BN Prose: Kasali by Kayode I Jegede

BN Prose is a periodic feature on Bella Naija. BN Prose is an opportunity for us to display our talents by sharing short stories that are interesting yet inspire discussion.
Anything from light-hearted short stories to short stories that touch on hard-hitting subjects.
The purpose is not to critique the writing style, its an opportunity for writers (from amateur to accomplished) to share their work with the Bella Naija audience.
If you will like your short story to be featured, email it to bella @ bellanaija . com with BN Prose in the subject line along with the title of your story.
Stories cannot exceed 1500 words.
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We are very excited by today’s BN Prose submission – Kasali. It is a short story for Kayode I Jegede. Kayode is well known (and loved!) as Mr. Fine Boy of www.naijafineboy.blogspot.com. He was one of the 25 participants of the Chimamanda Adichie helmed Farafina Trust Writer’s Workshop.
He is working on a novel titled ‘Emere,’ and another based on his blog persona called ‘Daily Tonic – Mr.Fineboy’s Guide to Life, Love and Lagos‘ to be published next year. Also look out for other short stories by Mr. Jegede to be published via online literary journals soon.
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I would sit on the stool in the corner of Alhaja’s kitchen and watch her scurry around, aluminum bowl in one hand and a fistful of ewedu in the other, shouting orders to Tanwa or Bisi or whoever else was within earshot to “cut those peppers smaller! With your lizard eyes you still don’t know how to cut pepper?”

Tanwa or Bisi or whichever poor ward that was helping in the kitchen that day would spring around the room overzealously, desperately wanting to impress her and would usually in the process, spill some ground pepper or knock over a pail of hot water that somebody had left on a wooden stool in the middle of the kitchen. Alhaja would smile, tilt her head to one side and say gently, “So ripe ori re o pe? Do you now see that you are not well in the head?” The next instant she would bellow “Clean it up now! Omo jati jati!” Her voice was big, deep like a man’s, and it seemed as though the room shook whenever she shouted at somebody. Her voice and her height were the only things that were manly about my mother though. Her beautiful, fair-skinned face would glisten with sweat in the heat of the kitchen and I was convinced that this was what angels looked like, the steam from a pot of fresh vegetable soup blowing up in front of her so that all I could see from my stool was an outline of her face and her white hijab gracefully flowing about her head. She would taste the soup by taking a sip off the edge of the ladle and nod. “Ehen, o ti dabe. That’s good enough.” Alhaja repeated this ritual everyday, with every pot of stew, and I wondered why she even bothered tasting it, since she got it right every time. She would pass the ladle back to Tanwa and say in Yoruba, “Thank you, my heart.”

Everybody in Igbosere knew that Alhaja cooked the best food in Isale Eko and my father, Engineer, even argued that it was Alhaja that won us the civil war.

“Ah, Azeez, your mother’s soup is obe abami o! It was her egusi that General Obasanjo and his soldiers ate before they went to the battle of Ore, and that was how we scattered the Igbos.” I could tell even then, that my father was lying because he would grin from ear to ear every time he began to tell the story. He repeated it a thousand times, usually as he washed his hands before eating a bowl of iyan or eba. We knew he only told the story to please her, and Alhaja would try to keep her face stern, pretending that she was deeply engrossed in the dishing of Engineer’s soup.

I was eight when Kasali came. It was around midday, when the Lagos sun is at its hottest, and the buka was crammed with civil servants from the nearby ministries, danfo drivers and conductors and messengers from the different offices in the area. Alhaja was standing behind the net screen of the kitchen, meticulously counting the pieces of meat that had been served in a customer’s bowl, when she saw the old woman come in. She came out to greet her.

“Mama ek’abo! How is it?” she said, and I looked up. The old lady smiled, bending only slightly in greeting with both hands placed on one knee, as elderly Yoruba women do when saluting other elders or very important people. She was holding a little boy clothed in dirty trousers and a worn t-shirt that struggled to cover his round stomach. He looked at me and nonchalantly licked at the string of yellow mucus that dangled from his nose.

