My first impression of Lagos, when we alighted our 13-hour long flight and plunged ourselves into daylight chaos, was that it would be easy to get lost in a city characterised by such disarray.

It did not surprise me, the chaos, but I worried that we may have been away for too long, that we may struggle to fit in again for the moment that we had to navigate the city. The burning sunlight and the heat and the discordant sounds, they all came in a way that even the tumult of an American subway had not prepared us for. We were grateful to find a kind Lagosian at Ikeja who was magnanimous enough to let us take certain liberties of her rare, endless well of patience as we struggled to explain to her, in our rusty Yoruba, where we needed directions to. And when we eventually boarded a bus to Enugu, my brother Lotanna spent the entire drive through the Benin-Sagamu expressway rehearsing what he would say once we arrived in our hometown, how he would comport himself, to be as outgoing as courtesy would allow, and yet as reserved as grieving demanded. He would do his best to not swat away the little children who would run to him, he’d said. He would offer them okpa and cashew nuts which he would buy from the hawkers in traffic, and he would pat them on their backs and send them away, gently. Then he would go to greet the neighbours, meet those who needed to be met, leave perfunctory apologies for those he couldn’t visit, and a fickle promise to visit again soon.

At Ninth Mile where we alighted, Aunty Kamsi, who had timed her own journey from Port Harcourt to be on the same day, picked us and drove us for the rest of the journey because Boniface, our family driver, had some errands to run for Mama. Aunty hugged us both by gently pressing our faces into her bosom, which seemed larger than I remember but still soft and smelt of lavender. Her huge figure made it easy to do so, and for a moment it felt as though we were children once again, cradled in the arms of our favourite aunt. She spoke nothing of the death of our father, and allowed long spasms of silence to settle between us for most of the journey. The only sounds that accompanied us came from the car stereo. Aunty sang along with her eyes fixed on the road. There was something about the way she held the steering, lightly and without too much caution, like plying this road was an art that she had mastered; the rhythms with which she bobbed her head and tapped her fingers on the wheel. Something about how she mouthed the wordings of each song without mixing up the lyrics. I felt a warmth that was easy to settle into, and I imagine my brother doing so too, as the playlist progressed from Osadebe’s Onuigbo to Oliver De Coque’s Father Father.

The sun was setting when we arrived, and our village took on the image of a room lit by a kerosene lamp too early in the evening. It unravelled itself before us, like a painting set for exhibition. Aunty drove through untarred village paths with scantily clothed children scurrying about and elderly people walking with hoes slung over their shoulders. We passed stops and landmarks that bore distant resemblances to the faint pictures in my mind. And that was when I realised that we had indeed been away for too long, because it took a while before I began to have clearer recollections: of trees under which I once sat to watch an evening extinguish in one of those our rare visits, enchanted by the sun flirting with red hills in the horizon; and familiar buildings crumbling with the weight of history on their roofs — not having changed much as I thought of them. Every piece seemed like an artefact with museumesque significance.

We could see Mama standing by the entrance of our compound, with a few neighbours who had come to welcome us. Boniface helped us to carry the things we had brought with us inside, while the rest of the people gathered more around Aunty, who had a graceful way of spreading her attention to everyone and yet greeting each person with a precise regard that could not leave them feeling ignored. Lotanna promptly shared okpa and cashew nuts amongst the congregating children, patting each one on the back and sending them away in a gentle way as he’d said he would. I, however, did not wait to greet the people who came to welcome us. As soon as I’d hugged my mother, I made for my father’s room, or what used to be. And the first thing I noticed when I walked into the room was the yawning emptiness of the wall just above the bed. The black-and-white photograph, which always hung on the wall in all of Papa’s rooms—both in the city and in the village—like an eternal observer, was laying on the bed, flat on its face.

It took a few days before we settled in. And settling in, in part, meant getting used to the sting of sunflies in the evening. Their bites left red, itchy spots on my skin, so I always wore long clothes for protection. My clothes for the Requiem Mass in honour of Papa were also sewed long. It matched with those of Aunty Kamsi, Lotanna, and Mama, with Papa’s face etched on it, so that there was no ambiguity as to whom the Mass was held in honour of. It was at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church where the Mass was being held that we first got to meet a barrage of uncles and aunts I could’ve sworn I never knew. A grim, bespectacled woman called me by my name and introduced herself jocularly. She offered her condolences and said that it was remarkable how much I and my brother had grown since the last time she saw us.

