House of Memories
Filed Under: Fiction
1.
“Empty your mind.”
The room was cool, dimly lit, and quiet. The atmosphere felt sacred, like a temple. Koki understood why it had to feel this way. The process he was about to submerge himself in demanded a certain level of gravity. You could say it was almost spiritual. And just thinking about it made his hands tremble a bit.
Everything felt strange—the ceiling fan spinning slowly overhead, an old gramophone forgotten in the corner, transparent bottles hanging from lines across the room's blue walls, the shaman’s thin, tall figure standing in the corner. The shaman was an elderly man with a white goatee and a sagelike aura of spirituality. The grey robe he wore over his wiry frame swayed with each measured step he took.
Koki’s tongue felt dry all of a sudden. He inhaled deeply, and let out a shuddering exhale. He thought of Lulu, thought of Kina. He thought of those airless days in the hospital, cruel as they had been. And he thought of his father. He always thought of his father.
“I'm ready now,” Koki said, pleased with how his resolve tasted in his mouth.
“Good,” the shaman said. “Now, be calm. And purge your mind of everything else. Concentrate on the specific memory you wish to return to.”
Koki shut his eyes. Unmoored, floating in still darkness, he knew only the smell of the incense burning beneath a table.
“Focus on the life you want to return to. It has to be from a long time ago, at least five years in the past. Remember a smell and a song from that time. And hold on to it. You are seeking out a core memory. Trust these familiar scents and sounds to take you back there.”
“Okay,” Koki said.
“What scent makes you think of the memory you seek?”
“Imperial Leather,” Koki said. “That's the smell.”
“The soap?” the shaman asked. “Did you bring it?”
“Yes. It's in my bag.”
The shaman cut a chunk of the soap with a rusty table knife and placed it delicately into a jar of incense burning under the bed. Soon, the entire room smelled like a huge bar of Imperial Leather. How many times had Koki walked out of the bathroom as a child, smelling like that?
“What song is attached to this memory?” the shaman asked.
“Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. You can play it off my phone.”
“Don't worry,” the shaman said.
Silence. After a minute or five, the song came on. First, the acoustic thrum of the guitar, then Chapman's deep vocals.
You got a fast car/
And I want a ticket to anywhere/
Koki felt his body loosen, felt the hard bed he lay on become cottony and cloudlike. The music led him away from everything here, back to when he thought happiness was free and lasting. Was this what it felt like to be in a trance? He was drifting gently, away and away and away…
He wakes up in his bedroom at G.R.A Okene, in his 10-year-old body. Then, he hears it. Strains of it at first, but as he moves towards the door, the song becomes clearer. You've got a fast car, and I want a ticket to anywhere. He opens the door and follows the music. He walks like a dream through another dream, past the familiar layout of the old family house. It is as if his mind had never forgotten anything at all. The music draws him into the living room, and there, his father, his tall father, still dressed in his office uniform, just back from work.
His father is here before him, true and definite, and upon noticing Koki, he gestures for him to come come. Come and dance with me. Koki is hesitant at first. His heart is ready to take the leap, but his body remains frozen. Sunlight is pouring into the room through the windows. His mother is here too. She is immersed in a book, or at least pretending to be. Koki understands this to be her way of subtly disapproving of what is about to happen. He doesn’t care now. He breaks free and moves to dance with his father. They hold hands and sway in sync, and when their eyes meet, they laugh together at how silly they must look, and also laugh at how they don't even care.
For the first time in a year, he feels light as air itself. And even after the memory fades into itself, dissolving in the faintness of Imperial Leather and his father’s gentle touch, even after he gives up trying to make it last longer than the shaman told him it would, Koki wakes up to joyful tears hanging from his eyes.
2.
Lulu tried hard not to look straight at Koki. They were in the dining room, eating the rice and stew she cooked earlier in the day. Koki was humming to himself as he scrolled through his phone. His face would light up with a smile for a moment, before the smile faded back into a stoic mask.
She and Koki barely talked anymore. It was as if they were a pair of new roommates, rather than a couple. She decided to ask Koki what he had done earlier in the day.
“Nothing much,” Koki said. “Just hung out with an old friend.”
There was a brief, heavy silence, thick as phlegm. Then Koki asked: “How about you? What did you do today?
