Growing Teeth

‘That woman na ashawo,’ Manager says too loudly. I wince on his behalf  because the woman he has just spat venom at is drawing into a sketch pad four feet behind us, ears open to the words of the world. But Manager clears his throat, a gurgling sound like the precursor of an uglier shade of vomit. I take my plate of hastily microwaved spaghetti from him and walk back to my table, increasing the volume of my music. Second hand embarrassment can burn as hot as being caught on camera masturbating in public. 

I am eating slowly, examining each forkful, because I need the time to decide whether to be angry. I already am anyway, if a churning belly and trembling wrists can be interpreted that way. I do not frequent this diner for their bad, graciously cheap food. Two things; free Wi-fi and this Indian stranger. 

Every time time I have been here in the last two months, she sits on that scratched red chair by the window and draws into her sketch pad, or stares into the noisy 2006 air conditioners on the far wall. Fair skin, bird tattoos running from God-knows-where down to just before her wrists, the creases of a 45 year old and the gait 20 years younger. I only know she’s Indian because I heard her order a Pepsi once. We’ve been this way – I on my laptop on one of the back chairs, she on her pad by the window- for enough hours for it to feel like we had some kind of friendship. The day I glimpsed the edges of The Orchestra of Minorities peeking out from her tote bag was when I had decided we were in love.

The town of Oka is nearly comatose; the place is kept barely alive by parallel rivers of haughty faced undergraduates and women in academia waiting for the bus at Regina every evening, their jerry curls and batik print gowns clinging limply to them, like dreams of better civil service careers. Beneath these rivers is the murky waters the sex workers of Aba nkeleke street ride on. This is me making excuses for Manager; I angrily call my mind to order with some transferred aggression. But when you have lived a decade in a town as predictable as an Asaba Wood movie, what do you do with a moisturized woman that comes alone to your diner everyday and points to the most expensive vodka bottles in your fridge with tattooed hands?  

II
The waiters here goof a lot. Well, a lot is probably understating it; they’ve got range. From comically mismatched orders to cold food, delayed service has already been accepted as the norm. Two days ago, my favorite, Sochi, and the waiter with the eczema ridden face got into a fully fleshed out fight; bra-dragging and all, right there at the counter. I think I come here to remind myself that it’s not just my life that is in comic disarray. 

It’s just me in the diner right now. I say I am warming up to write but between the rattle of ancient air conditioning and Burna Boy’s I Told Them… which is the only thing I’ve ever heard played here, those words are really to make myself feel less lost and unproductive than I really am. 

A rat passes; runs the length of the diner and behind the sink opposite the toilet door. Twice. 
That was probably how I had looked to Agumagu’s editor; strangely out of place in my over-ironed suit trousers, fiddling with wrist beads. Yesterday, I had been in his office atop an ageing four storey plaza; struggling to keep my mind in the present and following his barely cloaked bragging of his magazine’s standards. After the 17th job interview, all of them start to look the same, begin to blur into each other. I knew I wasn’t going to get the job from three minutes in; he had stared too long at the painting behind me when I had confirmed that yes; I had never held a writing job before. The man had been too polite however, and dragged out the conversation for another 20 minutes; eagerly promising they would ‘be in touch’. 

My mother, a spectral presence in my head with a reaction to everything, it seems. Was it when I was 17 and returning back to school after a short holiday? When she had inhaled and told me how I needed to start learning a digital skill, how writing was a good hobby but I needed to start thinking seriously of how to make money. She had looked relieved after saying that; like it was something that had been caught in her throat for a long time. I stopped listening to the dear woman the year my beards began to grow in a defined shape. I had promised myself then; my novel, that great Nigerian novel, was only half a decade away.  I could smell the print under my nose, could feel the awe wafting from book festivals, when I closed my eyes. I still feel it in my dreams these days, sometimes.  

III
Tukwashe Thomas, the Dj TT, was 17 when he played his playlists loud enough to get people silent and looking at him, dancing to him. His face has been around the edges of my vision all day, stubborn like pieces of yesterday’s suya stuck in places a toothpick can’t reach. I am thinking; maybe it is all about volume. How loud are your explosions? How many broken car windows are your stones? Do your words reach out from the page and poke into eyes? 

But then, Asugharia was screaming when they drowned in themselves. If you pause that music you put on to get yourself to sleep peacefully, you would still hear her growling rattling the cement off the walls. 

Me? My mother cried into a voice note yesterday. Which got me wondering if she had had to cry twice if her first attempt at recording had failed. ‘I made a covenant when you were born that you would serve Jesus, Kowaki. Find your way before it is too late, Kowaki..’I want to tell her that a covenant made to a crucified god is like shouting into wind but her heart has more scars than there is space for them already. I told my girlfriend about the voice note, in a tone that said tears were not enough current to drag me into dress shoes on a Sunday morning. But in my subconscious I have already begun the hard decision on whether the light blue shirt would look better on cream trousers, whether my cowrie necklaces would be more than ushers can handle.      

IV
The day the Indian stranger walks in beneath a red body con gown, I decide male lust is enough motivation to take the chair at the other end of her table. She is warm. We have seen each other enough, memorized how the other person chews, it does not feel exactly like strangers speaking for the first time. We never exchange names. 

I have to stop thinking about the brightness of her smile and the darkness between her front teeth so I can focus on deciphering her English. ‘I’ve been working on this exhibition for the museum here in Oka for weeks and the concept is still nebulous. I think the clumsy clanging of trays here helps me think,’ she tells me. I smile, gulp my Smirnoff straight from the bottle, and turn the phrase over in my mind; ‘clumsy clanging’. 

‘I’ve been trying to write this essay for so long now,’ I confide in her when the alcohol finally gets to my mouth muscles. ‘It was meant to be a commentary on the Annual Occult Gathering of the Wizened Brotherhood in a hotel in Agu-Oka.’ The Gathering ended three weeks ago and my essay is still in its third paragraph. The magazine I am writing it for has decided that is stale news now and has lost interest but I would still complete it anyway.   

At some point, a four year old with her face and a healing scar on her forehead runs into the diner, makes a beeline for her. The Indian mother shuts out the rest of the world without apology and has a conversation with her baby, in the same soft tone with which she told me about her exhibition. She rubs her forehead, tells her to go play on the swing outside. I force my shock behind a face of utter politeness. 

When she turns back to me, the crackling light in her eyes could short circuit half the bulbs in here, if they had been working. Her smile is wide. I look back, as if searching for an answer. Evidently she does not care that other people’s interpretation or misinterpretation of herself exists. I briefly wonder if she had heard what the Manager had said to me the other day, but we have not learned to ask each other such questions. She invites me to a party that night as an afterthought. ‘It’s a masked party,’ she adds with caution, ‘are you umm..christian?’ She loads the word masked with nuance. I do not need to ask but I am completely certain she has read Little Rot cover to back cover. 

Are you christian? 
My mother flashes in my mind, a mind photograph from when I was six. In it, her hand is covered up to the arm with detergent lather. I smile back, easily, ‘No, I am not.’