Chris Abani - GraceLand

It can also be used effectively to cast a spell on someone to speak the truth, in which case an unbearable burning is produced each time the person lies. Or it is used to seal one from speaking the truth by creating the same effect, only reversed.

Three lines on the King’s head mark the turning. These people, rarer than the two, bring new things, sing new songs.

The Igbo have a very abstract mathematical system. Recent anthropological data suggests that they knew about and used π before the Creeks; that they had in fact begun to explore ideas that we now call quantum mechanics. Though there are many treatises on this, it is hard to determine what was there and what has been brought to this thesis by modern scholarship.

Lagos, 1983

The club was packed, and Elvis and Redemption had a hard time squeezing their way into the room. The band members were lounging by the bar drinking, having already set up their instruments. Loud highlife blared through the house speakers, and most of the crowd shuffled to the fast-tempoed music.

Onstage, King Pago, the house dwarf, tiny next to the instruments and microphones, danced. He whirled like a dervish, his small feet barely touching the ground. He jumped up and spun some more. Stopped. Then started a calmer, more recognizable dance. The audience cheered at this display.

A female dwarf got up onstage and began to gyrate erotically with him, their groins sending up a heat that caused them both to perspire heavily. The crowd jeered, urging them on, and they ground together, trying to outdo each other. Suddenly the woman’s boyfriend, a huge six-foot-tall motorbus conductor, broke through the crowd and, to angry boos, carried his girlfriend off the stage, tucked safely under one arm, pelvis still gyrating.

Redemption laughed and walked over to the band and was greeted familiarly. He introduced Elvis and said that he was a great dancer and that maybe they could use him. The bandleader nodded and said they would speak during the intermission, as they had to be onstage in a minute or so.

Elvis stared about him. Everything seemed brighter, better, in here. It was his second time in a nightclub. The first time, he got drunk way too soon into the evening and missed much of it. Tonight would be different, he thought. Besides, Redemption was trying to get him a job as a dancer, and he wanted nothing to jeopardize that.

Elvis sank into a mock leather seat, stiffened and cracked by sweat and abuse, and looked out at the crowd. Onstage, King Pago was a small fireball of energy, a pure elemental, like a rabid gnome. He jumped, somersaulted, cartwheeled and danced across the unstable wooden elevation of the stage. Sweat flew off him in a fine spray, anointing the worshipful crowd.

“Redemption!” Elvis shouted over the music.

Redemption turned from the girl he was chatting up. “Yes?”

“Are you sure they will hire me to dance here? I mean, the only dancer onstage is that pygmy,” Elvis said.

“Dat is not a pygmy. King Pago is a dwarf. Don’t worry, you go dance. Now let me talk to dis girl, okay?”

Elvis nodded and went back to people watching. In a corner, a fat woman crammed into a red sequined dress several sizes too small drowned in the waves of music. Her head hung limply from her neck, arms reaching for air, waving weakly. Her body was a quivering mass swaying along to the music, shedding sequins like old skin that collected in a pool of light by her feet. Makeup ran in riotous color down her face, and her mouth was open in a surprised “ooh.” The floor in the corner was not concreted over, and her heels sank into the soft earth, rooting her to the tempo.

A skinny man stood in front of her, motionless apart from the lewd movements of his twisting pelvis, which he thrust bonily out at the woman. His eyes were closed too, arms raised in adulation, a bottle of beer firmly clasped in one hand. Intermittently, he let out moans, gentle “shshsh”s and “aaaahhh”s.

The record changed, the music slowing to a gentle calypso — Harry Belafonte belting out “Kingston Town.” King Pago slowed to a slow shuffle, and the crowd followed his lead and began to swanti.

“Elvis!”

He turned. Redemption stood on the dance floor with two women.

“You won’t dance?”

Elvis shook his head.

“Come and help me — come,” Redemption said.

Reluctantly Elvis got up. He did not want to be off dancing on the floor when the bandleader came looking for him, but he did not want to annoy Redemption. He joined the group and began to swanti. He learned the dance quickly and easily.

The swanti — or swan-tease, as he later found out — required the men to shuffle forward in a two-step hop, arms spread out to the side, palms open like ruffled wings, while the women, arms raised up, hands curved to sloping beaks, breasts pointing forward, moved back slowly by wiggling their backsides in time to a subtle two-step. When the men stopped, bobbing in place, the women moved forward, breasts teasingly brushing chests. When the men moved into them, they danced away, elongated arms dipping gracefizlly. To Elvis’s left, a couple argued. The man, not content to do the swanti, was trying to press the woman against the wall in a grind. But the woman was having none of it. The musicians began making their way back to the stage, and soon the sound of retuning instruments filled the club.

As the band began to play, the bandleader motioned to Redemption and whispered something to him. Nodding, Redemption returned to Elvis and led him to the back of the club.

“Okay, you done get your first customer,” Redemption said, pointing to an Indian woman in her late twenties.

“Customer?”

“Yes. De band, and dis club, attracts rich patrons, mostly Indians and Lebanese, and de band has to find good, well-mannered men and women to dance with dem all night. You will be paid well, don’t worry.”

“To just dance?”

“Well, dat is up to you,” Redemption said with a short laugh.

Stopping before the young woman with beautiful long raven hair and black eyes flecked with the slightest hint of honey, he introduced them.

“Elvis, dis is Rohini. Rohini, Elvis.”

Her twin-dimpled smile was pearl white and excited Elvis. To her left stood her silent, towering golem, a eunuch her father employed to chaperone his daughter. He bared teeth in a snarl at Elvis’s approach.

“Relax, Prakash,” Redemption said.

Rohini was Upanishad Tagore’s eldest daughter. Upanishad, a shrewd businessman, had inherited a couple of medium-sized provision shops from his father, Davinder Singh Tagore. Tagore senior had come to Nigeria in 1912 to help build the railways, and stayed on. With an uncanny head for business, Upanishad had turned those two shops into fifteen huge department stores scattered all over the country. They sold everything from dry cell batteries, Swiss Army Knives, groceries and toys to cars and tractors.

“Hello,” Elvis said. “Would you care to dance?”

Prakash laid his big hand on Elvis’s shoulder in warning. Redemption picked it off and turned to him.

“If you lay your hand on my friend again, I go take you outside and give you de beating of your life, you bastard.”

Prakash hesitated. Redemption had a mean reputation, and this club did attract a lot of local gangsters — disgruntled, angry men who would jump at the chance to work over a much-hated Indian. Prakash backed off.

“Hello, Elvis,” Rohini replied, her voice like treacle. “Yes, I would love to dance.”

With a smile, he led her off and, holding her lightly, swung her through a waltz as the band played “This Is a Man’s World,” though the singer sounded nothing like James Brown with his high-pitched falsetto.