BOJU BOJU

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER.

There was a game Efua and I used to play as kids — Boju Boju. Hide and seek. You press both palms flat against your face — no gaps, no peeking — and you shout: Boju Boju! And the person hiding is supposed to answer:

Oloro n’bo — the masquerade is coming.

And you respond:

Epara mo, Eni ti oloro ba mu a pa je — Go and hide, whoever the masquerade finds, he will kill.

We played it on the cracked concrete in front of 14B Bode Thomas, Surulere, in the dead hour between school closing and our parents coming home. Efua was eight years old, gap-toothed, dangerously carefree — and she always called oloro n’bo from the same spot. Behind the water drum at the side of the compound. Every single time.

I always found her immediately. But I pretended it took longer to make her happy. I loved seeing her happy.

Efua’s family and mine lived in the same face-me-I-slap-you apartment — they were two doors down. We were eight and nine respectively, which meant we were the same age for exactly three months every year, and Efua reminded me of this constantly during those months, with the kind of smug satisfaction that only children understand. Efua was my person.

One Tuesday in November, we were standing in the side passage of the compound when Efua decided to pick three stones from the ground to throw at the birds on Mr. Fashola’s tree —our neighbour’s tree.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Your hand is already raised, Efua. I know what you want to do.”

“I’m stretching.”

I looked at her hand. It was not stretching.

“It could hit someone’s head —”

“You are always too scared Haruna.” she responded laughing.

“It will touch the tree, the birds will scatter, and we go inside. Simple.”

She threw it.

The stone left her hand in a clean, beautiful, catastrophic arc, and then there was a sound that was not the sound of stone meeting tree or stone meeting ground.

It was the sound of glass.

The rear windshield of Mr. Fashola’s new Camry.

The next thing we heard was silence. Two full seconds of it.

Then: Mr Fashola shouting from his compound: “WHICH POVERTY-RIDDEN, GOD-FORSAKEN BASTARD —”

He ran through his gate into our compound in a wrapper, barefoot, chest heaving.

Efua’s hand found my wrist.

“Let’s run,” she said in a breath.

I don’t know why I didn’t.

“Which of you?” Mr. Fashola said, looking between us. His voice had dropped, which was worse than the shouting.

Efua’s grip tightened on my wrist. I could feel her pulse through her fingers, or maybe it was mine.

“Me sir,” I said. “It was me. I was throwing and it — it went the wrong way.”

Mr Fashola dragged me by my collar to my father who reluctantly paid for the glass from the envelope in the top drawer of his wardrobe — the one he was saving to get my mother a sewing machine. Later that evening, my father took off his belt in the bedroom and folded it double. I received forty- eight strokes across my back and legs, each one landing with a different opinion about obedience. It was meant to be fifty, but my mother held his hands begging him to stop as i was almost passing out. I spent the next few months quietly wondering whether a man who could love me and flog me that hard in the same hour could truly be my father.

Efua was sent home untouched. Guests at someone else’s crime are granted immunity — that is the unspoken law in Nigerian homes. You don’t punish someone elses’ child under your roof .

I would later learn that her mother asked her to stay away from me.

That boy, she warned, is a bad influence. “You will be following him one day and you will land inside trouble you cannot get out of.”

Efua came to my room that night through the window.

Two taps, pause, one tap — our system, established over a year of after-dark consultations. I was lying on my bed in the dark, very still, and when I heard the taps I almost didn’t answer. But I did anyway. I always did.

She climbed through and sat on the edge of the bed without turning on the light. I had been crying.

For a while neither of us said anything. Somewhere outside, a generator wheezed to life.

Then she started crying too — “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice very tiny. “I’m going to tell them tomorrow Haruna. Your dad, my mum — I’m going to tell them it was me.” “Don’t Efua”.

“Why?, but it’s unfair—”

I reached out in the dark until my hand found hers.

“Promise me you won’t,” I said.

She was quiet for so long I thought she’d changed her mind. Then she squeezed my fingers, once, and I felt the promise move through her hand before she ever said a word.

“Promise”.

A year later, her father landed a high-paying job at a firm in Victoria Island, he bought a house close to his work-place, and just like that, they were gone. I remember she ran out of the car that morning to come hug me and tell me “bye” just as the car was about moving.

​We didn't swap numbers; we didn't have phones. We just drifted apart. I will sometimes see the scars from my father’s belt on my thighs in the bathroom and wonder where she’s currently at.

My first month at Obafemi Awolowo University, I went to the Fresher's Party because my roommate forced me to. I was leaning against a pillar with a drink I wasn't really drinking, half-watching the room, when something snagged my attention across the floor.

I can't explain it — the party was loud, the lights were low, there were a hundred people between us. But something about the way she was laughing. The angle of her head. I set my drink down on the nearest surface and walked toward her before I'd made any conscious decision to do so.

I got close enough to see the gap in her teeth and my heart leaped for joy.

It couldn't be. Ten years. Different city, different school, different life.

But I knew that laugh. I had heard it the day she was about throwing a stone through a man's windshield.

I walked up to her, I didn’t think. I just opened my mouth.

“I had a really good line rehearsed,” I said, leaning in so my voice cut through the music, “but you’re so good-looking I’m literally speechless right now.”

She turned slow, eyebrow raised, that familiar gap-toothed grin flashing. “Is that the line you use on those small girls? “Anyway, My mother warned me to stay away from men like you.”

“But we both know you’ve never been very good at following instructions.”

I’ve heard that one before. You’ll have to do better than that.”

I chuckled low, stepping closer, letting the heat between us build. “Oya, challenge accepted. Bet you’ve not heard this one.” I paused, eyes locked on hers like I already owned the moment. “Can I interest you in a magic trick?”

She played along, folding her arms with a half-smile. “Magic trick in a party?..Okay…”

“Give me your phone,” I said, voice smooth and cocky, “and watch my number magically appear on it.”

​“Haruna, please. You haven’t changed one bit!” she laughed, but her voice broke slightly at the end. She reached out and grabbed my forearm, “Drop the act. I knew it was you the moment i heard your voice.”

​I didn't care about the people watching. I stepped forward and pulled her into a hug that had been ten years overdue. “Efua,” I breathed into her hair, the "smirk" completely gone. “Where have you been? God, I’ve missed you.”

Because i couldn’t help it, i had to say“ I have changed by the way, I’m taller.”

“Slightly,” she responded laughing as she poked my stomach.

“Liar”

I looked down at the boy sitting on the rug, his eyes wide, hanging onto every word. I reached out and squeezed his shoulder.

​“And that, Kamil, was how I met your mother. Life is just one long game of Boju Boju—but no matter how far she ran, I was always going to find her."

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IMAGE FROM PINTEREST