“Children like you skip adolescence and just grow into adults like plantain stalks,” she said.

I thought the metaphor was a fine one, but I had no memory of this woman. My memories of my father, however, stretched far into time. Papa was always fond of Lotanna. I remember my brother playing on his hairy thighs while he sat in his favourite upholstery chair in the cool of a December evening. Lotanna’s fingers would always reach out to grab a fist-ful of Papa’s well-groomed beard, a thing I suspect always fascinated him, because in the house, full of women, Papa’s face was the only one which held an abundance of hair. Papa always said that a man should tend to his beard as he would a garden, that it was part of his identity. Without ceasing, he would explain the mechanics of what it took to look after one’s beard to any one who cared to listen, insights Lotanna probably took to heart and waited anxiously to apply.

But it was not to be, for although he always looked up to our father as a boy, my brother had taken after our mother in more ways than one. He spoke with a softness that was easy to associate with her, his face lacked Papa’s angular features, and not one strand of hair had sprouted from his chin until he was about twenty six.

“I hope that you and your brother will mingle with your clan people and not stay indoors all the time,” the woman who had introduced herself leaned through the pew to interrupt my thoughts.

She winked as she said it, in a friendly way that was not at all sarcastic. And she had a pleasant aura about her that made the church feel like home. The people in the church too were nice. They offered us their condolences and said encouraging words. They said good things about Papa, that he was a man of good repute who never let anything trample on his integrity. They teased Lotanna about his tattoos in a playful way and did not give him condescending looks. I imagined that my father would have been proud. Not of my brother’s tattoos, but proud because he always cared about his reputation in church. And it would have pleased him to know that his family found solace because of who he was in the church. Their words were comforting, occasionally even littered with good humour, which made us laugh heartily, sometimes briefly forgetful of the fact that it was a funeral that had brought us home.

Yet there is a way grief works that is innate to the body. It has a way of seizing one from within, unprepared. I had seen Lotanna break into laughter a number of times that day. But just before they lowered Papa’s corpse beneath the ground and filled the hole with sand, they opened the casket and asked each one of us to look for the last time. My brother had refused to look. His name was called more than once yet he would not move an inch, not even after I nudged him. And that was when it had happened. He had simply broken into tears in that instant. It had started as a gentle sob, with his head lowered and his fingers placed over his eyes to curb the tears. Then shortly afterwards it poured, so that his shoulders shook as he cried and his nose became runny. It was as though with each attempt he made to compose himself, his body gave way to the grief of our father’s demise all the more. And not knowing what to do, I stood beside him and held his hand and squeezed it gently, in a manner as comforting as I could muster, to at least let him know I was still there.

But Boniface, who stood behind us, could not stay and watch a grown man cry in the presence of everyone. Something about it seemed to upset him, embarrass him.

“It’s enough,” he whispered from behind us, “pull yourself together. You don’t want everyone to see you crying like a woman.”

He said it in Igbo. And I thought it was an insensitive thing to say. But more than anything, I found it grossly offensive.

“And what exactly is wrong with a man crying?” It was Aunty.

Boniface looked at her as if to say that it was undignifying.

“Ozugo,” he said again, flatly.

I looked over at Aunty and she simply shook her head and said nothing more.

Lotanna continued to cry, now putting a napkin over his face to stifle his whimpers, perhaps reeling from the fact that it took the demise of our father to make him attend Mass again. My brother did not always have a troubled relationship with our father before his death. He used to attend Mass regularly and confessions every Wednesday. He had been baptized and had received the Holy Communion. He used to pray the rosary daily and often squeezed some of his pocket money into the St Vincent de Paul box in front of the cathedral, even after Mama had told him he did not have to do that. But all that was years ago. He had denounced his Catholic faith shortly before we left for school in the United States, and although Papa never said it out loud in the exact words, he too had denounced my brother.

