The sun sieves through the half-drawn lace curtains, casting dancing patterns of light and shadow on my face and on my pillow. It must be morning already, then. I wonder why Papa has not come to tear me from sleep and bed. More than because he wants me to be up early and go through all the rituals of getting ready for school, I think Papa has come to love waking me up, as much as he actually enjoys my pretending not to have had enough sleep and my begging him to let me recoil myself and shut my eyes for eleven, just eleven more seconds. I indulge him. After all, he is family, and he is my Papa.
His not coming today is odd, and even though I could
use being the one to tell him tall things about the need to be an early riser
and the benefits of being punctual and proactive and other such things, I let
myself fall back into cuddly comforts of bed and pillow. But the pool of
sunlight and shadows on my pillow will not let me go back to bed. Try as I work
myself into getting annoyed with the sun, I cannot even frown. I can only
remember…
No, I do not remember to daydream and imagine and be
curious about myself and the worlds around me. I remember to go wake Papa and
tell him that maybe, just maybe, when I ask for eleven seconds to shut my eyes,
I am really asking him to let me breathe, to live, like I really know how to. I
remember to go wake Papa up and tell him one of many stories I have lived out
because of sun-filled daydreams, because of animated, uninhibited imagination.
A story that will
happen at school.
* *
*
It was one of those idle school days between end of
term exams and vacation. Some of my friends were
discussing a part of our
recent Natural Science exam paper, something about the seven things – life processes,
Teacher Ago had said – that human beings can do. That was when I started telling
my friends about how plants can do many of the things animals and even humans
can do. Everyone was intrigued and wanted to hear all I had to say.
Everyone but Foli and his Morris. Foli hastily left
the class. Morris came closer, wearing a grin that spelt ‘silly’ and ‘trouble’
in one word. Knowing Morris is Foli’s spy on my every move, I decided to ignore
him and go on to tell those eager to listen more. But Morris will not let me.
He insisted I am deceiving people and stealing all of Foli’s friends.
I am not the one with the latest and fanciest games
and gadgets, and the plenty money to buy snacks and friends who are willing to
be bought. Foli does, and he does not like me at all. He just does not
understand why many people would rather gather around me and listen hard and
long at the endless things I tell them. I am the one who gets it written on my report
cards that I distract lessons.
Given the chance at an Open Day, a teacher will
explain ‘distract’ to mean friends gather around me, listening to plenty
God-knows-what, all the time, and in the middle of lessons. Days after, when Uncle
Akwasi will come to visit, he will not find such a report worrying. He will try
to convince Papa that this kind of distraction is actually a good sign, but
Papa will tell him to at least, not say that in my presence. He had meant for
Uncle Akwasi to help him talk to me to change my ways. In front of Papa, Uncle
Akwasi will tell me to at least, not do that
while a teacher is in class and is teaching. Then, we will smile, Uncle Akwasi
and I. And it was with a shared understanding of mischief. Our smile.
I frowned Morris away, and when he would not leave
and leave me alone, I asked him to then tell us how plants are able to grow if
they do not eat – that is, if he knew it.
‘Plants eat. They suck their food from the soil. Through
their roots’ explained Morris, simply.
Rather than this making him see reason in what he
would not even given me the chance to explain, his answer won him many nods and
a new company. I got only sudden suspicion, I felt like a fraud. Yet, I disagreed,
saying that it is only water and some soil nutrients that plants take in
– or in Morris’ words, suck – from
the soil.
‘As for the real food, plants make it in their
leaves when there is light from –’
‘Stop it! Shut up! Liar!’ accused Morris, now raging
with angry hate, neither able to hide its rawness nor give ready reasons for it.
I could bear his calling
me a liar. His implying Uncle Akwasi
is a liar was what hurt me, for it was Uncle Akwasi who taught me how plants
make and eat their food. And my Uncle Akwasi cannot lie. Not about this, at
least.
Morris smirked, twitched his left eye brow and gave
me the now-what-becomes-of-you? look. And I thought I heard someone laugh. The
laughter, it was a brief but meaty one and I was not sure if it was (directed)
at me or at Morris, at both of us or at what was fast becoming a sour
situation.
The air burned with liquid battle. Someone soon
saved the situation. Albeit gingerly, the person suggested that we go ask
Teacher Bernice, our class teacher.
It was not until we got to her table, close to the
door leading in and out of the class, when we found that Teacher Bernice was
busily grading one of our recent exam papers and excitedly chatting with Teacher Peprah, the class teacher next
door. Before I could even start asking her she told me to ‘leave her face with those
my many silly stories’. I tried not to cry, as I marched upstairs and she and
Teacher Peprah’s chat intensified with crisp giggles and climaxed into a rather
neat hi-five. When I got to the landing before the last lap of stairs to the
next floor, I realized I did not even know where I was going.
The pain of Morris calling my Uncle Akwasi a liar knotted in my throat. Threatening to
fall in torrents on already fallen face, tears scoured my courage. I slumped in
the corner of the landing, ready to let it all come crumbling down, in eleven,
yes, eleven heaves and as many sighs and gasps. I soon found none of all that was
to be: through the first film of tears, I saw a pool of people at the bottom of
the stairs. Quickly, I brushed my eyes with the back of one hand. It was my
friends. Looking a little like a champion, Morris stood large and in front of
the pool. The knot of pain kicked. With jagged
intent, it scratched me bloody sore.
