By now my mother and I do not speak. Nonetheless, she is a presence hovering everywhere I go. She has smelled the same for as long as I remember. When I had outgrown the powdery smell of babies she too stopped smelling like talcum. Now she smells like bubblegum as if littering the air with a confetti of bubblegum wrap long after it has lost its sweetness in her mouth. I assess that smell in the room to confirm she has left or if she has merely retreated to a far corner where I won’t hear the catching of her breath or the restless shuffle of her feet.

And so the smell slowly fades away…

Comforted by this finding, I shift in my seat and lower myself until I am lying comfortably. My therapist takes this as an invitation to break the silence. First, though, Dr. Alim lifts her teacup off the coffee table and there is a moment where only the clinking sound of her stirring her tea is heard. *silence*… She puts it back on the coffee table. The event plays in my head through the sound of ceramic dragging over the surface of the glass, the steel spoon hitting the body of the cup, and glass reuniting with glass again.

“So, Eman…”                                                                                                                                                

“We do not talk about these things,” I quickly interject.

“What do you mean by ‘these’ things?” Dr. Alim asks.

“You know what things.”

“No Eman, I do not know what things. You’ll have to tell me yourself.” She stresses each syllable.

“There’s a lot that we never talk about.”

“Is it a ‘we’ thing, or is it just you who doesn’t want to talk about it?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because you deserve to be heard, Eman.”

I pick at a thread that has escaped the helm of my cardigan. I tug at it and it begins to unwind slowly. Once when I was younger, I held onto my mother’s veil as she tried to leave me in a room alone with Baba. By the time her footsteps were inaudible and a door somewhere in the house had closed, I was left only with a line of miserable thread in my hands, so soft it almost felt like I was holding air. I used that length of rope to tie and untie my bottom lip, hiding how it trembled as I held back tears begging for her to return.

“So, Eman,” this time she is less authoritative and more empathetic, almost cajoling me to speak. “Will you tell me what it is that you don’t talk about?”

“The man from Kawo” I whisper, still unraveling the cardigan. There is now enough wool in my hands to have caused significant destruction to my sleeve. I begin to thread it around and round my fingers. I tighten it until it stops the blood from flowing, any tighter it would cut through my skin. I untwist it and start again all along thinking about the first time I heard about the man from Kawo.

Kawo is where we live. The landmark is a flyover bridge that connects four intersections. When we are passing under the bridge, the noise of Kawo is as muffled as listening to something when my fingers are plugged into my ears. I also know we have gone over the bridge when my stomach lifts to my neck at the incline. There are eight tiny bumps on the bridge which I carefully count, then at the sixth bump, I hold my breath and welcome the sinking feeling that comes as we descend.

I was four years old the first time I heard about The Man from Kawo.

“There’s a man from Kawo who owns a bicycle, and a cat, and rides down the street.” My father chanted and danced around the courtyard trying to evade me in a game of catch.

“Down the street from where Baba? Does the cat have a name? What colour is his bicycle?” I asked curiously. So that the more he answered, the more his voice would lead me to him.

My fixation with colours is born out of my mother’s obsession with making me a normal child. She never failed to describe a thing in its colours, she never bothered that I couldn’t see it.

“What can you see Eman?”  She always used to ask

“Nothing, Mama. There’s nothing.”

“Okay Eman, what you’re seeing is black.” Anything she says is final.

Black is a vacuum, it is the canvas of my sight, emptiness, the absence of something important, the absence of colour. Grey is how the water feels in my mouth when it is cold, blue is water itself. A shape-shifting uncountable spirit. Green is the colour of grass and my mother’s salad, something wet with a crunch when ground by feet or teeth. Yellow she said is the silkiness of her veils, she lets me caress it with my hands. It spreads into a pool around her crossed legs, a cushion for my face as she gently braids my hair. Brown is the bark of a tree, the bark of a dog, an opening, a door, me.

“Baban Eman, ya isa haka. Ku shiga dare na yi” Mama didn’t like my father and me to play when it was dark outside.

“Amma mama, yanzu muka fara.” I sulked.

Because Mama could terminate play at any time of the day, I could not use that as a measure for day and night, especially in Kawo. Kawo never sleeps, the air is violent with life and laughter. The constant blowing of horns of final bus stops, loading and unloading of passengers, hawkers out-screaming one another calling their wares. There are the constant auto-tuned voices of Hausa artists shrilling, they add to the soundtrack of Kawo with the noise of the banging and clanging of metallic bus doors. A hush falls over Kawo and the call to prayer momentarily replaces the music, then it is broken suddenly by the voices of the hawkers again as if raising their voice in time with the call to prayer will result in a miracle of sales, being that close to God. At night time the smell of suya fills the air and tea stands sprout in the corridors of the closed shops. Without constant movement, the smell of cigarette smoke hangs longer in the air.

