The Beginning – Radha Zutshi Opubor

I was born before the Beginning.

I remember.

I remember my father’s house. Low to the ground and solid with a thick iron door: I never felt safer than when I peered out into the stormy night from behind my window bars. I remember the plants, and the mirrors, the tele… television (the word takes too long to come to me now), and shelf upon shelf of books. I remember how they smelled, their weight in my hands. I remember.

I remember my school uniform, the green blouse and plaid skirt of which my mother was so proud. I remember my satchel and my sandals, stained with sand. I remember skipping over puddles as I walked to school with the neighbour’s son, to see who could jump the farthest. He never beat me.

My father was a teacher, I remember. He wore the ugliest ties, but it made his students laugh and that was all that mattered. My mother loved those ties, but she told him she hated them, laughing. I wonder if they ever think about me. I hope they don’t.

I remember the heat in the harmattan, when clouds of dust choked the sky. I remember the sweat as it dripped down my forehead, the blood as it gushed from my nose. I remember the too-expensive mask my mother strapped over my face every morning before school, and I remember also the way she cried when it was stolen, her long brown fingers covering every inch of her face. There was never another mask and even now I remember the way the air fought me as I forced it into my lungs, the way it settled there and never left. There was no more skipping over puddles after that. Every step, I carried a stone in my chest. The puddles were larger by then, and deeper. The Beginning was coming, although I didn’t know it yet.

I remember the leavers. Not too many, at first, then more and more. The Adeyinkas, the Robertsons, the Ofuokwus, all gone. Lagos is an island, they said. You can bury your head in the sand if you like, but this is an island.

Stores shuttered and moved to the mainland, where they built taller and taller towers, grasping for the sun like the most invasive weeds, strangling the plants below. I was eleven when whole neighbourhoods flooded and began to be deemed uninhabitable, when criminals and wanderers moved into apartments that had once been inhabited by millionaires. My father drove me home after that.

I remember the sun and the wind and the sand that crept up on the city. I remember when the grass in the roundabouts died and never recovered. I remember the inhaler I was forced to carry, and the humidifiers we kept in the house, and the drought that lasted so long food became something we could not afford. But the thing I remember most clearly, the thing I began to see in my dreams, was the rain.

Of course, I remember the rain. How could I not? I remember the drizzle, shockingly cold, that dripped off my ears as I trekked to school, leaving me shivering. I remember the sun showers, warm like a bath, and the rainbows they’d cast in the sky. And I remember the storms. I’d wake up in the night to the sound of thunder, then run to my window as the lightning burned the city white, and I’d see.

The road was a river and the river was the road, I remember. The water was dark and deep and fast-flowing, carrying bicycles and vegetables and the anti-flooding sand bags the government provided. I remember the flood-proof door my father installed, and I remember sweeping water out of the house when it failed. I remember the drowned chickens and lizards and cockroaches and stray cats and birds I would find when the waters finally receded. I remember the trench near the salon my mother owned, how the water would rage and overflow, churning and brown. I remember my mother’s salon after a storm, wet and broken. I was fourteen then. I knew it could not be salvaged.

Did my father know the Beginning was coming? In my own selfish way, I hope he did not. What I do remember is:

This is impossible! and, You couldn’t be more obstinate if you tried.

I remember, We cannot abandon our city and, My father built this house!

He died in this house, and so will you.

Go then, but you cannot come back to this place. I remember, You will not take my child!

I remember, But she will drown!

I remember a long silence. And then I remember that my mother left and did not come back again.

I remember when my father’s school closed down. It was a private school, and there were no more children who could afford to attend it. They had gone to Europe or America or farther inland, and they would not be coming back. My father, who loved literature almost as much as he loved me, began flood-proofing houses. He sold his ugly ties, or maybe he threw them away. All I remember is that I missed them. It took longer for my school to close, but as the roads flooded and the rains came and the sun burned, it was determined that most schools on the island should shut for an indeterminate period of time. I remember my green shirt and plaid skirt sitting forlorn in my closet.

I remember the neighbour’s son, Wole, as he gravely shook my hand. His family was immigrating to Ghana. I’ll miss you, he said. I was sixteen then. I was a little in love with this boy, I remember. I clasped his hand in mine for a long moment.

Do you remember when we used to skip over puddles? I asked him.

Yes, he said, I always let you win.

I never saw him again.

I remember the Beginning. It is not a story I like to tell, but you have followed me this far, and I remember.

I remember the thunder as it woke me, and my father calling me to get my coat and come, and to leave the rest of my things. He had sold the car and we could not carry them. I remember stepping bare-legged into my rain boots as I ran downstairs. I remember what I saw: my father standing in the living room, up to his chest in black water. It was absurd. I stood, stunned on the staircase.

We must go, he was saying, it is all underwater and we must go. I remember his hand closing over mine. We will be all right, he said, as long as you hold on to my hand. The water was freezing cold. His hand was shaking. Then he opened the door.

A wave of water flooded into the house and smacked me full in the chest. I struggled to catch my breath as my feet left the floor. Outside was pandemonium. The road was no longer a river. It was a vast ocean of oily water. People were screaming. There was a woman in the water floating face down. Then she was gone, carried away into the wet blackness. I remember my father pulling me forward as the cold rain fell like bullets on to our backs. We were up to our necks in it and I couldn’t feel my legs. It’s all right, he kept saying, we will get to the Rooftop and we will be all right. But the Rooftop Hotel, with its towers that slashed the sky, was too far away, lost in the rain and the darkness.

We won’t make it! I screamed. The current pulled my boots from my feet. My father struggled forward, relentless, yanking my arm—and then his hand was not on my hand anymore, and I was being pulled along by much stronger hands, but they were cold like death—the current was cold like death and then there was oil in my lungs and darkness all around me and I screamed, I remember, and I fought for my life—but there was nothing to fight for anymore. That was the beginning of my time here. That was the Beginning.

I can remember in this place. For a long, long time, all I could do was remember. Remember my father and mother, the storms and the floods. Remember the day that I drowned. It took me a much longer time to realise that I could imagine. Now I imagine my father lived, and that he found my mother again. I imagine a floodman fishing me from the water and going to Ghana to see Wole again. I imagine my life if my mother had said She will drown and my father had listened. Or even if he had not listened and she had taken me with her. I imagine a world where the waters had not risen and I had not died. But there is no world like that. I can only imagine it.

Radha Zutshi Opubor is a sixteen-year-old Indian-Nigerian girl who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. She has won her school’s creative writing prize and two short story contests. Radha has short stories published in sites including Chicago Literati, The Kalahari Review and Omenana. Radha’s hobbies include reading, playing rugby and baking.