Chapter One

I have lived many lives inside this body.

I lived many lives before they put me in this body.

I will live many lives when they take me out of it.

We

The first time our mother came for us, we screamed.

We were three and she was a snake, coiled up on the tile in the bathroom, waiting. But we had spent the last few years believing our body—thinking that our mother was someone different, a thin human with rouged cheekbones and large bottle-end glasses. And so we screamed. The demarcations are not that clear when you’re new. There was a time before we had a body, when it was still building itself cell by cell inside the thin woman, meticulously producing organs, making systems. We used to flit in and out to see how the fetus was doing, whistling through the water it floated in and harmonizing with the songs the thin woman sang, Catholic hymns from her family, their bodies stored as ashes in the walls of a cathedral in Kuala Lumpur. It amused us to distort the chanting rhythm of the music, to twist it around the fetus till it kicked in glee. Sometimes we left the thin woman’s body to float behind her and explore the house she kept, following her through the shell-blue walls, watching her as she pressed dough into rounds and chapatis bubbled under her hands.

She was small, with dark eyes and hair, light brown skin, and her name was Saachi. She’d been born sixth out of eight children, on the eleventh day of the sixth month, in Melaka, on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Later, she flew to London and married a man named Saul in a flurry of white sari, veil, and flowers. He was a forceful man with a rake’s smile and deep brown skin, tight black coils cropped close to his head. He sang Jim Reeves in an exaggerated baritone, spoke fluent Russian and knew Latin, and danced the waltz. There were twelve years between them, but still, the couple was beautiful, well matched, moving through the gray city with grace.

By the time our body was embedded in her lining, they had moved to Nigeria and Saul was working for Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Umuahia. They already had a little boy, Chima, who had been born in Aba three years before, but for this baby (for us), it was important that they return to Umuahia, where Saul was born, and his father before him, and his before that. The blood following paths into the soil, oiling the gates, calling the prayer into flesh. Later, there would be another girl child, born back in Aba, and Saul would sing to both the girls in his baritone, teach them how to waltz, and look after their cats when they left him.

But before the girls were born, they (the thin woman and the forceful man) lived in a large house in the doctors’ quarters, the place with the hibiscus outside and the shell blue inside. Saachi was a nurse, a practical woman, so between the both of them, the odds were good that the new baby would live. When we got tired of the house, we fluttered and swooped, playing in the compound and watching the yam tendrils crawl up their supporting sticks, the silk of corn drying up as it ripened, the swelling and patched yellowing of the mangoes before they fell. Saachi would sit and watch Saul fill two buckets with those mangoes and bring them to her. She ate them all the way from their skins through their wet flesh to her teeth scraping like dry bone against the seeds. Then she made mango jam, mango juice, mango everything. She ate ten to twenty of them each day, then a few of the large avocados, slicing those around the pit and scooping their butter down her throat. And so our fetus body was fed and we visited, and when we were tired of their world, we left for our own. Back then, we were still free. It was nothing to slip away, along the bitter streams of chalk.

In those Queen Elizabeth days, their taxi driver was a man who plastered the inside of his car with a slogan, NO SHORTCUT TO SUCCESS. The same words, growing thick as stickers piled on one another, some peeling and others glistening new. Every day, Saachi left her little boy, Chima, at home with his nanny, and the taxi driver would take her from the compound to Saul’s clinic in the interior of the village. That morning (the day we died and were born), her labor started as they drove down the twisting red roads. The driver spun the wheel around, following her gasped orders, and took her to Aloma Hospital instead. As her body called to us and wrung itself out, all Saachi could focus on were those stickers, swarming around the seats, reminding her that the short way did not exist.

Meanwhile, we were wrenched, dragged through the gates, across a river, and through the back door of the thin woman’s womb, thrust into the rippling water and the small sleeping body floating within. It was time. When the fetus had been housed, we were allowed freedom, but it was going to be alone, no longer flesh within a house but a house itself, and we were the one meant to live in it. We were used to the warm thuds of two heartbeats separated by walls of flesh and liquid, used to the option of leaving, of returning to the place we came from, free like spirits are meant to be. To be singled out and locked into the blurred consciousness of a little mind? We refused. It would be madness.

The thin woman’s body was prone to quick labors. The boy, the first child, had been born in an hour, and a year after we were born, the third child would take only two. We, the middle, held the body against the pull for six. No shortcuts.

It was the sixth day of the sixth month.

Eventually, the doctors slid a needle into Saachi and fed her from a drip, fighting our resistance with drugs, expelling the body that was becoming ours. And so we were trapped by this unfamiliar birthing, this abomination of the fleshly, and this is how we ended up here.