If I get jollof and you get fried rice,
(a story for my brothers, Evan, Jonathan, Joel, Joshua)
Come, sit. The floor is cool.Concrete keeps its secrets from the sun,and a boy who lies belly-down on bare cementin the furnace of a Lagos afternoonknows a luxury no palace has learned. The road outside was never finished.The agama lizards nodded on the walllike elders agreeing with the sun.The world, as far as we knew, was our mother's gardenat the front and the back, plantain leaning into banana,papaya standing guard, soursop and mangodropping their sweetness like careless kings,and five boys in the middle of it all,barefoot lords of a green kingdom. We tied our mother's fabric at our necksand became more than boys.A wrapper is a cape if the wind agrees,and the wind always agreed.We flew low over the compound,saving a world that did not know it was in danger,dying dramatic deaths in the red dustand rising again for supper. We hid and we sought.Behind the water drum, inside the storehousewhere old radios slept among the thingsnobody had the courage to throw away,and Evan and I would open their bodies with our small hands,priests of the screwdriver,asking every dead machine the same question.What made you sing? And when father said the word, restaurant,the whole house changed its weather.A trip down that unfinished road was a pilgrimage,and the negotiations began before the door closed behind us.What will you take when we get there?Jollof rice. No, fried rice.No, sausage roll and a bottle of Fanta, cold, with the mist on it.And then the treaty, solemn as anything signed by nations.If I get jollof and you get fried rice,we will share.Half of mine for half of yours. At night, when NEPA took the light,as NEPA always took the light,we lit the green coil and surrendered the house to its smoke,and waited outside under the moon,the whole family loose in the dark,aunts and uncles and boys and stories.We sang songs of praise until God leaned closer.We sang songs that made us laugh until we fell over.We sang songs that made the older ones quietin a way we did not yet understand.Mosquitoes took their small tax from our legsand we paid it gladly.The moon was our ceiling.We were never once poor under it. And there was fire, once.The generator, the funnel, the slipped hand,the night the back of the house wore flames,and father shouting for water, for soap, for sand,ordinary things turned to weapons,and I, searching the smoke for my brother,crying out the words for the very first time,i love you, please come back.And Evan's voice returning like an answered prayer.He had run toward the street, toward help,already a healer before he knew the word for it. Evan, who drew the chambers of the heart as a childand now mends them as a man. Jonathan, who arrived speaking a languagenone of us could enter,grammar and rhythm of his own invention,a whole country built inside one small mouth.We were a house of engineers.We did not know what to do with a boywho was already a nation. Then the high school years, and the band,and a door down the hallway closedwith the same eight bars behind it,wrong, and wrong, and wrong again,and then one evening, right.He was not practising.He was spelling out his namein the only alphabet that ever fit him. We asked him to study science,the way families ask, meaning it kindly.He tried. Computer science. One semester,which was long enough to be certain.And then he came into his true shape,paintings, comic strips for the paper,his own work on his own walls.I went to one of his exhibitsand stood in that room and understoodthat what physics is to me, art is to him.The same fire. The same hunger. The same music.Forgive us, brother, that we learned your worth slowly.You were the song in a house of engineers,and the song is what everyone remembers in the end. Joel was still small when I left for college,which means I have holidays where I should have years.I know him the way you know a houseyou keep returning to and never live in. He took a job at the restaurant where Joshua worked.Not for the money. For the shift.After school he drove them both there,and after closing he drove them both home,a boy quietly arranging his own lifeso his brother would never work a night alone.He carries our mother's oldest habit,paying what needs payingand letting the room believe it paid itself.He gives his turn away. He waits his turn.He has not opened yet.He will, and I intend to be in the room. And Joshua, last born, who arrivedalready knowing who he was,builder's hands, artist's eye, athlete's stride,charm enough to warm a room before he enters it.The strange office of the eldestis that the youngest telephones youto ask what it means to be a man,and you answer him in a steady voicewhile your own hands are still learning.I visited him once and he showed me his work,proud, wanting me to see all of it,and I recognised the face he was making.It is the face I make. Four brothers, and I hold four different amounts of them.Evan I have entire, from the fire onward.Jonathan I had to grow into.Joel and Joshua I have in photographs and phone callsand long weekends and the holidays,which is what the first son paysfor being the first to leave. We were boys who did not know what the world was,or what it would ask of us,or that oceans and years were already waitingto scatter us like seed. We only knew the cool of the floor,the sweetness of stolen mangoes,the weight of a fabric cape,and the certain, unshakeable knowingthat we were covered,under mother's wing, under father's roof,under God's wide sky. Brothers, wherever this finds you.The treaty still holds.Oceans between us now, years between us now,and still, if I get jollof and you get fried rice,half of mine is yours.It was always going to be yours.It will be yours until the last plateis cleared from the last table. Come. Sit. The floor is cool.There is enough. — tachi
next in the long tellings the sound his back made 