That’s why the first difference between dare and safe to me was the way my body was guided around my bed. In the morning, my body is pulled away from the bed, and at night, I am guided towards it and then lowered into it. This pattern of my daily routine also signaled how tasks were shared between Mama and Baba. Her soft voice and humming in the morning, Baba’s briskness at night. Always in a hurry to join the Kawo night after I have gone to bed.

“What can you see Eman?”

“Black, Mama” 

“Good. Dare yayi, now the sky is black”

The sky is an insincere black thing, sometimes it is orange, sometimes it is blue but it could also be grey.

When Mama taught me the sky is blue, I asked if we were covered by a blanket of water and why it didn’t pour on us. This blue spreads out warmth, she tried to explain. She said that when the blue sky is overcome with the coolness of grey, the sky will pour showers of rain. She filled a cup with cold water and waited for it to absorb the warmth of the room. Then she led my hand to touch the droplets of sweat that had formed on the body of the cup and the pool beneath it. “Just like that!” she exclaimed.

Another time she called me, “Come, quick Eman. Look.” She said breathlessly.

I turned my head towards her, to the sound of her voice.

“No, Eman. Look up.” She guided my face upwards, her face glued to mine with a thin film of her tears between them, and our faces became engulfed with a stream of warmth.

“Orange is the intense heat from a setting sun, just before the call to Maghrib prayers,” she whispered.

The Man from Kawo taught me humans too are as insincere as the sky. Burning, cooling, wetting, drying, with enough warning to let you know what will happen but never to be stopped. I also learned from the setting of the sun how intense a thing can be as it comes to an end.

I begged Baba to continue with the story. That first dare, baba obliged and answered my pleas about The Man from Kawo. The name of the cat, the colour of the bicycle and the route The Man from Kawo rode.

“There’s a man from Kawo who owns a bicycle and a cat and rides down the street.” I sing under my breath.

“So, this man from Kawo. What else does he do?” this from Dr. Alim

I am tired.

“Sorry?” Dr. Alim asked.

“I am tired.”

“We can talk about something else.”

“I don’t want to talk about anything.”

“You are doing a good job, Eman.”

“What colour is your couch?”

“It is a white couch.”

“Hmm…”

White… white is a concrete thing. I trace my hands on the couch till I clash with the arched wood of the handle. White is delicate and easy to ruin. My mother’s constant warning “be careful, you are wearing white.” Be careful, watch where you go, and watch how you eat. It is also pure, a thing to remove before you do something dirty. Mama’s ritual “Wait Eman. Let’s change you out of this white dress before you go out to play.” At age six, something about The Man from Kawo started to feel like peeling off a white garment.

Dr. Alim isn’t my first therapist. When I was six years old, I started speech therapy when I began to pronounce my ‘sh’ as ‘s’ as in shake as sake, and my ‘l’ would come out in a sharp ‘y’. Mama noticed this when I started to call the colour “yeyyow”. Mama had tried every effort to perfect everything she could about me.

This therapist, Ms. Louisa, was impressed with my intelligence. By my third visit, I had memorized the sizes, shapes and colours of the spheres for the stacking tower in her office. I could organize them in whatever colour pattern was asked of me.

“Yook, Ms. Youisa, I have stacked them yike the coyours of the rainbow.” I finished with a flourish.

She never failed to indulge me with loud cheers adding that I have earned from her a standing ovation. Like all kids once they do something to the amusement of an adult, they don’t know when to stop. Aren’t men the same way too? Constantly repeating their actions only for their amusement. Look at Baba, always telling me about The Man from Kawo.

“You said she only just started having these speech defects?” Ms. Louisa inquired from Mama almost out of earshot but not quite. I continued to build my fallible towers.

“Yes. Her pronunciation has always been impeccable. Eman is homeschooled so I can emphasize a lot of things in her development.” Mama bragged.

“Sometimes children regress in their learning when they experience traumatic events. Some children begin to pee in bed even after they’ve stopped for a long time. While others may develop a speech defect.”

“No, Eman is perfectly fine. Maybe hers is because she’s learning too many things at once. I read that it also causes regression. She’s just started picking up braille.” Mama defended.

“That’s another possibility.” Ms. Louisa agreed although she didn’t sound convinced.

That was the last of what should have been eight weeks of sessions because Mama decided to be my speech therapist. After all, she did everything for me already.

“It is a nice couch.”

“Thank you.” Dr. Alim responds.

