These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  “Light? Light, tell me.”

  I answer that I do not need the light, and that—yes—he can switch off the single bulb glowing in the corner of the room. The light bulb goes off, and darkness falls. A traveling troupe of singing mosquitoes descends on me, singing ominous tunes in my ears as I feel a tiny needle-pinch on my right foot. I rub the sore spot with my other foot, tuck both away under the blanket Geetha offered me, adjust the sack of clothes that is my pillow, and try to make myself as comfortable on this single wrapper as I possibly can. Kutti had told me earlier in the day that he wakes up at 6:30 a.m. every day to prepare his children for school, and that we’ll need to get up early to have a bath. As I imagine what that might look like, the thought occurs to me: what am I doing here? Why am I sleeping on a cement floor, with seven other humans, in a hundred-square-foot, fifty-year-old shack—one of many homes in a cramped Indian slum? What am I looking for? Is this what Bàbá meant when he invited me to become lost in order to find my way? And will I find any hushes for the ritual?

  Are Lali and Alethea safe?

  Will something deadly come through that old rotten wooden door?

  Before you were born, while you roiled the insides of my belly, your father and I decided we were not “bringing you into the world” … it just wasn’t the right metaphor for how we wanted to hold you. That sounded like you were not of this earth, and that you were coming through parting clouds, descending from the naive into the real. You were more real to us than a hovering ghost or a visiting messiah. So we learned to say that you were coming out of the earth (not into it), that you were the domino effect of many parents—including animal and plant parents, and that you were a gift to us.

  You are wise, not a tabula rasa. You have the royalty of mountains, the determination of swooping hawks, the experience of bursting pollen, and the joy of opening flowers written into your bones. This is the reason we said, once you were born, once your jelly father held you in his hands, and once I breathed in your face, that we would follow you just as much as we wanted to instruct you. That we would listen to your questions not merely as things you didn’t know but as clues about what we also might need to unlearn. This has been our journey—to follow a child like the disciples of a rabbi follow hard behind the sandals of their master. And the questions you ask! Oh, how delightful! How surprising!

  One day, we are preparing to take you out to see your Bama down the street, for fellowship. You are dressed just the way I like. Yes, I admit I often treat you like a doll I didn’t have growing up—a point your father never fails to remind me of. The shiny black shoes. The little jeans. The bow on your cornrowed hair. The bangles on your hand. And the oversize plastic glasses on your face. With that dimpled smile your father bequeathed you. You are my angel.

  We are leaving behind your father at work, writing his letters to you. I’m dressed and ready to go. I walk to the opened door, but you are not there. As I turn from the door to call you, I see you right by me: there you are, standing with a big smile, holding on to my leg. You say, “I want to make kaka!” “Kaka” is, of course, how we have learned to say that you want to shit. “Susu” is how we say you want to piss. We walk over into the toilet and I put you up to sit. I leave to the kitchen to sort out something and let you do your business—you like to be left alone until you need me again. I return moments later to clean you and pick you up. As I wash you up, you ask a question: “Where does all the kaka and susu go after I use the toilet and flush it?”

  I call on your father, and he rushes out to hear me relate everything that has just happened. When I’m done, he takes a pen and writes the question on a yellow piece of paper stuck to the toilet door. We have many papers stuck on many things in our little house. He writes your question and today’s date. And then we both turn to you, staring at you, you—blushing like you’ve just broken one of the seals in the Book of Revelation. “How about we find out together, love?” your father asks, smiling. You nod an adorable yes. A new adventure opens up to us—to follow the enchanted trail of shit and piss. To know a world that is more magical than we, educated and princely, ever knew was possible. To listen to one who came out of the earth, who still remembers faintly her melodious tunes.

  Letter 2

  Consider Leviathan

  We live in the orbit … of things that exceed us.

  Alethea,

  I wave my sister-in-law, your aunt Ifeoma, good-bye. She reciprocates by chuckling, shaking her head as she rides away on her Honda scooter. She must think I’m mad.

