I could see them taking me
Pushing the trolley into the incinerator
Mother was not there to balm my body
Oh! Nothing was left except the ash.
— Journey of a Body, by Rajagopal Haran.
His remains have been brought back home: a full-grown man of youth has been transported back to his hometown as ash. This homecoming becomes an instant permission for the sword of agony to pierce through his mother’s heart. If men were gifted to such an extent as seeing the future, this agonized woman would have known from the very moment her son made known his intentions of travelling abroad, that this day of unbearable sorrow would come.
She would have sat her son down and said to him, “Listen, my son, stay with me and do not travel for any green pasture. Let us instead fend for ourselves here in the most little ways, even if it means chewing kernels and drinking cups of water.”
But no human can know for certain what fortune or tragedy lies in the days ahead. So this mother had danced heartily like one whom the gods had served food on a golden plate, as it had seemed to her that her son’s travel would be a marked change in the family story; a trajectory to be reckoned with when her son becomes successful. She never could have known that as she hugged her son farewell, she would never hug him welcome.
He was brought home as ash: a cremated version of a young boy of great promise who felt, from the moment he could think like a person, that his destiny was nowhere within the shores of the country. And when his childhood friends began to lose the infantile dreams they had nurtured about travelling abroad, he stored his dreams in the arsenal of his heart. The dreams soon became his essence, the force that drove his actions.
So now it hurts his relatives to accept the reality that this ash brought home now used to be their brother and son, the one who shattered his school’s record and set a new one by making his Senior School Certificate Examination with Distinction in all subjects, after taking the first position undisputedly in class for six years. He was the one who would always trek to his friend’s compound in the evenings during the holiday to discuss how difficult it was to get an American visa due to the unnecessarily strict attitude of the embassy.
A little bundle of heartbreak. That is what his mother has become. For it is one thing to behold the corpse of one’s child and an entirely different thing to behold the ashes of one’s child. She remembers those days when her son, then a little boy, would run home at the end of the term after collecting his result booklets. A smile of satisfaction would break out on her face while her son would nod his head in a self-congratulatory manner; and when she praises him for an outstanding performance, the young boy would reply that he was reading very hard and trying to do well in school so that he would be able to travel abroad. Of course, he did travel.
Never did he imagine that this would be his fate. He did not ever know that life doesn’t follow the script written by the person living it. Maybe, he did not know that man had no right to form a schedule for this thing called Life. Naturally, a man should plan and nurse ambitions. But he also has to know that things were possible to happen in ways different from one’s plans, and things may appear different from one’s expectations. He did not, as well, know that one may encounter good things and nice opportunities that ordinarily were not in his plans for himself. All one had to do was adjust previous plans and adapt to new changes. Had he known all these, he would not have turned down the job offers he got immediately after he concluded his National Youth Service. All his visions were to travel overseas and choose from the avalanche of lucrative jobs available there (as he had read in books), and then return a few years later more successful than he would ever have been if he lived in Nigeria. In all his life plans, he never envisaged this day.
Mother did not go very far in education, so she did not know the need for a Master’s degree. Her mind had relaxed after her son told her he was going to do the Master’s degree on scholarship abroad. A few of her friends whom she told about her son’s scholarship had encouraged her to allow him to go. After all, she was not going to pay his fees. That was one of the reasons she did not object to the travel, and now she thinks that if she had, this misfortune that has befallen her could have been averted.
Before he left, his mother had gone on dry fasting twelve hours each day for two weeks to commend him to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in her words, to activate top-alertness of his guardian angels. She had broken her piggy box, taken exactly half of her savings and offered it in church for her child’s safety. And as she looks upon the ashes of her son, all these sacrifices flash kaleidoscopically in her mind.
Like every normal human being, he tried to relate with those who were of the same origin as him but lived also in a foreign land. He made friends with some Nigerians, three of whom were Igbos, members of his ethnic group, and people from Ghana and Somalia. He did not ever ruminate in his mind that these Nigerian friends of his would be the ones to bring him back to Africa. One of his friends had lived there a long time, so she made arrangements for him to work with a permit that was not his.
