Our Father

There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear.

He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in another country–everywhere, all at once.

There are eight duplicates of this picture in frames made of gold, silver, or ornate wood matching his brown skin. It hangs on a wall in a living room, sits on a desk in an office in Lusaka, or rests on a bedside table next to a rosary that glows in the dark.

His offspring, all eight of us, sit around the fire, trading stories late into the night. Our mothers are inside, scattered in undesignated spaces, leaving us to sip cheap wine while we search for our father. We find him in our oldest brother’s swaggered gait, in the bridge of our baby sister’s nose, in the long fingers of another, in a tooth gap, in broad shoulders, in our misty eyes.

We stoke the fire and unpack our memories, holding them up to the embers. One of us claims our father attended their graduation carrying such a massive bouquet it shielded his face. Another swears they spotted him from behind at a political rally, but lost sight of him in the crowd. Someone heard his laughter in a room brimming with voices, or caught a whiff of his woody scented perfume in a barbershop in Lilongwe, or stumbled upon a gold pen identical to the one he wore on his suit pocket at a till in a bank.

To liven things up, we mimic the sound of his yellow Datsun Skyline vrooming off because he always had somewhere else to be. Spit sprays from our lips and we burst into laughter.

We pull into a huddle, promise to stay in touch, that our children will be cousins, and their childhood won’t be as fractured.

We are all here, entwined in his intricate web.

The mud that clung to our shoes at his graveside in the morning is now dry.

None of us wants the night to end, yet we harmonise to a song he sang to us as children;

Tulo? Eh?

Ubwela? Enhe!

Tulo? Eh?

Unzune? Enhe!

Sleep? Yes?

Are you coming? Yes!

Sleep? Yes?

Will you be sweet? Yes!