this compound.

You could be anywhere in the world. When you had your health scare last week and your boss insisted you took a month off work, she did not also insist that the month off be spent here.

But here you are, without a key—you’re just now realizing—and wondering if it is too late to just leave the door to the past unopened and go back to your house in the city.

You try the doorknob. It doesn’t budge. Maybe it is your punishment for forgetting the house and the memories. This local place.

A memory you haven’t remembered in decades comes rushing back to you. Nike’s voice travels to you across time.

“Grandma doesn’t lock her door with a key. Hit the top part twice, and the side close to the knob once, and try again.”

That was the night she’d bullied you into sneaking out with her to watch a dance at the playground. You’d panicked when you got back and met an unwavering door.

Doubtful, then and now, you hit. One, two. One. Then, you turn the knob again.

After all this time, it still works.

Henrietta Lehi

A combination of a tendency to get lost in daydreams, and a curiosity that pushes Henrietta Lehi to observe people and the collections of stories they carry about unwittingly, gives her pen life. And living in Nigeria mostly means never getting low on her supply of stories, both imagined and real.