Had he been alive to make it back to Africa, he would have written a book on the wide gap between dreams and reality; and how it was wholly serendipity that dreams and reality should synchronize. He would have written about his days in England without a single money on him, and how he tried to manage himself because he felt it was a shame on the part of him, who was abroad, to phone those at home for money. Even when his close friend, Andrew, urged him to call his mother for a little assistance, he insisted that he would not want his family to worry over him. He would only call them to tell his success story when he has achieved his goals and set to return home.
It was also this mindset of reaching home only when he strikes wealth that made him not call his mother when he had severe health complications even though his mother would not have hesitated to go borrowing just to raise the money. Despite the pleadings of Andrew and his other friends for an arrangement to be made so he could be flown back home when his health began to fail drastically, he had insisted against it, because he came to a foreign land in good health and he would be a failure if he does not return home not only in good health but with wealth. What he did not understand was that a living failure was way better than a dead man.
Now that he has been brought home, Mother will have to worry no more. She had always worried about her son: what he ate, who and who was with him, what he was doing or what was happening to him. Before they stopped communicating a few years earlier, she would always call at any opportunity to ask him the last time he prayed, and when he was going to become a Master for that was what she thought was the objective of having a Master’s degree: to become a Master over uneducated ones. Now she will have her son with her as long as she wishes. He has been brought home as ash.
His mother and relatives listen as these good friends of his recount their ordeal in bringing him back home. Andrew suspects he may have died of pneumonia, although he had not been well for some time. He had been found dead towards the end of Winter. Andrew reveals this as if Mother and the other family members know exactly what period was winter. Well, the point is that he is dead, and because he had told his friends every necessary thing to know about where he came from, they made plans to bring him home. But, because it was not easy to transport a dead body from one continent to another owing to the cost involved, they had come up with an idea, the only one that seemed workable: to cremate his body and bring the remains home.
Edith comes behind Mother and places a palm on her shoulder. She cries because Mother is crying; because she too knows how much it hurts to lose a loved one. All along, she has resisted the urge to cry, because crying over a dead person whom you barely know seems to her like an act of mockery to those with whom the deceased must have shared real memories. But she cries (if crying means gentle sobs and a line of tears running down one’s reddened left eye) because she feels hurt by her inability to help a woman whose sun has set at noon.
Mother had always hoped her son would marry Edith when he returned. So, when Edith comes behind her to place a palm on her shoulder, she turns and points at the ceramic, somewhat transparent container on the sitting room table. She looks at Edith and, spirit-speaking-to-spirit, she says,” This would have been your husband.”
When the callers for the condolences leave later in the evening, Mother sits on the sofa, the same sofa she has been sitting on since Andrew and his friends came early that morning. She sings the hymns she knows by heart. Hymns from the Sacred Songs and Solos hymn book. Rock of Ages. Blessed Assurance. Then she thinks about the piano in her son’s room. She had planned on begging him when he returned to give up the piano to the church. Now the church could come and carry it, so each time they play it in church, her son can proudly say to the angels in heaven, “Look, that is my piano!”
For days to come, she will have so many nightmares about her son that she will think she is going mad. This may be because she spends most of her evenings pondering what to do with the remains of her son. She certainly will not pour it away. God forbid that her son will be scattered on the ground for the wind to blow the ash to all ends of the earth. She will at one point think of burying him, but what will she say to the gravediggers? Six feet to bury ash!
She finally resolves to keep him there, on the centre table of her sitting room, in that beautiful ceramic container. He will stay there, at rest and unbroken, so that she can see him every day. So that he will not die in her heart. So that till her death, she will have something to vent her love upon. So that if at any time in future, someone asks her if she has a son, she will answer yes and, when asked where the son is, she’ll answer, “At home.”
What she will not tell such a person is that that son of hers is the ash in a container at home.
Daniel Echezonachi Maxwell is a student of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). He was born in the southeast of the country in the mid-2000s. A product of Adventist Model Schools and Sacred Heart College, he has a flair for literature and several unpublished works. His epistolary essay is forthcoming in Arena Of Wisdom, an anthology of the African Literary Summit.