*

The first time my brother refused to attend Mass, a stinking wave of apprehension filled our house all through that day, so much so that the black and white photograph, my father’s favourite of our family, which always hung on the wall above his bed, had fallen and developed a crack in its middle, as if to forecast a storm. That was the beginning of bad things. Lotanna was seventeen at the time, and had simply refused to come out of his room as he was wont to do on a Sunday morning. Papa who was always the first dressed for Mass, had been waiting outside. And so was my mother and myself. But Lotanna was nowhere in sight — which was uncharacteristic of our Sunday mornings, because my mother was usually the last to emerge from the house.

“Young man,” my father called, “I hope you know we are all waiting for you!”

But there was no response. Papa looked at his wristwatch impatiently and began to walk back inside. Without thinking, I too began to walk behind him. He climbed the stairs the way an athlete would, taking short, fast-paced strides up as he did.

“He had better have a good reason for this nonsense.”

When Papa got to the door and turned the knob, it was locked. He banged it with his fist, but still there was no response. He turned to me, as though to confirm if I was witnessing what was happening.

“Lotanna!”

Silence.

“Lotanna!!” he called again.

At the second call, the door opened slightly, held by a hinge behind it, so that there was only enough space for one’s face to peek.

“I don’t remember installing a hinge to this door, young man.” He always called us “young man” or ”young woman” when he was upset.

“I won’t be attending Mass today,” my brother said. It was said with the finality of a judge banging his gavel.

There was another strange silence that followed. It stretched. Until Lotanna broke it with a reiteration.

“I won’t be attending Mass anymore.”

His voice was calm and collected, as though he had been rehearsing the words for weeks. He would not accept a faith that did not accept him for who he was, he said. Papa turned to look at me with a bewilderment in his eyes which carried a conviction that my brother was mad. He looked at me as if to ask, as he often would when he found something to be unbelievable, “can you see and hear what I am seeing and hearing?” Then he turned to stare again at Lotanna, straight into his eyes, in the way he always did when he wanted to test the resolve of his children, when he wanted to disarm us of it. A common performance, yet unique in the way it delivered its effects. Lotanna did not flinch, and although he eventually looked away, he did not go on to prepare for Mass. He just avoided Papa’s gaze and proceeded to shut the door gently.

Papa stood by the door, burning with rage as he tapped his feet impatiently. I feared he would proceed to do something drastic like attempt to break the door with his fist. And perhaps he considered it for a few minutes, before turning and walking back outside. I scurried after him, again without thinking. He did not say a word as we entered the car, not even after Mama asked him what happened. She suspected that there had been an altercation, but as my father drove us to St. Jude’s cathedral that morning in Lagos without uttering a word, she did not ask him again. We could see the rage that lined his forehead and burrowed into it. It manifested itself in the way he drove also. My mother pled the blood of Jesus one too many times when he almost bumped into other cars; and when she could not hold it in, she gently asked him to drive carefully.

“Daddy”—she called him ‘Daddy’ when she knew he was upset and she was trying to calm him—“please take it easy. It is better for us to arrive late than not to arrive at all.”

But it was no good. Papa continued to drive like an enraged man. It was only during Mass that I noticed the burrowing anger on his forehead disappear.

Papa was a strict man. Stern-faced, bespectacled; his was a fearful mien greeting household dissents with cavernous silences that enforced the irrevocability of his decisions. He instilled in us a stringent sense of discipline, sometimes with a shot of paranoia. He had a firm, no-nonsense way of talking that buttressed his points and emphasized every word he uttered; a twist to his mouth that would make each thing he said sound, to a stranger, like a threat. He enforced principles with something that was sometimes brute force but had a strange affection underneath it. And my brother was always on the receiving end of this brute side of him. When we returned from Mass, he came with a tool to break the door, still burning with rage as he stated categorically that it was his house and no son of his would deny him access into any of its rooms. But he found it open because Lotanna was no longer inside. He only showed up a week later, to the utter relief of my mother who had been worried sick. Strangely, however, Papa had simply shook his head and had said nothing more at the return of my brother, not even about where he had been. He only muttered something about children who thought they had grown wings.

It was not always like this, you see. Things had only started to change on the day before that Sunday when Lotanna refused to attend Mass. It was not that Papa himself was such a fanatic. Even as a Catholic, he evened out his devotion to his faith with a respect for his tradition. In Lagos where we lived, he bore his baptismal name, the name with which he’d been rechristened in 1984, but he always took pride in being called Amunike whenever he went to our hometown in Enugu. Papa never for once missed Mass, yet every year he travelled home to join the men to hold each New Yam Festival, reliving the days of his youth, like a glass of old wine still fizzling at its rim. And he was loved by all. Where love couldn’t reach, fear and respect did. My mother adored him. His umunna respected him, largely because he made generous donations to them every year. But as Papa often said: respect is respect.