“Therapy,” she said.
“Therapy? Like, you went for a therapy session?”
“Yeah. Though I wouldn't call it a formal therapy session per se. I just met this lady who recently lost her partner. I met her from a support group on Facebook, and we decided to meet up and talk.”
“Oh, okay,” Koki said. And then he went back to scrolling on his phone.
She was beginning to feel a soreness stretching out over her tongue, the lie in the truth stealing all the sweetness in the stew. She had actually gone over this conversation before now, cautiously trying to find the best way to bury the presence of the other man lurking in the peripherals of her poor grieving soul.
As Koki got up and began packing up his plates for the kitchen, an awkward silence bloomed and unfurled between them, until Lulu spoke.
She asked, “Do you think about Kina a lot?”
Koki stood still, blindsided by this question. She just wanted something out of him that was not tepid or casual. Her lips were tightly pressed together, and she had to grip her spoon while pretending to be immersed in the food left on her plate. She braced herself for the impact of his words.
“I do,” Koki said, gently, and then turned towards the kitchen.
Confrontation was not a strong suit for Lulu. Perhaps, a different woman would have held Koki back and exploded in steam and sparks. But that wasn't who she was. She always found ways to channel her rage before she could give in to its blaze.
She was the first of two children, and from birth, her parents held her in a firm, unyielding grip while Papa, her brother roamed free, the feral cat that he was. He was diagnosed with a condition that seemed to make him immune to their parents’ swift judgement, especially her overindulgent mother. Yet, every time Papa got into trouble, the noose around Lulu tightened. This shaped her into a timid, emotionally brittle teenager. She grew up folding in on herself, pliable under her parents’ heavy hands.
The only emotional outlet available to her was her unhinged brother, whose delinquency she witnessed and tended to with sisterly affection. When she became a young woman, she wandered around in the wasteland of emotional vulnerability, looking for a broken boy to pour her love and care upon: To save.
This was the Lulu that met and fell in love with Koki, who was crushing under the weight of his father’s demise. Their courtship was short, the wedding pleasant, and their marriage a peaceful escape. When Kina was born, Lulu's heart expanded further, only to explode into smithereens when Kina died.
Grief consumed her. Even in her depth of despair, her heart desperately lunged at Koki, the need to wrap him in a fuzzy embrace over their shared heartbreak was the only way she knew to cope. But Koki was unreachable in his sorrow. The hollowness of his heart gave no allowance for grief.
So when Lulu met Talib on a Facebook community for grieving people, and Talib tended to her grief through the openness of his vulnerability, she could not will herself to stay away from the pull of his suffering.
Earlier that afternoon, she and Talib had merely sat on one of the benches within the parkʼs greenery and talked. As the afternoon sun morphed into the orange glow of sunset, families began to appear at the park. This one, a mother and two daughters. The mother chastised her children and told them to not run so fast, did they want to injure themselves? Then another one, a man and a woman holding hands as they walked their dog, laughing together.
Lulu felt a sensation of longing that shamed her, because she could almost sense the jealousy writhing underneath it. But then she’d spent the afternoon with a man opened sore by his vulnerability. His grief had a dint of shame to it, yet he didn’t care enough to mask it when they spoke. He laid it bare to her, his bizarre, convoluted tragedy, unafraid to hold his pain in his eyes. And when it was time for him to cry, he cried with no inhibition or shame. Some people looked towards them with mild concern, but Lulu did not care. For the past year, something in her had been breaking and breaking, and that afternoon, it had finally felt as if the person sobbing against her body finally got what she was going through.
3.
When Talib first saw Safiyah, she was not alone. She was hanging loose in the swagger of another man—Ahmed or whatever he was called. Safiyah, her laughter, bright and unguarded, echoed across the room. There was a flimsiness to her mien that convinced Talib that he could share in the risquéness of her aura, so he cornered her at the end of the house party and laid his charms on her. The infatuation was mutual— searing and unequivocal. Two evenings later they found themselves fucking in the backseat of Talib’s Honda.
Love stories didn’t start like this. But in real life anything was possible. When their passion was heated enough, Talib was tired of lurking in the shadows so he asked Safiyah to be his, once and for all. It was a natural progression for Safiyah to leave Ahmed—broken heart and all—for good.
