Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [93]
Well, the men went out looking. Even sent messages to the neighbouring villages asking after him. For days people searched the neighbourhood, and whenever they crossed paths would say to each other: ‘Have you seen Baba?’ And after many months and years the question became simply: ‘Baba?’ And then there came a time when the other began to answer in jest, as if to say, I am very well thank you: ‘Tunde.’
So this man’s name became detached from him and used for all sorts of other things. And in the end he stopped being whoever he had once been and became all the things they said about him.
Ya Sallay laughed when she told me this story. But I didn’t laugh. Rather I worried for Babatunde. I didn’t care that he was a scoundrel. I felt sorry. I wondered where he was and what had become of him. I thought about him living far away, among strangers, without his name, not knowing who he was any more.
Once I went to live among strangers and I learned what it was like to lose yourself. To feel the fragments flying off you. As if your soul has unhitched itself from your body and is flying away on a piece of string like a balloon. Lost in the clouds. You think, I only have to catch the end of the string. But though it hovers within sight, you cannot grasp it. You try and try. And then there comes a time when you are too tired. You no longer care. So you say: ‘Let it go. Let me just fall down here on the soft grass and go to sleep.’
I left home on the day our new President ordered everybody to drive on the opposite side of the road. In the crowded bus there was panic, because every time we looked up a car was hurtling towards us on the same side of the road. Unwary pedestrians stepped in front of vehicles. Drivers honked their horns. Cars swerved around each other. Our driver drove too close to the verge, skimming the wooden stalls. And when the bus reached the stop we all had to climb down into the traffic, because now the passenger door was on the wrong side.
By the time I reached the quay all I could think was how glad I was to be leaving. I showed my ticket, paid for by the Christian Mission who had given me a scholarship to study in England, to the man in a buttoned uniform who stood at the end of the gangplank. As the ship sailed off into the silence, some of the passengers, the Africans who had never left home before, gathered on the deck to wave goodbye to everything we were leaving behind. The sea swelled up and the sky stretched downwards. In front of our eyes the city disappeared and the coast shrivelled into a wavy line. And all of us saw how small our country really was.
A girl on her way to the United States boasted she would soon be seeing the cowboys and indians for herself. Foolish girl! Still I said nothing because although I knew in England women no longer wore bustles and carried parasols, there were no horse-drawn carriages or steam trains, no hot-air balloons, and no white rabbits with fob watches — I could not imagine what I was going to.
In England the air was flat and colourless; sharp to breathe like broken glass. The pavements came up hard and struck the soles of my feet. The people walked fast, but spoke quietly. And skimmed past, never touching each other. Everybody went about and minded their own business. Even when they spoke to you, they seemed always to be looking at something outside the window or on the other side of the room.
In the hostel where I stayed we lived in rooms on top of each other and next to each other. Names on the doors: Bidwell, Holt, Pichette, Clowes, Schenck, Buchan, Bersvendsen, Wilkinson. And I saw that was how people lived all over the land. Like colonies of the blind. On top of each other and next to each other, but without ever seeing each other.
A girl from Ghana was assigned to help me settle in. Emma. Without her I would have been lost straight away. I liked her. I wished she had been there for longer. Maybe, if she had, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. She would never have let