Under This Cashew Tree
Photo: Anton Shuvalov
Now we’re biting flesh off the fruit. Sucking its juice. We’re laughing and holding hands. I want to read poetry to you till your eyes are teary or till you cry and wipe your eyes with the back of your hands. But even as much as I want to read poetry to you and run my fingers through your hair, I also want to just sit with you in silence, and even though our bodies do not touch, feel every fibre of your being entangle with mine.
This walk together started with an insinuation. A suggestion. Just like God suggested, “Let us create Man in our own image.” You said it’s in places like this, secluded from the world, in isolation, that you feel like you know yourself. I think we’re alike because it is here that I, too, can wear my own skin in comfort, and there are no limitations to who I can be.
I like to think that when my father fell in love with my mother, it was under a cashew tree like this that he saw, through her eyes, the many pieces of her shattered heart. How she was scared to crave someone again. How she was scared of leaving her heart unguarded, enough to dedicate even just a beat of it to someone. But I would never know because I never asked.
You look like one of those girls that have a perfect life. Happy family, male and female siblings, rich uncles, live in a big mansion. Its inside cream-coloured with big leather cushions, Italian furniture, exotic arts—figurines, masks, ceramics, paintings. Its garage, a cluster of expensive cars. So it hits me hard when you say you hate your father. It just slaps the picture of your perfect life out of me— because of how you say it, your voice’s sharp conviction.
I think hate is a strong word, but to be fair to you, it’s useless trying to tone down its intensity with a soothing word like almost or kinda. But this is what I try to do with my own father. I don’t know if it’s hate or kinda hate or just plain fright. Not even with events of that morning.
That morning, in the wake of harmattan, when bodies turn white regardless of how well moisturised they are, and hair need not be pat dry because it dried in the short distance between your bathroom and your bedroom, my father slapped my mother. The previous Sunday, my father had smiled as the district pastor announced that he, alongside four other men in the church, would be ordained a pastor.
Although when he slapped her, he barked, “What kind of wife wastes time and delays her husband on an important day like this?” I still wonder what could have been the true reason for his action. As he drove off that day, raising clouds of harmattan dust in the air, my mother watched his car speed off, her eyes damp with tears. Even though she always looked firm with her thick arching eyebrows and pursed lips, especially on Sundays like that when she dressed in native attire, for the first time since I can remember, she looked weak and helpless.
That night, I sat in silence and watched as my mother set the table for dinner. If she was as frightened by what father was becoming as I was, then we should have left that morning. But she really loved him, and perhaps she hoped that she could keep up with his pace.
“Nkem, this soup is very delicious o,” he said as he rolled a ball of fufu between his fingers and, with his idle hand, patted her back approvingly as if it had not been him who slapped her and called her enemy of progress, outside the compound where the glaring eyes and suppressed chuckles of our neighbours stabbed my mother in the rib, the pain of that stab probably hurting much more than my father’s raging palm against her left cheek. But Mother feigned a smile, “I knew you’d like it.”
That was the first time, but definitely not the last time I saw him lay his hands on her.
Once, he beat her because she didn’t birth a male child. “You empty barrel! You drop this one, fourteen years, and there’s nothing left.” He paced the room, breathing heavily, before slamming the door behind him and leaving. I thought that was it. We were going to leave, and when I thought of us leaving, I wondered how my father would fare without us. He liked to talk, and my mother liked to listen. I liked to watch them talk. We had a role in each other’s lives that we had become accustomed to, and we would be very much missed if we had left that day. But night came, and Mother made supper again. Perhaps she, like me, also thought Father was under pressure from his family or from attending graduation parties of his friends’ male children.
“Even though she always looked firm with her thick arching eyebrows and pursed lips, especially on Sundays like that when she dressed in native attire, for the first time since I can remember, she looked weak and helpless.”
One afternoon when Mr Kayode visited, Father received him with hearty cheer as he usually did when his friends visited. “Ada, go and tell your mother Mr Kayode is around.” And as I ran off, he added, “Tell her to bring us food.” After their fufu and afang soup, they talked about church, politics, and even sports. As Father saw him off, Mr Kayode announced, “Eze, Bamidele’s graduation party is this Friday. You should come.” My father’s cheerfulness disappeared and was replaced with a feigned enthusiasm, “So fast? How quickly these children grow.”
When Father returned, he sent me to my room, and I slept off. When I woke up, Mother had a pink eye. It was so swollen I thought she’d lose her sight. The next day after school, we sat together in the kitchen as she peeled yam. “What happened to you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked, pretending to not understand that I was asking about her injured eye.
“Your eye, what happened to it?” I asked again. There was an awkward silence before she claimed to have slipped on the stairs, but because my mother isn’t the best of liars, I asked again, “Did he beat you? Did Daddy beat you?” She looked at me and, instead of answering, handed me the bowl of yam slices and told me to boil them.
“Your father will be back in no time, and he must be hungry because he didn’t have breakfast.”
Not long after, Mother was expecting another child but did not seem happy about it. She was pregnant with a girl. I wondered how they still had that kind of intimacy, how he pushed himself between her thighs and how she could let him.
I know he hated that I looked so much like my mother. That my long kinky hair, which I usually made into cornrows, was the brown colour of my mother’s, that my eyelashes were thick and long like hers. So he made me cut my hair often, and the day his sister said in admiration that I have my mother’s beautiful eyes, he came home the following night with a pair of small scissors and asked Mother to trim my eyelashes. I remember how she stared at him as he dropped the scissors and dragged his feet to the room. It was the look one gives something they used to know. Something that used to be theirs. It is the response we give when the familiar becomes strange.
I hate that my mother still didn’t pack her things that night.
