With feathers in his throat, Baba Ngani Agba opens the morning. In that record,
he and his apala band sing about kindreds. The music wafts sonorously from our
old Kenwood speaker my father inherited from his uncle. My father, with a broom,
clears cobwebs from the edges of the living room. At the end of the requiem, a loop
of birdsongs. Then silence. I go outside and stretch. Smoke rises from someone’s
house and I tell that the goat that ate our maize has finally met fire. I walk to the
back of the house and our goat is there, sitting, waiting. Teslim and his father return
from Eid in their shiny orange Up Nepa. My irreligious father is still singing inside.
Today, we pack ourselves in his golden Opel car and go to Ìjẹ̀bú. Today, I will see
my grandfather’s grave again and my father will tell me how he was full of flowers,
how he met a strange sickness on a fateful morning as he returned from mosque, how
they brought music to him at home, on his sickbed—gángan, àlùmólẹ̀ atì omele, and
a band of singers waiting for him to begin with wisdom. He will tell me how he sits
among them, transcribing music as life seeps from his father’s faint body one syllable
at a time. Today, we will arrive at Oke-Agbo safely, and I will run to the arena to
watch goats fight. They will come to look for me and find me. I will not be missing.