Tenants

You have all lived in this compound for as long as anyone can remember. Baba Segi’s father built it, Baba Segi inherited it, and you inherited Baba Segi—which is how these things work.

You know the house with an intimacy that runs deeper than memory, nearly as instinctive as a child recognizes his own mother’s face. The stream behind the fence that spills into the yard every August? It is nothing new. The moringa tree out front that scatters pale flowers across the ground in the dry season? You could trace it blind. Child of this house, you are; nothing here escapes you.

On the third Friday of every month, Mama Rotimi’s society women arrive in matching chiffon lace, their raucous laughter spilling into the street. Uncle T returns from Ilesa every weekend with dodo-ikire for the children, and they hear the gate and come running, all of them, even Mr Fashola’s shy one who hardly runs anywhere. When Mrs Animashaun makes jollof she goes from door to door herself, opening without knocking (come and eat, come and eat), and the little ones are always there first, reaching and craning. She slaps their hands and heaps their plates the highest and you never complain and they never talk about stomach aches. See? That’s how you know everything is fine.

Until now.

Baba Segi collected rent on the first of every month. He would knock three times and wait for a response, usually a promise. He was a patient man. Or he became one; you are not sure there is a difference.

The one time he tried to raise the rent—early 2015, if memory serves—you called a meeting. You are exceedingly cheerful tenants, yes, but none of you are wealthy. You have learned to cover your financial inadequacies with warmth, with solidarity, so that your children will not feel the sting of lacking, the sting of missing out on what every other kid in the neighborhood must be taking for granted: going to ShopRite on Children’s Day, taking brisk strolls through the aisles of Palms Mall on Christmas Day. So when Baba Segi turned up the heat on the rent like that, you organized yourselves and turned it right back on him. You are not ingrates, no. You bore him no ill will. You have simply come too far to let any foolish submission drag you back into the gutters.

All of you together, armed with your complaints and the palpable awareness of having nowhere else to go, cornered him in his parlor before he could leave for the farm. You spat and prodded and ranted until there was nothing more to be said. By the end of it, he had folded into himself and withdrawn the increase, his gaze fixed on the ceiling with something you chose to read not as hatred or regret, but as plain weariness.

After all, you had done so much for him, too. You took turns washing his clothes when Segi left for Lagos, you swept his room on weekends, you filled his buckets whenever it rained. It was only right, you decided, that he repay you.

And you made that clear. You told him he would have to endure your incapacities, whether he liked it or not. And he did—good man, Baba Segi. He made sure you returned to your rooms satisfied, and you thanked him in kind, with a special broth you all contributed ingredients to prepare. He never tried again. Perhaps you made sure he would not, but is that not the same thing?

He grew calmer afterward. Considerably slower, too. It is what men do when they age, isn’t it? They slow down, they let nature take its course. And when he died in March, it was not a surprise to you all, only a sadness, the ordinary kind.

You handled everything the right way. His daughter came in from Lagos for the burial in dark glasses and a black dress. She stood at the graveside and did not cry, which you noticed, but said nothing about. Instead, you told her what a good man her father was, how patient, how fair. She looked at you through her shades for a moment.

Yes, she said. She knew.

She came back six weeks later in a different dress, this one billowy and an inch too long, and told you just as her father had done: the rent was too low and would have to go up. She named a figure, and as she spoke, she was watching all of you closely behind those queer sunglasses.

There was no cause for alarm. You did what you always did. You formed up in the compound, sat in a tight circle, beseeched her, and she stood at the center of you, waiting. When you were done, she said, utterly to your chagrin, that you had until the end of the month.

None of you had ever imagined a challenge like this. Never. It came upon you unawares and left you reeling. Who walks into a place—even if it is their father’s house—and thinks they can unsettle the legacies that built it? That is not how things are done, though, is it?

But at the same time, you cannot have a migraine and think of decapitation; it begs for rational thinking. When a load touches both earth and sky, there must be somewhere else to keep it. You regrouped and tried again. Three times you did. You doubled the heat, tripled it, quadrupled it. You reminded her how some of you had bathed her when she was small, how you bought her lollipops and Hollandia yogurt after her mother passed—the same woman who, three months before her death, had called your solidarity performative and your boisterousness unbearable, and to whom you had offered your broth to smooth things over.

Still, Segi did not bend. She remained composed, distant, and, frankly, ungrateful.

Now this was beginning to look like a real problem for you all.

