FOOD IS READY – PROLOGUE
AMA and IMA
Ama bursts into the world four decades ago in a conservative farming settlement just outside Efik Kingdom. Where she comes from, it doesn’t matter to the men if their women are stiff like coconut trees or soft like beds of roses. Beauty to them is being healthy enough to carry and push out a 4kg first-born son within hours of going into labour so that a husband can boast within a year of marriage of having a fresh pair of hands to help cultivate his land in another decade.
Parents watch with hawk’s eyes as their young daughters blossom and are alert to the early signs of puberty expected at around age thirteen. A family’s obligation to their girl child is simple: Keep them healthy and ensure that they keep their legs shut until you pass them on to the next family for procreation.
It is with concern, therefore, that Ama’s parents notice that at eleven, their daughter has already seen her first period and is showing unusual body development. At thirteen, her chest is as heavy as that of those fresh from the fattening room. And at fourteen, her hips rival those of the goddess Afia Anwan in width. Men who thought they needed to wait at least two more years begin to circle. Ama’s father, Ikpa, has no plans of giving his daughter away before she turns sixteen.
“Dark times await,” Ikpa declares to his wife one day, their patience wearing thin from Ama’s recent habit of prolonged stays in the shared bathroom, each lasting an hour or more.
“Have you looked at her?” he says to his wife on her fourteenth birthday.
“No, Obong mmi,” his wife submits.
“Don’t be stupid, woman!” Ikpa hisses.
The following day, Uyai calls her daughter into her bedroom and examines her. Later that day, she has her report ready by the time her husband drains the last dregs of palm wine from his personal gourd after a hard day on the farm.
“It’s there. As visible as the sprout of new corn. And slithering like the tongue of a cobra,” she says, her heart fluttering.
Ikpa shakes his head.
“Take her to Abakpa tonight!”
It’s bad enough that your firstborn is a girl. It would certainly be worse if she grew up unable to control her urges such that villagers would say to their sons, “Grow up strong and don’t eat sweet things so that you would produce a son at the first strike. Don’t be like Ikpa and produce a whore to assuage everyone’s thirst before they find a suitable woman.”
That same night, as the world sleeps, Uyai heeds the wish of her husband. She travels by foot with her blooming daughter to Abakpa, a village five miles away, to have the ugly development in their child erased.
At four in the morning, Eka has already sharpened her implements for the operation. She goes to the guest bedroom to fetch the new girl. The bed is empty. She searches the house and finds that her son’s bed is also empty.
Edet has come home to look for a wife. At thirty, he is still a bachelor after city girls have drained him of his essence before heeding conventional wisdom to go home for a good girl.
But he doesn’t have to put them in trouble to get one! Eka moans.
It is a year and a half later that Edet returns with Ama to the village to formally carry out her marriage rites. They come in the company of a newborn daughter they name Ima. Her eyes are the colour of the evening sky, wide and luminous with long uncurled lashes and a button nose. The baby squirms at every touch and sucks on a knuckle in relief when back in the safety of her mother’s arms.
Twenty-seven years later, Ama and Ima stand all alone in the world. Both widowed. Both single mothers. Both enchanting nymphs sculpted by the hands of nature’s own artisans.
Nearly sixteen years separate them, but you have to be eagle-eyed to be able to tell who is mother and who is daughter between the two. Ama, following the passing of her husband, exudes a timeless allure embodying grace, vitality, and enchantment. Ima takes after her.
They now live in an obscure close off Opebi in Lagos where Ama one day announces to her daughter that she is starting a restaurant in the showroom on the main road her husband used for his moribund shoe business, the endeavour that accelerated the journey to his grave when the burden of debt drove him to suicide.
“Can’t you see the potential?” Ama says to her daughter.
“Look around. See all these banks, boutiques, bureau de changes, airline offices, big furniture companies, gymnasiums, other offices we don’t even know what they do. They all employ people and have customers. We will be feeding them all!”
Ima can see from her mother’s eyes. But there are big eateries everywhere as well. This is not an original idea.
“I am a Calabar woman,” she says with a perfunctory wriggle of the waist. “No one offers what we can. We don’t cook rice with machines!”
The similarity between Ima and her mother ends with the banging bodies they both possess. While her mother believes everything is possible for as long as she wears her two hundred-carat dimpled smile, Ima always reasons that an unpleasant surprise is never far off, therefore she tends to be more pragmatic. Life made her so. She lost her womb to a bad abortion at nineteen. The man that was responsible married her at twenty. At twenty-two, her effervescent mother carried and bore her now six-year-old daughter for them. Ima named her daughter Gift. What else could she call her?
She is back at her father’s house two years later when she finds proof she had married a man of the underworld. She learns via a phone call a year later that a stray bullet had killed him. Ima knows it was no stray bullet. They’d deposited more than one slug in his criminal skull in a shootout.
Supremely shy and wary of people, she accepts to work as an office hand for her father until his death. Now with her mother’s new designs, she does not think twice before agreeing to tag along. She is not expecting anyone to come and save her. She is on Twitter and sees that every microblog on masculinity tells men to avoid women like her. They do not mind her body, but being almost twenty-eight with a daughter and incomplete insides and once married are the sort of circumstances they are teaching the new breed of men to punish. So she will stick with her mother and make the best of this new endeavour.
She enrols in a three-month culinary class to get to grips with the nitty-gritty of modern dining. When she is ready, her mother has already found an interior designer to tear down the old showroom and turn the place into a cosy little diner that catches the eyes of their targeted clientele.
“Mummy. Men. These men. I’m dead!” Ima gasps after their first week of business.
Two young men in their twenties outside their regular clientele who work shifts at the airport and somehow find a lot of free time in between are always on hand to offer the needed brawn when they take delivery of drinks and foodstuff. They live nearby. Ama takes them as the sons she never had and makes sure they do not go hungry for the kindness they offer her. One day, frustrated at never being noticed by Ima whom he fancies, one of the boys named Irikefe, panting from offloading a truck full of yams and two bags of rice, corners Ima in the food store and says, “Ima, there’s something I need you to know.”
“What is it?” Ima says.
“Promise you won’t be mad at me for telling you.”
“Why should I be?”
“It’s about your mother.”
“And what is it about my mother that can possibly make me mad?”
“My bro Castro discovered something.”
“What?”
“And I checked.”
“Oh speak!”
“Your mother. She fucks her customers.”
TO BE CONTINUED.