But Talib quickly realised that for Safiyah, her heart could not be docked in one harbour. It was hard to tell whether it was a function of fear or greed, but her feet wandered and the rumours were rife. When he finally found the heart to confront her, her denial was so thinly laid that it seemed like she was hoping he’d see through it and call her out on the bullshit. But he willed himself to believe her. He was too afraid to put his heart through another difficult task of unloving someone. Too afraid to let go of the magic that they were. Even when she eventually came out clear to him and they cried in each other’s arms, it felt just enough that she would always come back. So he stayed.
She died in the passenger seat of her ex-boyfriend’s car. It wasn’t even a ghastly accident. The errant driver just hit her side of the car with enough impact to put her beautiful oval face on a condolence register.
Talib lost her without ever knowing if she really belonged to him. There’s a type of shame that comes with this sort of grief, when you don’t know if you’re even entitled to your sorrow. At her funeral he stood there awkwardly watching everyone console the man by whose side she died—her one true love, perhaps?
When he sobbed against Lulu’s warmth at the park, he recognised the gentle tug he felt in his heart. In his sorrow, he discovered that he found strange comfort in squeezing himself into other people’s imperfect love stories. Who was he to hate Safiyah for being as flawed as he is?
4.
Koki skipped dinner and went straight to bed. At midnight, he woke up with a metallic taste in his mouth. He had a nightmare and bit his tongue in his sleep again—an extinct childhood habit reincarnating in his adult grief. He went into the bathroom and spat out blood in the basin. He returned to the room but heard a faint sound coming from what used to be Kina’s room. He traced the sound and found that the door was slightly open.
Through the opening, Koki saw Lulu lying on Kina’s bed while on a video call with him. He stood there long enough to weigh the affection in Lulu’s voice; to see if the line between grief and intimacy had been crossed. He stood there just enough for him to get bored of the therapy-speak he could not endure with her. So he sighed and went back to his room.
He found out about Talib six months after Kina was gone. He hadn’t been looking for him—not exactly. Lulu had logged into her Facebook on his iPad and forgot to log out. A tiny oversight.
In the weeks after the last condolence visits had dried up, the house grew quieter. He and Lulu moved about their grief as if it were a piece of heavy furniture neither could decide how to rearrange. Kina’s absence had become a faint, digital echo. At night, Koki would open the gallery on his iPad, scrolling through her photos in search of a feeling—any feeling. Sometimes he thought he could almost hear her laugh trapped inside the pixels, like a ghost locked out of heaven. But one night, the photos felt stale, like faded wallpaper. On impulse, he tapped on the Messenger app.
At first, the exchanges between Lulu and Talib were vague, the kind of detached empathy strangers offer when their pain is eerily similar. They spoke in shadows, brushing past details of their losses as though naming them might make them sharper. Koki found it oddly amusing. He was an intruder in their shared sorrow, peeking into the spaces where their sadness overlapped.
For months, he followed their conversations as a quiet participant, up until something began to shift. The tone of their messages deepened, a current pulling them closer. Koki could feel it. Talib’s words were raw and unflinching in a way he had never been. Talib knew how to let grief seep into his sentences, and Lulu was drawn to it, pulled toward him like a moth circling a flame.
Koki envied him, but he also felt a strange kind of relief. Maybe Talib was the answer to a question Koki had been too afraid to ask: who tends to the healer when the healer is breaking?
It was how Lulu had found him all those years ago. He’d been crumbling then, too, after his father’s death. His mother had grieved in her own stoic way, burying herself in her work as though her husband had simply vanished into thin air, leaving no mark behind. Koki felt suffocated in that house, the air too still, too cold. He moved out, carrying his pain like an unpacked suitcase.
Lulu did not try to sidestep his grief or paint over it. She leaned in, tending to his wounds with the same quiet determination she brought to everything. Slowly, her presence softened the ache in his chest, and his grief transformed into affection. Now, Koki couldn’t shake the question pressing against his mind: was it love he felt for Lulu, or just the hollow echo of gratitude for the way she once pieced him back together?