My fear of cats also started around the same time I lost my ability to speak. Mama’s ritual of removing white had morphed into the existence of The Man from Kawo every night. Every night a tickle here and there that draws uncomfortable laughter, Baba would start…

“There’s a man from Kawo who owns a bicycle and a cat and rides down the street.”

I too would ask in dishonest wonder…“Down the street from where Baba? Does the cat have a name? What colour is his bicycle?”

The first time Mama taught me the parts of my body, she sang it in a song. My head, my shoulders, my knees and then my toes. She taught me to say “I love you from my head to-ma-toes.” I loved to reach for her toes, I always used to reach for Mama. Oftentimes, the song would lead her to tickle me behind my ears, and my knees, drawing fits of laughter out of my belly until we fell into each other, tangled in the yellow silkiness of her veils. When Mama taught me the parts of my body the second time, it was done mechanically. Then, my body became frigid and stoic. She held me at arm’s length poking me here and there with the blunt edge of an object- these are private parts and these are public parts.

“So now, you have all the words.” She seemed to say. “It is your fault if you do not use them.”

Bestowing me that knowledge hurt her so much, that she never again bathed me without succumbing to a fit of tears. One of us was not talking, and neither knew which.

My body is pulled out of bed and morning spills into my room through the smell of freshly fried Akara. I follow the confetti of bubblegum wraps to the bathroom and wait for the first wave of blue to splash on my body.

“Mama, lafiya? Why are you crying?”

“Ba komai my baby.” Mama stuttered, scrubbing the skin off me with vengeful strokes. “Ba komai.”

My perception of the night is askew. I thought with the way Mama always compared it to my sight, then it must be something that would outlive the insincerity of the skies, and the amusement of men. An eternal cover- something fixed.

At night, my body is lowered to the bed signaling the end of a long day of playing under deceitful skies.

Baba would ask this question back to me, “Eman, lafiya? Why are you crying?”

“Ba komai Baba. Ba komai.”

“Should I tell you about The Man from Kawo?”

When I was 4, I revered The Man from Kawo. It was a story my dad told of how he met Mama. Before Baba opened his store in Kasuwan Barchi, he sold jewelry from a glass box fastened to his bicycle. He went from street to street, even riding over the waters of the river Kaduna to Barnawa and returning to his cat in Kawo. A stray cat which he was too lazy to name that he only called her ‘Kuliya.’ It was the stuff of fairytales, the princess running out to the honking sound of a jewelry seller only to meet Baba who dazzled her into buying more than she wanted, and then some. Every day, something changed in the story. Sometimes, Kuliya is Mama’s cat that followed him home and she had to follow Baba to retrieve her. Other times, Kuliya followed Baba once and when she saw Mama, she didn’t want to leave her. This caused Baba to frequent Mama’s home so that he could see his cat. These changes held me in a grip of wonder, so I asked every night to learn of the modified tales and adventures of The Man from Kawo, captivated mostly by the mischief of the cat. Kuliya, what a thing.

When I turned six, the story began to make a twisted ending. Kuliya, what a thing.

“You’ve told me this story over and over again Baba. Please. Na gaji.”

“Today it will end differently. Just ask.” He promised.

“Down the street from where, what is the name of the cat, and what colour is the bicycle?”

This was the new ending of the story.

“Down the street from Navel Street on his black bicycle, in search of his cat Kuliya who got lost between two buildings.”

His hands would crawl from my stomach and plunge between my thighs, in search of a make-believe cat.

Now I am sixteen and I have learned the ways of Mama’s silence. We have spent so much time talking about everything else that all that’s left to speak of is The Man from Kawo. We would rather stay silent because there is no way to organize this memory without it going against our interests.

“There’s a man from Kawo who owns a bicycle and a cat, and…”

I thought I lost my hearing or my prayer to disappear was answered. Then I thought I was under the Kawo bridge where sounds came muffled. Slowly, then all at once, my senses returned to me with the intensity of a recoil. There was dead silence, the taste of metal, the smell of bubble gum and I knew that if I could see, I would see red.

Red is a warm colour. The colour of blood, Mama says. A living liquid that oozes out of our bodies when we open and leaves a tangy taste of metal. Everything that makes a sound itself is filled with this pigment running tirelessly through its veins. If I had listened carefully, I would have heard the whimper of a dying man.

“What can you see Eman?”

“Nothing, Mama. Mama?” I reached out to her. I used to always reach out to Mama.

“Good. You didn’t see anything.”

“We do not talk about The Man from Kawo,” I tell Dr. Alim. “Because I didn’t see anything.”

– Blessing Tarfa

Author’s Note: “The Man From Kawo” was shortlisted in Nigeria for the Hafsat Abdulwaheed Women’s Short Story Prize 2022.