The day mother spoke up and called my father what he had become, “lunatic,” he pushed, kicked, slammed, punched and slapped her right there as though I was invisible. I tugged at his shirt in fear, pleading on Mother’s behalf, saying Jesus wouldn’t be happy with what he was doing, but I must have been voiceless as well because he pinned her head to the wall and pressed hot iron against her back. The closest to a dead person I’ve ever seen is my mother’s limp and lifeless body that morning.
Healing is a process that reassures but deceives, so each day we spent at the hospital with Mother still lying there—lifeless—I said long prayers to God. I believe he was listening because she turned her head on the fourth day. And on the fifth day, she winced as she sat up listening to Aunty Sarah. “Chika, you cannot go back to that house. I understand that you love him, but Chika, please, for the sake of your child. This man is an unrepentant abuser. You deserve better.”
Mother turned to look at me, “What did you tell her?”
Mother didn’t say much after that. She just stared into space. “Don’t worry about anything, Chika. You and Ada can stay with me until I find you a place in Lagos. I will pay the bills and Ada’s school fees till you find a good job. If not for her and your unborn child, we really should sue that man.”
The iron had scalded mother’s back so badly that it left a big purple scar after it healed. Although she says it no longer hurts, I don’t believe her, so even now, when I hug her, I try not to touch the scar and remind her of her regrets.
Mother had Nnenna in Lagos. She says Nnenna is a testimony of God’s greatness as she should have lost the baby after the experience with Father. She still talks about Father at every chance she has.
“Nno, you know if we were home, your father would have preferred ogbono instead of egusi,” she would say whenever I suggested that we try other soups. The way she still referred to my father’s house as home, I knew she would call me one day and say, “Nno, we don’t belong in this Lagos. Let us go back home to your father. He has burnt in his own flame for long enough. We don’t even know how he’s faring without us.”
“But Aunty Uju says he is fine,” I replied the day she finally said it.
“That is what they tell us, Nno. How can we know? How?” she asked, her brows slightly raised so that the brown skin on her forehead creased into fine wrinkles.
“What if he has someone now?” I asked, trying to make her see reasons not to go back to him.
“Your father is a Christian. When Emeka and Amaka were considering divorce, have you forgotten what your father told them?”
I remember what my father told them. He had recited a bible verse to them as he peeked through his glasses, “Shall a Man leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.” I also remember wondering if my father and mother were truly one flesh.
We repeated this same conversation over the years, with the same expressions—the worry in my mother’s voice, the crease on her forehead, her slightly raised eyebrows, sometimes her raised voice, and my indifference—but we’ve never actually packed our bags for father’s house.
A cashew fruit falls from the tree, and you run to pick it. I watch your hips sway as you walk back to me, chuckling. I wonder if boys catcall you when you walk past, or if they pull your arm, too, when you go to the market and call you their wife as if you look like someone searching for a husband in the market. I wonder if you, like me, growl at these men when they approach you.
I wonder what you think of how I look at you. How my hands linger when I touch you. I sometimes wish you’ll fall into my hands in total surrender, just like the cashew fruit.
When my mother first talked to me about marriage, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. She bent her knees and rocked her waist, mimicking how she would dance when the priest joins me and a man together, pronouncing us husband and wife.
“When your husband says ‘I do’ and puts the ring on your finger eh, the way I will dance so that my enemies will know that I didn’t suffer in vain.”
“So you suffered that much just so I would get married?”
“When you’re my age, you will understand,” she replied, patting my shoulder, but I wasn’t done. Not just yet.
“What if I don’t want to marry?”
“Ada, what nonsense are you saying? Do you not know that the joy of a parent is to see their children marry and have children? Especially women like me, whom God has decided to give only female children. Your father will see that I have raised you girls well, and maybe you will give me the male child I’ve always wanted”.
“What about seeing your children being recognized for their good work, or seeing them bag several degrees, or helping sick people, or doing charity?” I asked as I lifted the lid of the pot to reduce the pressure of the boiling rice water.
Silence hung in the air, somewhere in the space between us. The only noise around was my sister’s furious tearing of a drawing that didn’t turn out as beautiful as she had thought it would. My mother stared at the whistling pot on the stove, her teeth clenched in irritation.
“What if I don’t want to marry a man,” I blurted and regretted it almost immediately.
My sister, as if aware of what I had just said, stopped fussing with her drawing and stared at me. My mother snapped. She sprang up from the wooden stool she was sitting on, her eyes widened, she untied and retied her wrapper loosely around her waist, and when the wrinkles creased her forehead, it wasn’t of worry. It was of shock and disgust.
“Enough! What rubbish talk is that one, eh? We really have to go back home before you run out of your mind. If your father were here, would you be asking me this nonsense?”
In truth, I’ve thought about this.
All those times my mother and I spoke about my father, it took some effort to pretend that I did not want to see him again. I actually do, but all the uncertainties frighten me. It is the same uncertainty that I feel when I want to tell you that every night, I wish to feel the tenderness of your lips and the warmth of your body against mine, but I don’t because my throat folds into a big knot. I hope one day the knot in my throat loosens, and words come in syllables of hope that even if it’s the last time you come here with me when I see this fruit whose flesh we tear off and whose juice we suck, when I see this tree or hear the orchestra of crickets and the songs of birds, if I ever see a spider again, or even its web, it is you I’ll see, and I’ll imagine us sitting here again, holding hands in silence, and letting our bodies do all the talking.
About the author
Precious Afolabi is a lover of the arts. His flash fiction won the 2018 W2W prize for flash fiction. He lives in Nigeria and is studying for a BA in Languages and Literature at Adeleke University.
