Ola W. Halim

We were girls once. The girls you once saw hawking on the streets of Arewa—selling awara, wainan rogo, dan wake and kosai by the junctions, beside bridges, under sheds near mechanic workshops where the ground was stained black with grease. We sold alale, tuwon madara, shinkafa da mai da yaji and dambu, near the Jummat mosques on Fridays. But we are women now.

The new game Oyin and I invented is called Shock-Me-I-Shock-You. We play it whenever our parents aren’t around. Often, Daddy is at work, bawling at his students for not understanding ordinary differential calculus. In the kitchen, Mummy will be flipping àkàrà balls in a pot of sizzling òróró or eyeing the burglary proofs like a burglar at a dress rehearsal. Sometimes, when the sun is at its hottest and the heat makes things crackle, she goes out into the yard.

The KrisFlyer miles of a dead person cannot be redeemed. The woman on the hotline said it as if she was underlining it in red ink with a ruler. She spoke with that irritatingly patient customer-service chirp. I imagined her out at Changi Business Park, manicured fingers parked on the keyboard and a mug of 3-in-1 Nescafe gone cold on her desk. Behind her, a dusty Seiko wall clock ticking down the minutes until her shift finally ends.