I picked myself up, dusted the back of my school
uniform and with the other hand, beckoned them to follow me. I still did not
know what I was thinking and doing, where all this was going, where I was
leading them. But I did know that all could not have been lost in proving that
my Uncle Akwasi may be many things I may not know yet, but he is not, cannot be
a liar.
I marched on, up last flight of stairs. There is JHS
1 Lily and then there is JHS 1 Rose, the second class after turning from the
stairs. I like the Rose form master, Teacher Bawa, because his looks, his ways confirm
two or four hallowed things somewhere soft and deep in my being. Maybe it is
because Teacher Bawa is lanky beyond any
plump redemption – just like Uncle Akwasi – but I do know that if Intelligence
were to be human and had eyes, the eyes would look like Teacher Bawa and Uncle
Akwasi’s. And it must have been this mystic connection to Teacher Bawa that tugged
me towards his class.
I and the host behind me found Teacher Bawa at his
table. He too was busy, but not with marking.
With his eyes closed and his long lean frame slumped
in his chair and barely under his nearly empty table – is he finished with his
grading? – Teacher Bawa did not look lost.
He was lost far and wide in a world of
his own. It was the thickness of our presence which jerked him back to this
other, popular, world. And it was the way his eyes glowed with something far
wondrous than sleep, the way he clutched the opened book on his chest that made
me know that the book on his chest must have triggered and unfurled this world which
Teacher Bawa was so happily lost in.
Almost impatiently, he asked what it is that we wanted
with him. I was eager to save time. And my Uncle Akwasi’s reputation.
‘Please, Teacher Bawa, my friends here did not
believe me when I told them plants make their own food. And that they don’t suck
their food from the ground,’ I only began.
‘But why? That is true,’ Teacher Bawa agreed.
‘But Teacher Bawa, how?’ a voice like Morris’ stole
in.
‘Okay, let’s do it this way,’ suggested Teacher Bawa.
‘Let your friend here tell all of us…’
‘But why won’t you tell us yourself, Teacher Bawa?
Please?’ Foli himself cut in, the ‘please’ part of his words sounding
half-hearted, dangling at the end of his protest, like the afterthought that it
really is.
Teacher Bawa frowned, but only briefly, and was soon
telling us all about how it is that plants make their food in their leaves,
using something, a word which begins with the first sound in CHLOrine and ends
with something that sounds like the word FILL. With his eyes glittering with
the sheer delight of the telling and our tingling, listening ears, Teacher Bawa
spoke of how all this happens beyond the seeing of the eyes and the help of
anything but nature on its own course. And through it all, Teacher Bawa
emphasized that very little or none of this wonder will happen without sunlight.
When Teacher Bawa was done and he asked if that was
what I was going to tell my friends and they won’t let me, I merely smiled my
gratitude to him. And when Teacher Bawa asked how I knew about Photosynthesis,
I told him all about Uncle Akwasi.
I told Teacher Bawa how Uncle Akwasi is full of
stories, how Uncle Akwasi is the only one who, with anything within reach – with
charcoal or pencil and ground or paper, with an orange and a stone alike, with
shoe laces as well as the tunnels in Grandmother’s big glass beads – can show me
how a cube has six faces, how the earth rotates while revolving around the sun,
how in a split second I pull my hand from a hot object I accidentally touch. It
is Uncle Akwasi who can start telling me about one thing – say wine and
fermentation – and before he and I know it, I am also learning bits and chunks
about the Babel and Pisa Towers, about mercury and magma and mirage, about Ancient
Egypt and Einstein, about Nkrumah and neo-colonialism, about parallel lines and
poetry and – if I really must add, about – photosynthesis.
This my Uncle Akwasi is fun and sunny in a vivid,
photo- …well, photographic way.
* * *
I still have to go to wake Papa up...
Papa is not in his bedroom when I arrive. On his bed
were a pair of Wellington boots a few sizes bigger than my feet, a set of
clothes – the kind Papa calls ‘working gear’. They are also close to my size – and
a note which made me jump with joy unbounded.
I do remember to go wash my face, brush my teeth and
go to the kitchen to have a generous helping of Papa’s signature Pine-ger juice
and buns.
The sun pours past the fully drawn lace curtains, leaving
a river of sunlight on my pillow, on my bed and the rest of my room. It is well
into morning. And I am sure it is the same sun I will meet, together with Papa,
in our backyard garden.
Aisha Nelson dreams, writes, thinks, teaches and lives in
Accra, Ghana. A set of her poems were shortlisted by Erbacce Press in 2014;
another won Akwantuo Writing’s
2015 Harmattan Poetry Contest. More of her poetry, short fiction and
non-fiction have featured in outlets including Accra
Theatre Workshop, One Ghana One
Voice, Kalahari Review, Munyori Journal,Saraba, Prairie Schooner and Caine Prize’s 2015 short story
anthology. Aisha’s blog
Nu kÉ› Hulu (Water and Sun) is at aishawrites.wordpress.com
Read Previous Editions
Read Previous Editions
