Beatrice

By Abeer Hoque

coalescence, 95°F

oyo yo oyo

oyo yo oyo

augustina matakwaya

matakwaya oyo

isinawaya oyo

afonariya oyo

oyo yo oyo

oyo kambade

de kambade

east, west…

– Igbo clapping game

Chubuike is darker than the darkening evening. Bottle smooth ebony skin. Next to Ivan, a Bangladeshi boy, he is a shadow bouncing around the gymnasium. All the Bangladeshis and Indians in Nsukka coo over my sister Simi’s butter honey skin, but I have little patience for this particular South Asian prejudice. My inner eye for beauty resolves with the dark.

Chubuike and Ivan are speaking a pidgin mix of English and Igbo, while Simi and I play a clapping game called “oyo yo oyo” with two other girls.

East, west, north and south, ibidaragay north and south…

We are waiting for the grown-ups to be done with their badminton game so we can play ourselves. When Ivan’s father strolls off the court, Chubuike singsongs a greeting.

“Good evening, sah!”

“Good evening, Justice. How are you?”

“I am doing well, sah, thank you.”

Chubuike’s Christian name must be Justice. I like Chubuike better. I am surprised he knows English. He doesn’t go to my school, so I thought he was from the village or visiting from another city. He probably goes to the boys-only school outside town that Ivan attends, but I can’t ask. He’s older and male and an outsider and good looking, each of which alone would have been enough to cut me off, but all together make it inconceivable. Ivan is also handsome, but more approachable because our families know each other. I’ve been to his house, read his Batman comic books, eaten his mother’s cooking. So his angular good looks aren’t as intimidating as Chubuike’s long-limbed grace.

Ivan turns to me and Simi, “We ah going to split de court and practice, ok? You and Simi take de left side.”

I adjust my hated new glasses and run onto the court. I have argued futilely with my parents that I don’t need them, but they are insistent that I do. This morning, Amma sat me down and pointed to the mango trees to the left of our garage.

“Do you see our oldest tree? Do you see its leaves?” she asks. She’s wearing a blue chiffon sari and smells like Oil of Olay.

“Yes,” I say, impatient because I know this is going to be a lecture.

“If you didn’t have your glasses, you wouldn’t be able to see each leaf, how the wind slips through them, making them tremble.”

But I know that the leaves are there. Do I need to see their shape, their very veins?

The gymnasium in Nsukka has the tallest ceilings I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I imagine there could be clouds above the distant and rusting light fixtures. Chubuike is on my side of the badminton net, alternately lobbing and smashing the shuttlecock at Ivan. Simi and I are practising more conservatively, volleying back and forth, but there’s a reason Ivan lets us play with him every evening after school, even though he’s a teenager and we’re barely into double digits. We’ve been playing tennis and badminton from the time we could hold rackets, so we’re both solid players and can hold our own.

When we start playing for points, I am glad to be on Chubuike’s team. He’s a little harder to play with than Ivan because he’s erratic, but he’s also fun to watch. And he doesn’t get angry the way Ivan does when someone does something wrong. At the end of the game, though we have lost, he turns to me and smiles his limpid, vivid smile.

“Good, nneh,” he says. “Good.”

The next few days open and close dim with dust. Each time I get home, I slather Vaseline on my lips and take my pinafore to the back porch to shake it out. The leaves on the banana trees look dead, covered as they are with dust. The vegetable garden is faded. As I snap my uniform in the wind, there is little to distinguish the particles flying off the fabric from those in the air. But there’s no time to waste. There’s no assurance that he’ll be there, but I have to go. I hang up my uniform, and blink all the way to the gymnasium.

At the gym, Chubuike is restless and distracted. The sky has been heavy the entire day, but still no rain has come. We play a half-hearted game of badminton before we are ousted by a raucous group of university students.

Outside the gymnasium, the air is cool, and Ivan and Simi slip into the tiny public library in the back of the building. My mother’s white Peugeot is parked outside over some flattened weeds. The University of Nigeria has allotted a tiny room for a children’s library in the back of the gymnasium, big enough to hold a few hundred books and half a dozen kids at a time. The books have been donated by American libraries, thanks to families in Nsukka with ties to the US. My mother is helping manage the new library’s collection. Nancy Drew and the American heroines of Judy Blume have added to my British Enid Blyton addiction. I wonder if there’s been a new shipment.

Chubuike stands beside me at the front of the gymnasium, and we watch the clouds come together, a pall falling. He jumps down the stairs and starts down a path that leads towards the children’s playground. I follow him. The path is so twisted and overgrown that by the time we reach the park, no one can see us though we’re not far away. At the entrance, he turns and looks at me, and then pushes open the little gate and goes inside. I hesitate at a crackle of thunder, and then enter as well.

The children’s playground has a slide, some swings, a sandbox, a small jungle gym, and a roundabout. Chubuike is scaling the jungle gym. He’s wearing what most of the boys wear, shorts and a button-up shirt. I’m wearing a bright printed dress that my mother sewed for me. It’s long enough to play badminton in, but not suitable for climbing. I put one foot on the roundabout and start spinning it with my other foot, holding a bright cold metal bar with one hand. The wind whips my hair around my head, and I close my eyes, enjoying the lurching inside my body. Lightning flashes through my eyelids.

The roundabout dips heavily, and I open my eyes. Chubuike is standing in the center, balancing as we spin.

“I am leaving,” he says to me in Igbo.

I look at him bereft, but too shy to say anything out loud, in Igbo or English.

He continues in the forceful rhythmic dialect, “I know a word of eight letters. If you divide it, half will make you happy. Half will make you cry.”

I cannot take my eyes off his face, sharp jaw, red and mobile tongue. His body surfs the motion of the roundabout. It’s slowing and I give the hard earth another kick to keep it spinning. He wavers and catches his balance by spreading thin muscled arms.

He switches to English, the slow deliberate way we all speak, “I give you dis wod, dis name of eight lettahs… Beatrice.”

He gets off the roundabout and leaps over the gate, dissolving into the damp. The rain comes then, huge chilling drops of water. Puffs of red dust pounce upward with each stabbing raindrop. Within minutes, the drops coalesce into sheets, like being under a waterfall. I spin ever more slowly into the storm.

Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. Her coffee table book of travel photographs and poems, The Long Way Home, was published by Ogro Bangladesh in 2013. The Lovers and the Leavers, is her first book of fiction, a collection of linked stories, photographs, and poems (Bengal Lights Books 2014, HarperCollins India 2015). Her memoir, Olive Witch, is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in 2016. See more at olivewitch.com.