  Ifeoma’s laughter is taunting and, at some unexplored depth, troubling to me. At this point, left alone at the gateless entrance to an expansive slum of more than a hundred families, with women bearing colorful plastic jugs of water on their hips casting eyes on the dark-skinned stranger in their midst, I feel a bit abandoned. Marooned on an island, albeit one of my own making.

  On the way here, Ifeoma had asked me a question I had asked myself over and over again in the weeks preceding my journey.

  “So … why are you going to this slum?”

  I still had no complete answer—just a rambling stretch of tangential remarks about fatherhood, about finding beauty in the most unexpected places, and thinking about home in new ways. I had assured her that all was well. That there were elements to this that I did not fully understand. I did not tell her about the hushes, or Bàbá’s talk about getting lost in order to find one’s way, or what I had—three years ago—whispered to the hush that sat motionless on my outstretched palm. I did not fully elaborate on the peculiar feeling I had that this was an adventure I needed to embark upon—a prayer quest. I did not tell her about your grandfather’s lingering absence, the traces of a revenant whose footfalls are a strain in my life’s leitmotif. Soon after my half-intelligible commentary had melted into the buzzing, beeping, and whooshing sounds of Chennai’s hetero-vehicular road users, I thought of you, dear Alethea. It’s how I ground myself in what needs to be done.

  I thought of your dimpled smile.

  Your impassioned arguments correlating the sincerity of our love for you and your access to chocolate.

  The way your mouth gradually stretched open for you to cry a few seconds before any actual sound came out.

  The way you screamed “I can do it myself” when I wanted to help you to the toilet to pee—a thunderbolt of self-assertion at such a precious age—only for you to come back seconds after, not a bit crestfallen or embarrassed, asking me to help you with unzipping your little skirt.

  Your manner of chastising me—“Dada, you are being very rude!”—while your little head swiveled from side to side. And the way you apparently forgave me when I apologized for being naughty—with wordless silence, followed by a redeeming kiss planted on the side of my neck.

  I thought of mama, her belly already bulging with your sister- or brother-to-come (“sister, brother, and puppy!” you always insisted, squeezing your face into a disapproving scowl). I thought of her angelic face, the pronounced curliness of her mixed-race hair, and how—even now—I still marvel that I had been so favored to be embraced by someone with her beauty.

  You are now three years old—inching closer to your fourth year in a few months. You are looking more and more like your mother—your perfectly round head stretching out to accommodate the nuances of her chiseled facial features … a development I am more than grateful for.

  I miss you. Already. I feel this weight of longing as I stand here at the threshold of madness. I want to hold you up in the air and watch you do the “super girl”—your eyes aglitter, your arms pulled out in front of you, and your excited voice screaming “Aga-a-ain!” after we both crash-land into your mildly irritated mother. This is why I am here, and why I leave your mama, my Lali, and your sister-brother-puppy with you for a while: so that even when my bones are too old to hold you up, we can both rest in the knowing that my arms would no longer be needed, neither would your mama’s, because you’ll be flying without them.

  With
eyes that do not blink, I see Bàbá—standing there, motionless—a phantom emissary of something-yet-to-be-done. He smiles. Ten hushes, he says. Find them. They will teach you how to pray for your daughter. Then you will find your way. Where do I begin? I am confused. Can they tell—these delighted kids laughing and staring at me? Can they see my nakedness and naïveté through the embroidery and ornateness of my invisible Researcher’s Clothes?

  Kutti is lying down on a spread of clothes when we step into his home. It is a sunny Wednesday afternoon. I say “we” because a friend of the family, Velu, has joined me. We had spoken earlier about my feckless attempts at understanding Tamil: I had confessed to him then that I didn’t even speak my own language, Yoruba … a detail I had in times past—to my chagrin—brandished to others as one would flaunt a peculiar body quirk just to arouse sympathy or (in most cases) to cover for the fact that I was poor at making conversation. Velu offered then to help translate Kutti’s words for me, an offer that came with the silent caveat of Velu’s own poor command of the one-tongue.

