The sensation of being in the tailor’s shop was, even in those circumstances, pleasant. I liked the smell of new cloth and, for me, the intimate wonder of getting measured for clothes was like that of getting your hair cut, or feeling the warm back of the doctor’s hand nestled against your throat as he checked your temperature. These were the rare cases in which you gave permission to a stranger to enter your personal space. You trusted the expertise proffered, and enjoyed the promise that the opaque maneuvers of this stranger’s hands would yield a result. The tailor, simply by doing his job that day, comforted me.
The funeral took place on a sunny day, in the afternoon, not on a rainy morning, not in wretched weather, as I suppose I expected funerals to be, as I still expect them to be. I recall now that Mahler, buried in Grinzing in 1911, was given the kind of quiet, private funeral he wanted, no speeches by the graveside, no religious readings, no florid poetry on the gravestone, just the name, Gustav Mahler. And, fittingly, it rained all through it until, as Bruno Walter tells it, the body was interred and the sun came out.
My father was buried on a particularly hot day, an unfunereal day. My new clothes, which were dark blue, not black, chafed, at the neck especially, and standing outside in the heat made me especially aware of the discomfort. The crowd jostling at Atan Cemetery was large, a somber crowd but, on account of its size, not without a touch of festivity. Many of the people present seemed to be friends and business associates of my grandfather, who was active in politics. Many of them had traveled from Ijebu-Ile and other towns in Ogun State to show their respects for my grandfather, who, though he held no formal political office at that time, had been a state commissioner in the seventies, and was still widely viewed as a kingmaker and power broker.
My experience of death was limited, less than limited. No one I knew well had died. But, as my father was interred that afternoon, I thought of someone else who had died, or had probably died. She was a young girl, around my age, I guessed. I was in the front seat, being driven to school, when the driver knocked her down. It happened in a poor neighborhood, probably her neighborhood, or near it, if she was walking to school. The girl was about eight or nine, and was dressed in a school uniform, which I distinctly remember was a pale lime green dress. I remember well that we’d seen her cross in front of the car once, in stalled traffic, a skinny girl, though not unhealthily so, merely gangly. Then she crossed again, and we hit her. The situation, our situation, was dangerous for a minute, as some men from the neighborhood appeared. The driver was dragged out of the car, after he hesitated awhile behind his wheel, and at first it seemed he would be beaten up. But then, perhaps suddenly realizing how grave his situation was, he was all business, clearing the area, carrying the child and putting her in the backseat. She was conscious but mute. We drove her to a hospital nearby, going so recklessly fast that we’d have hit another child if there’d been one in the way. The driver sweated, though it was a cool harmattan morning. The hospital was, or had until recently been, a residential house, now converted, with a neon cross placed outside it on the street. The girl was unconscious by this time, and I had a feeling, a feeling of certainty that even now I cannot explain, that she hadn’t merely fallen asleep or become comatose, but that she’d died. The driver, in a state of great agitation, carried her into the hospital. Please save me, I remember him repeating, to the nurses who had rushed outside to meet us. I remained in the car. I don’t remember it being a long wait, twenty minutes, maybe, after which he came out, solemn, and we continued our drive to school in silence.
I didn’t think about the little girl later that day, or the day afterward, or at any time at all afterward, I didn’t talk about her to my parents or to anyone else. The driver did not mention the episode either. She came back to mind only four or five years later, at my father’s funeral, at the graveside as the priest said prayers over his coffin, and I began to think in a general way about death. By then it was as though the little girl in the pale green school uniform, dead on a cool morning, a funereal morning, was something I had dreamed about, or heard in a telling by someone else.
After the burial, there had been a party at home. It wasn’t the large, buoyant party there might have been had father died at seventy-five, nor was it the entirely joyless ritual of frying akara that would have been the case had he died at forty. My father had died at forty-nine, and he’d been successful by the important standards: a good career as an engineer, a wife and son, a fine house. And so, there was a party, to celebrate his life, and lunch was cooked for the few dozen members of the family, and close friends, professional associates, members of the church, and neighbors, but colors were somber, there was no live music, and there was no alcohol. People sat in the living room, and outside under the rented canopy.
Some of the guests had brought young children, and the children ran around the tables, laughing, while the adults spoke in low tones and commiserated with each other. Memory fails me, but I believe that, for most of that afternoon, my mother was alone in her room, and my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle, received most of the guests. I had a role to play, my aunt had told me, and so I was to remain in the airless living room, too, uncomfortable in my scratchy buba and sokoto, and be as polite as possible to the many old men and women who insisted that I surely recognized them, who, in trying to comfort me, the orphan, invented in their heads a relationship with me that had little basis in reality, and that did not extend beyond that occasion in any meaningful way. From many of them, I heard reiterated the idea that I was to take care of my mother, that I was to become the man of the house now, which struck me even then as an unhelpful commonplace.
The children, for some reason hard to control that day, got increasingly boisterous, and when, in the middle of a chase, one of them reached out a hand and accidentally overturned a serving charger full of jollof rice onto the concrete floor, three of the others fell into a laughing fit. No amount of shushing or threats was sufficient to make them stop, and their laughter rose and bubbled across the somber gathering, causing deep embarrassment to their livid parents. Once or twice, the sound subsided, but then one of them would begin again, and the other three would not be able to resist joining in, and their raucous, heaving laughter went on for minutes. One of the houseboys was instructed to take them to the back of the house, from which, for at least another five minutes, we could hear them chuckling as though possessed. This incident caused the assembled adults obvious discomfort, but it amused me, and it is impossible for me, even now, to think of the events of that day, wreathed as they were in sorrow, without feeling a certain gratitude to those children, all younger than eight, who fell under the momentary spell of mirth and let air into a room that the rites of death had been asphyxiating.