But grief isn’t a one-way street. Now it was Lulu who was drowning, and Koki had no idea how to throw her a lifeline. Her sorrow over Kina consumed her, a silent fire that burned even when she smiled. When Talib arrived, Koki didn’t stop it. He couldn’t. Instead, he watched from the sidelines as their connection grew, unsure whether to feel threatened or grateful.
There was guilt, too. Three months before Kina died, Koki stepped out of his marital confinement. Caring for a sick child had cast a shadow over his marriage, sucking up whatever glitter of romance that was left between himself and Lulu. That brief affair ended abruptly when Kina passed, and Lulu never found out.
Maybe that was why he didn’t intervene now. He told himself it was fair. Lulu had spent her life fixing broken people. Perhaps this was her turn to be fixed, even if it wasn’t by him.
He suffered through their conversations, yet he could not stop himself from peeking through. Their words hung in the air like unfinished music, and somewhere in the space between them, he wondered if his silence was an act of selflessness or cowardice.
As Koki laid in bed, he thought about how the meeting had gone. He hoped Lulu might mention it casually. But instead, she lied, replacing Talib with the vague silhouette of a bereaved woman. It was a small lie, delicate in its crafting, but Koki recognised it for what it was: the beginning of a long, inevitable cycle. He didn’t need to ask how it would end.
Lulu spent most of her evening trying to shake away the guilt of lying to Koki. Throughout the past months, she hadn’t had to. She simply omitted any detail of her day that had Talib in it. That didn’t count as outright dishonesty, right? But now she’s had to cross two lines—meeting Talib in person and lying about it to her husband. Three lines in fact, because now she’s sneaking out of the room at midnight to talk to another man. As she walked back to the room, the glow of her phone against her face was almost too bright in the dark hallway, as though it knew it was complicit. What could possibly be so urgent that it couldn’t wait until morning? How dangerously is she slipping away from the reach of the man with whom she’s shared her matrimony? How would she face Koki if he ever found out?
In the room, she found Koki sleeping soundly. She watched his small chest rise and drop in defiance of the quiet storm raging between them. As she lay beside him, her mind returned home from the temporary euphoria of her chat with Talib. Now in the stillness of the night, the questions came.
Would things ever return to the way it was at the beginning? Would this grief ever end? And if it did, what would become of her and Talib? Would her purpose in his life become obsolete the moment his heart began to mend? Would she then be able to help her husband deal with the pain crystallized in his heart?
As her mind wandered in the void, she turned her head toward Koki, her eyes adjusting to the soft light spilling in from the passage. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Nowadays they cannot even make small talk without some awkwardness. But now more than ever, she wanted to talk to him.
“Are we ever going to be happy again?” She asked out of nowhere, catching Koki off. He said nothing at first. Then he sighed.
“I don’t know, really,” he said, his eyes now on her. A brief quiet sat between them.
Lulu turned to face him. There was something raw in his gaze, sharp and unspoken, as if all the questions he couldn’t ask and all the answers he feared were pressing against his chest. Without a word, he reached for her, his touch, urgent—a primal claim born of possession and desperation. As if he felt this was the last bit of her he would get before she finally succumbed to the call of another man.
She matched his intensity. Their movements were chaotic and ungraceful, a frantic entangling of bodies searching for something neither could name. His hands gripped her hips tightly, and she pulled him closer, their breaths heavy and uneven.
“How do you do it?” She asked when they were done. “How do you sit on your grief with this defiance?”
Koki said nothing. He just turned to her and smiled dryly. “I don’t sit on it. I just…cope.”
“Cope…how?”
“I go back to happier times.”
5.
In 1962, Mamadou, yet a teenager at the time, told his kins in Diourbel that he would be going away on his own.
“Where are you going?” His people asked.
“As far as I can,” he said.
“Why are you going?” They asked again.
“To see what I can make of myself,” he told them.
His people gave him their blessings but told him to return after a few years and look for a wife from amongst all the young women in Senegambia. Mamadou would never return.
That had been over 60 years ago. In the lifetime that passed since then, Mamadou had gone through many phases of life. The years took him from initial homesickness through gradual settlement until he became acclimated to this strange land that still welcomed him with open arms. He had given himself to the diviners in Maiduguri, and for his loyal services, they had trained him in their arts. Mamadouʼs father was something of a shaman back home, having converted to Islam after years of practising traditional arts just like his father before him, and his own father before him.