Each time, she waited for you to finish and repeated the same thing, as though it had been recorded behind her throat and set to loop. It was too late when you finally understood that she had not come unprepared. She had, in fact, been preparing for longer than any of you had been watching.

At first, you refused to comply. You challenged her. You bade her do her worst, invited her to do absolutely whatever she wanted.

You had no idea.

The day she arrived with two potbellied policemen with scars on their foreheads and instruments of death lounging at their hips, sending your children cowering behind your legs, some of you packed your loads and left immediately. Alhaji hoisted his sewing machines and did not look back. The couple from Igboora who had painted their door yellow took to their heels. The man from Ilorin on the last room—he evaporated. Each departure made the compound feel larger in the oddest possible way.

Those of you who remained did the arithmetic. You could not afford the new rent, but you could not afford to move either. You had school fees to pay. You had people in the village depending on you. Some of you had lived here for thirty years. And unlike her parents, Segi regrettably did not look like one who could be softened with nostalgia or a bowl of special broth at all.

So you agreed to pay in the end, but first she should kindly withdraw the monstrous men in black.

She stood there, watching you, her bespectacled head drifting toward the twin graves of her parents ever and anon. Finally, she turned and left without another word.

When she returned the next evening, you were already waiting.

Mrs Animashaun tested the waters first.

Look, she said. Is there something else we can give you? Instead of money?

Something like what? Segi asked.

Mrs Animashaun paused, staring at her own outstretched hands. Then she crouched, placed one foot on the first hand, and twisted very, very slowly. It came away.

Ditto the second.

Then she lifted her chin.

Will you take these? she asked softly.

One could have heard a feather drop. It was not a small thing to offer. Those hands had made the jollof, the broths, the agidi people came from two streets away to buy. They had braided children’s hair every Sunday afternoon. They had carried forty years of labor that meant something. It was a difficult exchange, no doubt, but it was also the only language left.

Segi looked toward her parents’ graves for a long time. When she finally turned back, her jaw was set. She lowered herself into a rocking chair, crossed her legs, and said: Yes.

You all exhaled at once.

This is how it works, she said. You give me something of value, you keep your room. Ló bá tán.

It became easier.

Mama Rotimi stooped, removed her legs, and slid them across the cement.

Uncle T glanced around to ensure no children were watching, then detached his arms and stacked them carefully.

Mr Fashola drew a deliberate breath, and took off his clean-shaven head in one swift motion.

Mama Risi peeled off her lips and wrapped them in paper.

As you gave, the compound grew even larger, quieter, hollower. You noticed it, but you did not speak of it. What was there to say? You gave what you needed, things you used every day, every hour, and she took them, and you remained. That was enough.

She kept coming. You kept giving. Willingly, even cheerfully. You did not mention what it cost because it was easier to think about the lightness afterward, the strange airiness that followed loss. And because mentioning it would mean admitting that you did not know where it was going. You did not need that.

Or maybe you did.

Segi came one afternoon and announced another increment. This was the highest of all. Nothing you had left could cater for such an extreme amount. Even better to admit, you had nothing left. Some of you were just a head, just an arm, just a foot, just a voice somewhere in the dark, and she was standing in the compound with her crocodile-skin handbag and blazing red lips, asking for more.

Mama Rotimi was the first to speak.

Give me back my legs, she said. I’ve paid, I’ve given everything, and still you want more. I’ll leave your house, but return my legs first.

Give me back my arms, Uncle T joined in. I cannot work anymore, I cannot travel to Ilesa without them, so return them now.

Mr Fashola wrote in the sand: Give me back my head. I want to see my daughter again. Give me my head.

Give me my lips, Mama Risi said, or rather, her face said it, her whole face straining to do what her lips once did. I cannot sing while I cook anymore. I can barely even eat. Please, give them back.

Mrs Animashaun chose to remain quiet, but it was very clear what her silence meant.

You all thought this would move Segi. You all thought she would look at what remained of you and feel something. That she would look around and notice how the pitter-patters of children playing hide-and-seek had gone, how the yard was flooded with water and rotting moringa flowers, how her father’s house had begun to look every inch like his grave itself. You thought she had no connection to the past beyond the ways you had helped her through it.

You had no clue whatsoever.

She waited for you to finish.

Then she gestured toward the gate and said, with the same organized efficiency you had used to subdue her father before his death: You already paid the old rent with those. Now you owe the new one. If you cannot manage it, you are free to leave.