Freshwater(3)

Saul had consulted with his senior brother while picking out that first name. This brother, an uncle who died before we could remember him (a shame; if anyone might have known what to do about the gates, it would have been him), was named De Obinna and he was a teacher who had traveled into those interior villages and knew the things that were practiced there. They said he belonged to the Cherubim and Seraphim church, and it seems that he did, when he died. But he was also a man who knew the songs and dances of Uwummiri, the worship that is drowned in water. All water is connected. All freshwater comes out of the mouth of a python. When Saul had the sense not to name the child after her grandmother, De Obinna stepped in and suggested the first name, the one with all the god in it. Years later, Saul told the child that the name just meant “precious,” but that translation is loose and inadequate, both correct and incomplete. The name meant, in its truest form, the egg of a python.

Before a christ-induced amnesia struck the humans, it was well known that the python was sacred, beyond reptile. It is the source of the stream, the flesh form of the god Ala, who is the earth herself, the judge and mother, the giver of law. On her lips man is born and there he spends his whole life. Ala holds the underworld replete in her womb, the dead flexing and flattening her belly, a crescent moon above her. It was taboo to kill her python, and of its egg, they would say, you cannot find it. And if you find it, they would add, you cannot touch it. For the egg of a python is the child of Ala, and the child of Ala is not, and can never be, intended for your hands.

This is the child Saul asked for, the prayer’s flesh. It is better not to even say that her first name.

We called her the Ada.



So. The Ada belonged to us and Ala and Saachi, and as the child grew, there came a time when she would not move on all fours, as most babies do. She chose instead to wriggle, slithering on her stomach, pressing herself to the floor. Saachi watched her and wondered idly if she was too fat to crawl properly, observing her tight rolls of new flesh as they wormed across the carpet. “The child crawls like a serpent,” she mentioned, on the phone to her own mother, across the Indian Ocean.

At the time, Saul ran a small clinic out of the boys’ quarters of the apartment building they lived in on Ekenna Avenue, Number Seventeen, made out of thousands of small red bricks. The Ada got a tetanus injection at that clinic after her brother, Chima, handed their little sister a piece of wood with a nail stuck in it and said, “Hit her with this.” We didn’t think she would do it so we were not concerned, but he was the firstborn and she surprised us. We bled a lot and Saul gave us the injection himself, but the Ada has no scar so perhaps this memory is not real. We did not blame the little sister, for we were fond of her. Her name was A?uli. She was the last born, the amen at the end of a prayer, always a sweet child. There was a time when she used to speak in a language no one but us could understand, being fresh as she was from the other side (but whole, not like us), so we would chatter back to her in it and translate for our body’s parents.

Early in the mornings, before Saul and Saachi were awake, the Ada (our body) used to sneak out of the apartment to visit the neighbors’ children. They taught her how to steal powdered milk and clap it to the top of her mouth with her tongue, flaking it down in bits, that baby-smell sweetness. After a few years, Saul and Saachi moved the family down the street to Number Three, which had more bedrooms and an extra bathroom. Eventually Number Seventeen was demolished and someone built another building there, a house that looked nothing like the old one, with no red brick anywhere.

But the red bricks were still standing when Saachi potty trained our body, using a potty with a blue plastic seat. The Ada was perhaps three years old, half of six, something. She walked into the bathroom where the potty was and pulled down her panties, sitting carefully because she was good at this. She was good at other things too—crying, for example, which filled her with purpose, replenished all those little crevices of empty. So when she looked up and saw a large snake curled on the tile across from the potty, the first thing our body did was scream. The python raised its head and a length of its body, the rest coiled up, scales gliding gently over themselves. It did not blink. Through its eyes Ala looked at us, and through the Ada’s eyes we looked at her—all of us looking upon each other for the first time.

We had a good scream: it was loud and used up most of our lungs. We paused only to drag in hot flurries of air for the next round. This screaming had been one of the first things Saachi noticed when our body was a baby. It became a running joke in the family: “Aiyoh, you have such a big mouth!”

Since Chima had been such a quiet child, no one had expected the Ada to be so loud. After Saachi fed Chima and bathed him, she could leave him in the playpen and he would just play, calmly, alone. When our body was six months old, Saachi took us to Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean, flying Pakistan Airlines with a layover in Karachi. The staff gave her a bassinet to put us in, but we cried with such force that Saachi slipped the Ada some chloral hydrate to make her shut up.

Back in Aba, Chima used to stare at us in awe because our body would scream any time we didn’t get what we wanted. There are limitations in the flesh that intrinsically make no sense, constraints of this world that are diametrically opposed to the freedoms we had when we used to trail along those shell-blue walls and dip in and out of bodies at will. This world was meant to bend—that’s how it had worked before our body slid through rings and walls of muscle, opened her eyes, filled her lungs with this world, and screamed our arrival. We stayed asleep, yet our presence shaped the Ada’s body and her temperament. She pulled out all the buttons on the cushions and she drew on the walls. Everyone had gotten so used to the mischief and the screaming that when the Ada was staring at the snake, frozen in fear and projecting her terror through her mouth, they paid no attention. “She just wants her own way,” they said, sitting around in the parlor, drinking bottles of Star beer. But this time, she didn’t stop. Saul frowned and exchanged a glance with his wife, concern flitting over their faces. He stood up and went to check on the child.