I put his medication on the table while he ate breakfast and he remembered to take it. Two eggs, half an avocado, a banana, a glass of water and a cup of tea with milk and no sugar. Although he eats only one of the eggs, I prepare two. Mum always prepared him two. Forever with that runny yolk she complained about yet never forgot.
‘We don’t eat eggs like this. White people eat this.’
‘I like the texture, my love.’
They bickered like this daily. Back then, I looked over at Baba’s wobbly eggs and felt like vomiting. Now, each day I make them for him, I fry myself a pair and wonder what Mum would do if she were here. Would she make fun of us or just sit there and smile?
After breakfast, we watched Saturday morning Premier League football. This was a staple when I was little. The early kick-off was the perfect teaser to a marathon of games.
On a morning like this over fifteen years ago, we’d be watching Arsenal vs. Newcastle. Liverpool vs. Man United in the late afternoon. The biggest game of the season. Jatou would join five minutes to game time. She watched only the most important games. I often joked she tried not to be too big a fan so her friends wouldn’t call her a boy.
By 5:30, the three of us would be in red. Jatou sat to Baba’s right and wore a United jersey bearing her nickname, Nna. I sat on the floor, eyes dangerously close to the TV because that’s how I preferred to watch sports and Baba let me only for the next 90 minutes.
I remember screaming so loud at Wayne Rooney’s equaliser in the 2011 Champions League final against Barcelona that I lost my voice for a week. Baba lifted me up on his shoulder and ran all over the house banging doors and shouting. Mum came out of the bedroom to see what the fuss was about and congratulated us before going back in. At times like this, she would be reading or napping. Her disinterest in the sport was as fervent as our obsession.
‘I watch talk shows, I listen to Ali Farka Touré and Youssou Ndour and I read. It’s what makes my blood move. For you, it’s football. That’s okay.’
Today, it was only me and Baba. There were no jerseys but it was still us. Still United. My phone pinged 30 minutes into the match.
‘Does he seem to be enjoying it?’
‘He called Rashford Andy Cole. If he thinks we’re in 1999 then he really must be enjoying it.’
‘I’m sorry I’m not there’
‘You’ll be here soon, don’t feel bad’
‘Three months is not soon.’
I put the phone down and turned to my left, studying his face. I don’t sit on the floor anymore because who would then sit to his right?
‘Nna asked if you’re enjoying the match.’
‘My mom? Is she at the market?’
‘No, not that Nna. Your daughter, Nna. In England.’
‘My daughter can’t speak yet. She’s a toddler.’
*
Today, we lost. Baba knew nothing of it and that eased the blow on me. When we were children and United lost, Baba turned the TV off and took us on long walks. Him, Nna, Mum, me. We went from our house in Pipeline, down to Fajara, through the golf course – evergreen with the most constant smell of life – and into the beach.
I think of the beach as the place where the world stands still and time is only apparent through the weather. Sunshine meant play time for Nna and me, a search for shade for Baba and Mum. The ocean water glistened from the sun’s rays and sported a blue colour the perfect companion to the sky’s. Marakh, Sunset, meant it was time to head home. At the end of every day, the sky exhibited a different art piece. I never felt the need to take a picture because it belonged to itself. Anytime I went back to seek it, I would find it right there. It was and will always be home.
I always went very close to getting into the water but Mum’s watchful eye kept me intact. I was lucky to get my feet in sometimes. I couldn’t swim, but I felt like I’d be safe somehow. I never got naked anywhere else because I couldn’t handle feeling so open. Here I enjoyed that openness.
Nna might have loved it even more than me. She at least three days a week with her headphones and snacks. The only day she never went there was on Sundays because that was the day everyone else was there. I believe she thought of the beach as her own place. This was why, no matter how hard a loss, Baba knew that once he brought us here, it was all forgotten.
‘Does he know we lost?’ Nna asks me. I stare at Baba trying to make out the answer from his face. He turns to me.
‘Luhew, boy?’ What’s wrong, boy?
‘Lan nga buga pour réer?’ What do you want for dinner?
‘I’m not a picky eater, you know.’
This was true. Baba never requested any food apart from his mother’s Mbahal, a groundnut based rice dish with locust beans and smoked tilapia. Nna and I have over the years tried to perfect it each on our own but there was always something missing.