  Kutti scrambles to his feet, wipes his eyes, scrunches the wrappers that serve as his bed, and greets us. With a sleepy smile, he asks us to take our seats. The challenge is finding where to do it: there are two wooden chairs—occupied with wrappers—facing a mattress-less wooden bed that takes up a third of the entire living space. Velu, apparently quite familiar with these circumstances, sits on Kutti’s bed like it’s nothing. I remind myself that in India—at least these parts of South India where your mother comes from—the common courtesies I was raised to observe back in Nigeria are not recognized. You could walk into another’s house for the first time and make your way to the bedroom, without so much as a hello thrown along your merry way. I have often wandered past our neighbor’s apartment, her door flung open, with all the goings-on in full view of passers-by. Me? I grew up behind closed doors, and was trained in the high art of landing a good knock on the door. Where there’s no bell to ring, three taps, four well-spaced sighs, and—if still no response—three taps. Or maybe two. Just in case you are not wanted. The point is that I grew up with a fairly rigid sense of privacy—a very Victorian sensibility about where my space begins and where yours ends—tempered only by some sentimental account of the goodness of African hospitality.

  In Kutti’s shack, I quickly learn, there is literally no time or space for such frivolities. Space is performed differently here, not as a limited resource or a private chamber for one’s own air supply. Everything bleeds into everything else, and in this scandalous perversion of boundaries, politeness is often fatuous. Well, I won’t be asked twice: I move the items on the chairs to a side, and make myself as comfortable as I can.

  Though this is my third time visiting Kutti and his wife, Geetha, I will be staying here for the first time tonight. I had asked him if I could stay over a week ago, and though I couldn’t make out what he had said prior to a friend translating his response, the way he threw his hands and smiled felt like he was saying “Please come! Why even bother asking?”

  So I look around, taking it all in. Looking for insight. Looking to be spoken to. Trying to force a question or two from the way the objects are arranged, the way dust lingers beneath my now unshod feet. I notice that the rough and uneven walls are constructed with red bricks, their earthen hues seeping through the aqua-green emulsion that pretends to cover them away. I run my fingers lightly across the gritty surface of the wall behind me, as if to entice it out of its stony silence. As if to reduce its empirical vagaries into the reliability of words, sentences, and story. As if to tickle out an epiphany.

  Farther into the room, on an asymmetric shelf designed with painted stone slabs—embedded into the largest wall—an incredible diversity of items sits frozen in dust behind thick sinewy spider webs. A small television set in the far corner of one of the cluttered compartments of the shelf harks back to the questionable policies of a previous Tamil Nadu government, which had—in its efforts to alleviate extreme poverty—embarked on a scheme to distribute free fourteen-inch television sets across the state. What do you think, dear? Does this not create nail-biting window-shoppers out of these people, who must now treat every flashy ad that blazes across their screens as a capitalist indictment of their precarity? It is unclear to me how the television helps Geetha sweep the floors, bathe her children, or tend to Kutti’s mother, who lives in an even smaller box a few feet away. And yet, am I too quick to reduce these people to victims? To strip them down to some kind of basic (and necessary) subsistence, and thus denying them the frivolity and complexity I allow myself?

  Five feet above, a tiny fan with short thumb-like blades spins rapidly, every hectic revolution jolting the rod that connects it to a bamboo stick, which in turn acts as a support beam for the asbestos sheets that are both roof and ceiling. Broomsticks and wooden canes stick out from the dips of the undulating sheets. In a corner of the room, a dirty worn-out cricket bat rests against the wall.

  My gaze slides to a framed painting of young deity Krishna with an older woman. Nesting close to their blue-skinned nobility is a framed picture of Kutti and Geetha, which opens into the tiny space that is the kitchen. There’s an oxblood fridge in there, a gas cooker connected to an orange gas cylinder, a stone slab upon which rest endless stacks of steel pots, tiny plastic containers, a bunch of bright yellow bananas, and rusty cooking utensils of every tribe and shape mounted on a wall holder. The kitchen ceiling hangs so low that I hit my head on its fan when Geetha invites me to survey the place. As I retake my seat next to Kutti and Velu, she generously offers me drinking water in a dented steel cup. I thank her and take a sip. The water tastes like something. Water shouldn’t do that.

