Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

I nodded, but I could not go on.

Suddenly there was a look in her face that seemed to say that she was now understanding. Her eyes and mouth opened wide. “ Chi m o! ” she exclaimed in a whisper. My God! She was still sitting on her stool, but she was flailing her hands and then wringing them the way a thief who has been caught in the act sometimes does.

“We didn’t think anything of it, Mama,” I said again.

Mama was making soft wailing sounds now.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” I said, going to her, kneeling before her, wrapping my arms around her knees. When I rose back up, I saw that Amina was standing by my side, her face coated in tears. She said, “Madam, I’m sorry too. Please don’t be angry with us.”

Mama appeared even tinier now, smaller than before. She shook her head slowly at us. Then she lifted her hands slowly to her mouth, covering it, a feeble attempt to stop herself from weeping.

I stood there watching her weep, and I imagined the punishment that the grammar school teacher had described: all the villagers gathered together at the mouth of the river, Amina and I being dragged into the river, stones thrown at us until we were sore and bruised and weak from all that pelting. I imagined us being left there to drown.

That was the way in which I finally left the grammar school teacher’s place. As for Amina, since she had no family, nowhere to be sent, she remained at the grammar school teacher’s. He and his wife would do their part in straightening her out, and Mama would do her part in straightening me out.

Mama led me down the road to the bus stop without uttering a single word. She simply maintained her grasp on my hand. In that stiff, unnerving silence we boarded the bus. Her grasp was tight, painful even. Loosen up , I imagined saying to her, to her fingers. Loosen up. And I imagined the reply something like this: This is anger. It does as it pleases.

THE SECONDARY SCHOOL, Obodoañuli Girls’ Academy — Land of Joy Girls’ Academy — ironically had a humble and subdued look to it, almost austere, like a place where girls went to become nuns. Based on appearances alone, there was nothing joyful about it.

The school was not in Nnewi proper, but rather outside of it and to the west, in the nearby community of Oraifite, where the Ekulo River bisected the land. Near the river, and also at some points in it, mangroves grew, leaning in the water like old men and old women permanently bent at the waist, cowering as if to eschew the sun.

It was a small enclave of a school, hemmed in by bushes and trees, mostly plantain and palm trees. The only road clear of the bushes and trees was the road one took to get to the school. It was a muddy and potholed road at the tip of which was a gate that led into the school compound.

The compound was large, with several buildings in it — between twelve and fifteen — all smallish in size, like oversized huts. The classrooms were the smallest of the buildings, each one decked with a meager pair of windows, open spaces with only wooden shutters for coverings, most of which remained flung wide.

The other buildings — those larger than the classrooms — served as dormitories, lavatories and washrooms, a library, and offices for the teachers and headmistress. Sometimes the senior students hung around in the offices with the teachers — in the evenings especially, but never on weekends. On weekends there was hardly anyone around. Many of the teachers and students went home.

Outside the front entrance of each dormitory building was a veranda. Fluorescent lights hung from the veranda ceilings; they came on at night. On the inside, the dorms consisted of open rooms lined with cots, with equal spaces between the cots. Each dorm held six beds, two or three girls to a room. Beside each bed was a small table and chair on which we sat to read and complete school assignments. On each desk was a lantern. There was not much else in the dorm rooms aside from what each girl brought for herself.

“No more of that nonsense between you and that girl,” Mama had said before sending me off to the school. “Remember, you’re a new person now. And lucky for you that the grammar school teacher is still willing to live up to his end of the bargain by sending you to school, despite the shameful way that you behaved under his care. Now, look here. Nee anya. No matter what you do, stay away from that girl!”

“If you’re so worried that I’ll do it again, why send us to the same school?” I asked.

“It’s the only school that the grammar school teacher can afford to send both of you to. If not, believe me, I would have seen to it that you two were sent to schools as far apart from each other as heaven and hell.”

The school was made up primarily of Igbo girls. There were a couple of Efik girls, no Yoruba girls, and aside from Amina, there was only one other Hausa girl, who was as good as Igbo because she had grown up entirely in Igboland and, as unlikely as the match was, one of her parents was Igbo.

We all stuck to our kind. The Efiks stuck to the Efiks, the Igbos to the Igbos. And, especially during those first weeks of school, every time I saw Amina around the compound, she was either by herself or with the other Hausa/Igbo girl.

The third day or so after I had arrived at the school, I had run into Amina on the way to class. She was by herself, and I had hugged her and attempted to make conversation, asking her how she was finding the school and how she was settling in. But Amina was stiff in my embrace, and afterward she barely looked my way, not even as I walked by her side. She gave only one-word answers to my questions.

We had been going to two separate classes. Eventually I left her and walked in the direction of my class. I tried again after my class session was over, waiting for Amina outside her own classroom. Just as she walked out of the door, I went up to her, but upon seeing me, she mumbled something about having to go, and off she went, her steps hurried, as if to get quickly away from me.

In the days that followed, no matter how hard I tried to get close to her, she continued to keep her distance from me. Those were days when I wondered if everything that had happened between us at the grammar school teacher’s place had been a figment of my imagination. How was it that she could be so cold to me?

After several attempts, with no luck in getting her to return to her old self, I made it a point to keep away from her. There were close encounters, of course, those moments when we could not help but be in the same vicinity — morning assemblies, physical education classes, mealtimes in the school cafeteria — but for the most part we kept out of each other’s way. Ugochi, my roommate, became the person whom I began to rely on for company.

Ugochi was sitting on her bed.

She was a dark-skinned Igbo girl whom we called panla , or stock fish, because she was very thin, and the way her body looked, it was as if all her flesh was so dried up that it clung to her bones. Even on her face, either the bones were too prominent or the skin was so tight around the bones that upon first glance she seemed to have a grave, almost angry look about her.

But at least she was endowed with a beautiful figure — a nice chest, curvy hips, very good proportions. Together with her rich, dark skin color, she wasn’t altogether unattractive.

She was folding her scarf. I watched her from where I sat on my own bed. It was a soft beige scarf, embroidered with flower petals scattered across its surface.

Unlike the rest of us, who came to the school with very few personal items, all of which we used on a daily basis, Ugochi kept things she rarely used: a fancy, pastel pink hairpin which I had not yet seen her wear, a spool of satin ribbons which I’d not yet seen tied to her hair, a pair of yellow sandals with a big gold bow at the front. And the scarf. Every once in a while, she’d sit and admire it, then fold it back up and put it away. Sometimes I saw her packing the items into a bag and leaving with them. But aside from those times when she packed them up, her belongings remained in their little corners on her side of our room.