Stranger In Lagos

ENIOLA I don’t remember when I started seeing Eyitope again. For a huge part of my childhood, she was there in my dreams, even after we left Lagos. Sometimes, she was there when I opened my eyes at night. I was scared at first, but when I saw that she was harmless, I got used to her. She had a habit of disappearing for long periods, even years, and then appearing again. Starting with my dreams, and then anywhere else she wanted to make her presence felt. She refused to go, and I got used to her being there. You know the thing they say about twins, how they are one soul split in two. When I first mentioned to Mommy that I always saw Eyitope, it was at Grandma’s place in Osogbo. There, we were not allowed to converse in English, so I strung together my weak Yoruba and complained about Eyitope’s frequent visits. Grandma, frying groundnuts under the morning sun that morning, stopped what she was doing and cast her eyes on me. Mommy also stopped her laundry activity. “Will you shut your dirty mouth!” she scolded. “Aren’t you tired of your mischief?” Grandma laughed. “She is Taiye and all Taiyes are mischievous,” she pointed out. She was chewing some of the fried groundnuts. As usual, bits of it flew out of her mouth through the gaping holes in her dentition. I was repulsed by her ways, remembering how my other grandma was so refined. “Your sister is dead,” Mommy made clear. “You are seeing nothing. It’s all in your imagination.” “Her sister is not dead,” countered Grandma with a full mouth. “Dead? Twins don’t die. Never say that. Kehinde is not dead. She has traveled.” Mommy was a zealous Christian then, as she is now. She didn’t want to put up with what she called Grandma’s dirty superstitions, and she certainly didn’t want me being fed any of it. She sent me into the house with a warning never to bring up any talk of Tope again. I went into Grandma’s tiny, hardly-ever-used kitchen and pressed my ear to the door to listen in on both women. “You know Kehinde will not leave that girl alone,” Grandma stressed. “Didn’t I tell you to bring them so that I’ll take them to the Ifa shrine here to have them dedicated to the Orisha god of twins, but you refused? You said your pastor said it was evil. Yet that pastor could not cast out the evil spirits following them. They took our dear Kehinde away, and now, she’s calling her sister to join her on a very long journey. Hmmm…Tolulope!” I imagined Grandma pulling her age-worn ear as a warning to Mommy. “Tolulope! You better go and beg the gods. Appease them so that they can protect Taiye! Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.” Days later, I was taken to an Ifa shrine by Grandma when Mommy traveled to Abeokuta to see Daddy. I cried when the babalawo made incantations over my head and marked certain parts of my body with a blade. He called for an artisan who carved a small effigy as a substitute for Eyitope’s soul. The effigy was brought to the house on the day Mommy returned from Abeokuta. When Grandma told her what had happened in her absence, she went berserk and refused to speak to the old woman for a while. Later on, she dragged me to a pastor who performed an exorcism on me. To me, he was no different from the babalawo. His ritualistic prayers were as disturbing. I fell ill, following that long, harrowing week, but it was good to know that Eyitope disappeared for a bit. I didn’t think my tired little self could handle any more stress. When she reappeared again more than a year after, I was by then, grown and smart enough to know how powerful a person’s imagination could be. But Mommy insisted it was a spiritual problem that needed to be handled. Her pastor said I had a demon. It was taking the form of Eyitope to haunt me. Its aim was to render me useless. Thus began my nightmares. I was taken for several deliverance services, from one church to another, to all sorts of prophets. Some said Aunty Ada was responsible. Others blamed my village people. A couple of them believed I was tormented by a marine spirit. One of them was a prophet who scared me by the way he looked at me whenever Mommy wasn’t paying attention. At that time, I had started to bud breasts, and my figure was too adult for my age. The prophet insisted that I had to spend a week in the church alone with him and his team of prophets in training to cast out the marine spirit from me. Mommy, as usual, was fine with it. I was left in the man’s care. During the day, the other people and I who lived in the church compound prayed with the prophet and his team. At night, he came to me in the vestry and sexually molested me. This went on for four nights. On the fifth, I ran off, finding my way home. When he discovered I was gone, he called the house and told Mommy I had run away. She began a frantic search for me. It was while she went searching that I snuck back to my bed at home and locked myself in. By morning, Mommy was home, devastated. It was her wailing that woke me up. I unlocked the door and came out to the living room. When she recovered from the shock of seeing me there with her, she got a cane and whipped me until Lekan stopped her. I was sent back to the prophet, bruised and traumatized. An extra day was added to my deliverance period. He kept molesting me. He had no solution to my problem.