  I am taunting myself, querying my motives, second-guessing the appropriateness of my very presence, even as the scribe within scours every material surface, every turn of texture, every whiff of feeling for story. For meaning. For a hush. I feel like an extraterrestrial prospector, looking for a new home, inspecting the ruins of a forsaken planet, probing it for life—for signs that it can support my narrative.

  And yet—as elitist as that sounds—I question if I am even doing it “properly.” If I were employing traditional qualitative research modalities—especially of the phenomenological kind—I might have articulated guiding interview questions to orient myself in the “field,” to help me know what to look for, and when to know I am saturated with enough responses and insights that it feels safe to leave. I’d have come up with a list of things to explore, and taken recorded audio memo notes of my observations—just as I did when I visited Bàbá. But this isn’t “research” in that sense; this is a coddiwompling, stumbling into things. Into the throbbing heart of a stranger’s world.

  I keep trying to recall why I am here, as if to find myself again and again in my mirror: to learn how Kutti, his wife, Geetha, and their two children are making a home between the cavities of the normative; to find wholly new ways of thinking about home by seeking out what troubles our present visions and practices of home-making; to find the beauty in Kutti’s life where it might be easier to merely conclude that he and his family are the poorest of the poor—and the only proper response is therefore charity; and to pray for the world you will live in when I am no longer there to care for and protect you. But my clarity of purpose also accentuates my feelings of helplessness—I do not know how to make any of these happen, and I wonder if I am not using this family, exploiting my status as a foreigner, and interrupting their everyday practices of getting by with my project of promise-keeping.

  Reassuring myself that I had previously asked that none of my academic credentials be shared, and that they know that I am more than willing and happy to do household chores or help in any way—if only to be briefly woven into the embroidery of their life—I “return,” as it were, to the quiet shuffling of feet, the irritating persistence of a scourge of dangling mosquitoes, the clanging of pots and steel containers just a few feet away, the rapid-fire Tamil conversation that is alr
eady underway between Velu and Kutti … and now, the smiling faces of children and their mothers peeking through the door to catch a glimpse of the black foreigner that is visiting.

  I catch Velu’s attention and indicate that I’d like to say something to Kutti, who is now sitting on the wooden bed next to Velu, smiling and nodding his head excitedly. “Teach me how you live. Tell me how you spend your day,” I ask Velu’s Kutti—acutely aware that reporting one’s life as if it were a simple narrative stream flowing from one end to another is a tall order. And yet we dive—into welcoming waters.

  An auto-rickshaw driver for most of the night, Kutti is a handsome little man with ear studs, a thick mustache and a generous mouche under his lip, so that if you squinted his mouth would look like a parenthetical remark. And true to form, he offers more smiles than words, partly due to the fact that his mouth always seems to be busy, his teeth reddened and words muffled by his fondness for paan—a mixture of heart-shaped betel leaves, tobacco, areca nuts, coconut shavings, and other ingredients. I have only known him a short while, but this much I know: Kutti loves chewing paan—a vocation shared by the boisterous population of Chennai, if the red splatter marks strewn across the city’s streets are anything to go by. At the entrance of his home the spat-out mucousy residue of his chomping and chewing glistens in the glare of the sun … close to my flip-flops.

  Kutti offers a few words in response to my questions. He tells me about his love for his children and his wife, how old his home is, and how he wants for nothing more than what he earns every week—no more than three hundred rupees, with a third of that more than enough to put dosa, idly (rice cakes), and some Samba rice on the floor. I am finding this hard to believe, but Kutti smiles, insisting that it’s enough—and when he can’t eat, when death seems close because of some sickness, he is ready to walk into a mist too thick for an accompanying other. He doesn’t seek a “better” home, and even when he agrees with the general consensus that he is “poor,” he doesn’t consider himself a victim of giant monolithic power structures.