He defined success in a banal, traditional way: being at peace with God and his chi; having a united family; being wealthy enough to give to what he believed were just causes; raising children who were not wayward. He believed that we, his children, could be the best, so he never accepted what he thought was mediocre. Or unbefitting. Or “abnormal.” And this was where he had a problem with my brother. He often said that I took after him in every way he could wish for.

“From a young age, I knew you understood that it took the strong-willed to persevere in this world,” he once told me. But to him, my brother was not like that. When Lotanna announced at dinner one evening that he had something he wanted to say, my father had not suspected he would say what he eventually said. And perhaps that was why he could not conceal his shock that day.

“Your fellow man, who is built the same as you?”

“Tufiakwa!”

“What will people say when they hear that my son follows a man who has a penis like himself?

“What will the church say?”

I did not say much. Not even my mother did. It was not so much a discovery for us as it was for Papa. And he seemed to wonder how it was that only he had not known all along. Moreso, he wondered why he was the only one who found it grossly alarming, abnormal even. He repeatedly asked anyone who knew what was wrong with “that boy” to go and talk him out of his madness. And I had gone to Lotanna’s room just to placate him, but I had been unable to say anything to Lotanna all the time I stayed inside. My brother would later tell me that he had expected me to ask questions, that my unflinching attitude always reminded him, even several years later, of why I was Papa’s favourite child and he was, well, who he was.

*

I imagine my brother reminiscing about the saccharine moments he had with our father as a child: a fistful of beard in his grasp, an open-toothed smile that illuminates the darkness and tempered the violent flashbacks he suffered when he remembered how Papa had reacted on the day he learnt about his sexuality. Yet I lived to remind him of the many things I was and the many others that he wasn’t, to Papa. My very nature appeared to contrast his and reflect against Papa’s preferences. My whole existence shone a light on how unfit he was perceived to be a son. And this was the very beginning of bad things for us. Lotanna’s coming of age, and Papa’s stubborn refusal to accept what he thought was “abnormal” had slowly created a yawning chasm between us, all of us, so that what was once a family became a group of people who could not even live together. 

I have often felt guilty, as though it was I who orchestrated the breaking of my family. I have felt guilty, deeply guilty, for this. I have often thought of my strength and personality as a thing to apologise for, caught as I always was in the cross-references my father frequently made. It has made me feel guilty, deeply guilty, each time Papa said that his son behaved like a woman, each time he asked Lotanna why he could not behave like me. I have felt guilty. Deeply guilty. For the verbal abuses. The prayer houses. The indifference with which Papa sent us to America, asking Boniface to drive us to the airport, and not once looking into my brother’s face as we left, as though he were an abomination he did not mind being rid of.

The morning on which news of Papa’s death came, I could’ve sworn I heard the sound of things breaking. I cannot tell if those sounds came from within me. But I heard them. And it was not so much the death as the manner in which Papa was said to have died that left that sound ringing: on his four-poster bed, pillows splayed at awkward angles, arms spread apart as though in surrender to a force greater than him. There was no spilling of blood, but the bed, it was said, bore signs of a struggle. It did not sound like a natural death. But “the doctor said it was a cardiac arrest” was what Mama told me when I asked her what really happened.

“Return home…” she added. Her voice trailed off. I could tell she had been crying.

I knew what she meant. I knew that she meant for me to return with Lotanna. She knew that I knew. So she said nothing else. And in a minute, the line went dead. But I remember how, in that moment, I’d felt something akin to relief at the news, and immediately afterwards, a violent shame for grieving in that way.

About the Author:

Isaac Chika is an art enthusiast and a lover of African literature who spends his time writing short stories, essays and creative nonfiction. His works have been published in The Kalahari Review and elsewhere. You can find him on X @chiickerr. Or on Instagram @chiickerr. Or on Medium, where he sometimes shares deeply personal stories about himself: medium.com/@isaacchika

*Feature image by Rui Silvestre on Unsplash