‘We’ll join forces and take this thing down when I come,’ she told me last week. It’s the last thing Mum ever made us as a family. It was three days before Nna left for her studies in England. She’s going to study virology, I bragged to my friends even though I didn’t know what virology meant. I remember her packing heaps of Mbahal into the biggest tupperware bowl we had and freezing it. A little piece of Gambia that could accompany her for at least the first week of her new life in a new country.
For the next four years, I was the only child in the house. I watched football and went to the beach as usual but always seemed to have free time. I started reading mum’s books. Seeing my enthusiasm, she gave me more to read and had a carpenter make me a small bookshelf. She threw books at me and I drowned myself in them. She paid me to read the important ones I had no interest in. I saw it as a fair deal and used the money I made to buy the books I actually wanted to read. Reading put life to a pause while teaching me life.
By the time I was 16, the local bookstore, Timbooktoo, had become my favourite place in the world. Its air was cold in the way the beach was. Its quietness made me breathe a little slower. I stared at book covers for longer than a normal person should, finally seeing them as the works of art they’d always been. I read the first few chapters to the books I was sure I’d buy, unable to wait till I took them home. I was drunk on the smell of books. Books which would over the years lose their crisp but build that earthy scent as they aged.
*
After dinner, I grabbed Mum’s old copy of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat to read to Baba. It is filled with a yearning for freedom and what it takes to attain it.
What do we do: sacrifice ourselves whole for freedom, or toss away the freedom of our people for personal gain? The main character, Mugo, showed me how complex human beings could truly be. I was 16 when Mum suggested I read it and 21 when I decided to read it again. I was alone in my dorm that summer with no Gambia in sight and needed something that made me feel like I was back home reading the last pages outside Baba and Mum’s room so I could knock on their door as soon as I was done and pull Mum into a conversation about it.
Mum died that summer. It was the quickest of cardiac arrests. We didn’t understand it. Mum walked everywhere, had vegetables with everything she ate, read more books than anyone I had known, had a partner she loved and children who never went more than a day without calling her. She had maintained the same friend group since her teenage years. She was positive when all everyone else saw was despair. She was the best of us all. She was more than just happy, she was whole. We didn’t understand how she was the one who left first.
Nna and I both made our ways back to Gambia. Baba refused to bury the body unless his two children were back, angering the elders in our family and community.
We saw her one last time after her body was ready for burial. ‘She’s so beautiful,’ Nna told me as she sobbed in my arms. Baba, in the room with us, did nothing but pray. His palms drawn out in front of him became a sight I would never forget. He prayed and prayed and prayed. He left his bed at 2 am every night and prayed till dawn. Some nights, I joined him and on others, I begged him to sleep. He answered in the most definitive tone, ‘I’m not sleeping.’
The funeral was packed but Baba made sure it was quiet. She would’ve wanted that. Baba was given a lot of money for his loss. Money he didn’t want; accompanied with the usual funeral saying: ‘sigil len kor’. Raise your head up for them. We asked them to raise their heads too as the tradition required. An elderly woman who was a distant relative we didn’t really know told Baba to be strong and to remember that an even better wife would be provided for him by Allah. Baba had to stop Nna and me from ordering the woman to leave our house.
The three of us stayed together for the following 40 days trying to keep Mum alive through talking, laughing and crying. Baba told us of how obsessed she was with cleanliness and would stay up an extra hour most nights to make everything in the house pristine again. He tried to make her stop by cleaning up before she could, so she then woke up an hour earlier every morning instead because she couldn’t trust him.
She was the person none of us wanted to disappoint. Her diverse nature made each of us love her in our own way. Baba loved her strength. Nna loved her kindness. I loved her taste in art. I like to believe we have kept on living with these parts firmly ingrained in us but sometimes I worry we might lose them.
Nna left a day after the 40th day ceremony where we acknowledged the final parting of Mum’s soul from this world, this dimension. I stayed an extra month.
Three years later, when we both received calls from our Uncle Hassan in The Gambia letting us know our dad was ill and couldn’t live alone anymore. It was, by default, my time to move home for good. I had completed my studies and was only awaiting graduation. I never attended. Nna had a family of her own now. She was a mother, a wife and a PhD candidate. I was responsible for just me.
She’ll be here in three months with her family. Baba will play with his grandson, me with my nephew. We will watch football together. We will walk to the beach and lose track of time under the sunshine and shade. We will talk about Mum for hours. We will laugh and cry.
Putting Baba to bed today, I told him I’d be staying up an extra hour to clean up. He smiled.
—–
Image: Dall-E