We did not know exactly how old Kasali was, but Alhaja said that we were twins, because she knew that we were about the same age. Years later, I would learn that Kasali was the son of Alhaja’s 20 year old cousin, Ariyike, in Ijebu-Ode. After a brief affair with the town’s local Anglican Bishop, she had gotten pregnant and father had refused to accept child. When Ariyike died from sickle cell anemia some years later, Alhaja agreed to take him in, and Engineer had not objected.

Kasali came to the buka with us every day during that holiday, and we spent our days reenacting war battles. I had been accustomed to playing the role of General Gowon in the civil war before he came, but Kasali called himself Sango, the god of thunder and me, Ogun, the god of iron. He said Sango was the greatest warrior that ever lived, his mother had told him so, and that Ogun could kill any adversary in battle with his bare hands. It was how we became brothers, he and I. Every morning was a new adventure; we raced up and down the nearby streets, weaving through crowds of bus conductors and anxious passengers at the bus stop, occasionally knocking somebody’s bag out of their hands or tripping up one person or the other in the process. If a victim shoved me or shouted an insult at Kasali, he would be ready with a retort;

“Bastard man! With that ya long neck like tolotolo.”

“Ten gorilla fuck ya mama, give am belle!”

I loved him. He was brave and crass and unrepentant. We would spend endless hours scrambling in the dirt outside Alhaja’s buka, or searching for old bicycle tyres that we would turn into carts. Every now and then we found a half-smoked cigarette and lit it, sharing it and pretending that we were two nonchalant adults having a very important conversation. It was he who taught me how to piss without using my hands. He would stand in the open space, pull his underpants to his ankles, place his arms akimbo and piss as far as he could. It made me laugh, the way his small penis dangled like a groundnut pod in front of his body. Then I would do it too, and we would look at the tracks in the dust to see whose went further.

Alhaja enrolled him in my school, Shadiya Primary, and we told everybody then that we were twins, which was believable because Kasali had taken our surname Shittu.

As we got older, we had less and less time to spend with Alhaja, who had gone from owning that small buka in Igbosere to maintaining four well patronized canteens around Lagos Island. I would only see her in the evenings, after she had returned from her shops and rested, her tall buxom body wrapped in her ever present hijab, her body smelling of lavender soap and talcum powder and I would fight an aberrant, slight arousal.

That was eleven years before I gained admission to the University of Oklahoma to study business. Kasali chose to go to the University of Ekpoma, in Edo state. We wrote letters to each other often, mine telling him about some pretty new conquest or the other, his about student life on Ekpoma’s campus. By my junior year in college, Kasali had become some type of fraternity capo, and he would write about how one “guy man” or the other was shot in the foot and made to watch his girlfriend being raped by rival fraternity soldiers. His letters were so thoroughly detailed; he would describe a gunshot wound to the letter or tell how he had witnessed somebody’s head sliced almost in half, pieces of white matter from his brain splattered all over a pavement. I shuddered when I read from him, almost envious of the exciting and action packed life that he lived.

It was a bright spring morning during my final semester when I got the news. My girlfriend Lucy, a pretty Chinese-American girl, brought the cordless phone to me in the bathroom, said it was my father on the line.

“Azeez. How is it?”

“We are thankful sir,” I replied in Yoruba.

He asked if I was sitting down, and I lied yes. I stood staring at my reflection in the mirror, telephone in one hand, toothbrush in the other, a ring of white around my lips. I knew.

He said Kasali had been killed, his body chopped up in so many places that it had to be laid on a mattress so that they could carry it from the bush where it was found. I felt the air drain out of me the longer he spoke, and by the time I dropped the phone, I could barely remember most of what he had said. I thought of Alhaja, and it was then that I began to feel the pieces of my heart shatter shard by shard.

We arrived in Lagos, three days later, Lucy and I. My brother had been buried, according to Muslim rites. When we got home Alhaja was sitting in Engineer’s favourite armchair, white hijab wrapped around her head, clutching her prayer beads in her right hand. She looked smaller, as though the grief of the last few days had shrunken her. I hugged her and introduced Lucy, who was clad in a white t-shirt and yellow denim shorts. Alhaja embraced her, and then said to me in Yoruba, “Get a wrapper for your friend, she must cover up. Or she will spoil the men’s fasts.”

Tags: bn prose, Kayode I Jegede

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