By Abu Onyiani
My mother calls me a lot. I do not exaggerate when I say she calls me at times 10 times per day. So I was at ease when she called me on Thursday morning while I was at a friend’s workshop. I opened my Coke before taking the call on the loudspeaker because my hands were full.
“Ejor o fi inyo mwen gbee ooo, Ejor o fi Inyo mwen gbee ooo”, my mother cried on the phone. My coke fell from my hand, the content spilling on the floor.
“Mhi zhe”, I replied as calmly as I could and stood up, ignoring the coke that was spilling onto Mother Earth. My elder brother Imazor called me immediately, first asking if I was in Benin City before asking me to rush home with as much alacrity as I could muster. The call had barely ended when my sister called, telling me she had left everything she was doing and was on her way, but that I had to leave everything I was doing to go stay with our mother.
I didn’t stop to look for a cab, and I refused my friend’s offer to drive me home. He was as shocked as I was even though he didn’t understand the Ososo language. I often joke that my mother knows a thousand songs, and can compose another one thousand on the spot should the need arise. She is also versed in folklore and proverbs and has a wide range of vocabulary, such that I had to pause and ask her what some words mean when we converse.
I only knew we had lost someone in the family.
On the run home, it dawned on me that the song was in plain Ososo. What she sang on the phone was easily translated to “Ejor has left my mother”. I almost burst out laughing. Did your mother suffer from heartbreak, or has she eaten breakfast as social media users would japingly put it? Why would Ejor break my grannie’s heart? What did she do to deserve such a cruel breakfast? What is a 94-year-old woman doing in a relationship when some of her great-grandchildren are struggling to find love? I asked, trying to joke with myself and evade the pain I carried in my chest.
I was at the gate, fiddling my bag for my set of keys, when it hit me that Ejor was my grandmother’s younger brother, who, by calculation, should be around 90 years of age. Why should my mother wail over the death of a 90-year-old geriatric? I thought as I bounced into the sitting room when I met her sitting on the Sofa, singing.
I did my best to console her, and when she stopped crying, I showed her Ejor’s photo, another of my sexagenarian aunt who makes more Facebook posts than I do had just uploaded. The crying began afresh; she only stopped briefly when she asked me to save the photo on my gallery, and in ten minutes, I saved the photo more than 20 times until my feed was refreshed, and I was ironically shown a photo of a cute freshly birthed baby.
When the crying had subsided and the singing was in vocabulary I could easily understand, I went to the bedroom to grab a mat, with which I slept at her feet in the sitting room.
I woke up a few hours later to see my sister supercharged in the sitting room, asking my mum why she had raised each of her children’s blood pressure. She looked betrayed when I joined my sister in a sudden about-face. Apparently, she felt I was okay with how loudly and emotionally she mourned my grand uncle, but I was far from impressed.
A few moments later, we were having a conversation about how she should take solace in the fact that the man must have clocked 90, or at least almost gotten to the mark. We also harped on the fact that as a woman who believed in at least one version of the afterlife, she should take solace in the fact that she would see her uncle who was a very good and great man again in heaven.
But her pains were deeper than what the belief of the afterlife could cure.
When my father lost his job in Benin City in 1998, poverty and hunger gripped his nuclear family, such that my parents agreed my mum should move back to Ososo until my father could find a job. My grand uncle Ejor made sure she never lacked anything as he always brought fresh farm produce to her. Of course, my father sent money home often, but the impact my granduncle made in our family life was indelible.
After my father secured a family-friendly job and my mother moved back to Benin City and had their fifth child, my uncle fell down from a palm tree and broke his leg. It was serious, such that the doctor advised his family to approve for immediate amputation of the leg or risk his death. My grandmother refused, saying a broken leg does not kill the chick of a hen.
He survived but spent almost 35 years walking with an unmistakable limp.
Apart from his limp, Ejor was also known to possess a quiet, wiry, devilish smile. The kind that makes you believe he has seen your deepest fears and secrets. The first time I met him as a young adult, I panicked under the impression that he had seen my nudes. I felt uncomfortable until I realized he was like that with everyone, and I thought I was safe since he must have either seen everyone’s nudes or had seen none but was pretending to.
Lately, he has been spending a lot of time with my grandmother and is one of the few people whose voice she now recognizes or heeds. That, for my mother, was the biggest sacrifice he has made for our family.
After leaving to attend to pressing issues, I got a call that a friend of mine who is younger than I am had lost his younger brother. By the time I got to his father’s house, they were digging a shallow grave. The amount of people reading religious texts there caught me off guard, as it always does. Why should a person cry so much about the loss of a loved one unless they feel that death is finality?
My mum claimed earlier that she was crying bitterly at Ejor’s death because she was worried if the women would remember to loosen their hair or tie their wrappers backwards, or if someone would have the sense to hang an immaculate white cloth on his fence, but a child should know when his parents are deflecting.
Deflecting from a simple question, is there a life after death?
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