Mamadou mastered the ancient art of his forefathers quicker than most. The knowledge of charms, herbs, and divination settled into him like a second skin, as though it had always been waiting there, dormant, ready. They began to call him Mamadou the shaman, a name that carried the weight of his craft. Over the years, as roads grew wider and familiar faces vanished, the name grew simpler, heavier.
He never married. Never sired children. Domestic life held no allure for Mamadou. Yet, as the years stretched long and solitude pressed deeper, he found himself missing home—not just Senegal, but the essence of it. The smell of Thiof fish frying in the crisp harmattan mornings, the heartbeat of the sabar drums under a cool Diourbel sun. He feared forgetting these things, for to lose them was to lose himself.
So he taught himself a new art, one his ancestors hadn’t passed down: the art of returning. By combining the senses of sound and smell, he could slip into a trance and find his way back, if only in his mind. He stood once more in the sandy streets of Diourbel, the air thick with voices and laughter, the colours of his youth vivid and unyielding.
It wasn’t long before others sought this gift. He learned to guide them, to help them revisit the past. And in their journeys, he saw the tenderness and desperation of humanity laid bare. Wives clung to memories of lovers long lost. Defeated men basked in their triumphant pasts. Grieving mothers cradled their infant sons, alive again in the fragile theatre of memory.
But as Mamadou grew older, the past began to lose its pull. He saw the price of nostalgia, its bittersweet sting. People chased the shadows of what was, never noticing the beauty of what is. The more they dwelt in memory, the more estranged they became from the present. They returned from their journeys hollowed, disconnected, reaching for something they couldn’t hold.
So Mamadou stopped looking back. He learned to stay rooted in the magic of now—the sun on his face, the sharp, healing scent of herbs, the soft chatter of songbirds nesting near his window. The present was fragile, fleeting, and, because of that, impossibly precious.
This morning, Mamadou sat in his usual chair, its woven back cradling his old frame. Through the thick lenses of his spectacles, he watched the world move before him. The sunlight dappled the room, golden and gentle.
Then she entered—a woman, her steps hesitant, her eyes weary. He had seen her kind before. Grief lingered around her like a shadow, a silent plea for the comfort of another life, another time.
Mamadou adjusted his glasses and watched her approach, knowing the truth she couldn’t yet see: the present she fled from would one day be the past she longed for.
6.
“Remember, the scent and the song must tie to a memory you share with him.”
Lulu nodded. This was one memory she could never forget. In it, Koki had taken her to a hilltop at Katampe. They had chosen an outdoor bar perched on the edge of the hill, its tables scattered with an air of casual intimacy. There, they had sat for hours, cocooned in the soft hum of a world far away. It was a few weeks after they started dating. Koki was smoking a Benson & Hedges cigarette, its curling tendrils of smoke rising into the cool night air. This was long before he quit, back when cigarettes were part of him, as familiar as the way he laughed or the way he tilted his head when he was thinking.
Lulu had always hated cigarettes—the sharp, acrid smell of them, the way they clung to clothes and hair. But that night, she didn’t flinch. Somehow, the scent wove itself into the fabric of the evening, becoming inseparable from the memory. Without knowing it, she would come to relate the smell of that particular cigarette with him, and with this particular time when their love was a burning force. It was the first time they would hear With or Without You by U2. This was the song that would always remind her of that evening.
And here they are, slipping back into their younger selves. This time, they don’t talk much. Koki doesn’t touch the cigarette pack on the table. Her phone lies next to it, forgotten. They sit in silence, holding hands, their eyes tracing the shimmering lights of the city below.
“Do you want to have children?” she asks suddenly.
“Of course!” Koki replies, his voice steady. “I wonder what it’d be like to have a kid who looks like me.”
“What if the child dies?” she says, her tone shifting to something heavier. He glances at her, momentarily thrown by the weight of the query.
“Then we’ll have another. And another. Maybe even ten kids,” he says, a grin pulling at his face.
They laugh together, but Lulu’s laughter is tinged with a bitterness aimed squarely at herself. The irony of their lives stings. She wants to linger here, in this fragile pocket of peace. When she leaves, she’ll return to her tangled reality. Maybe she will finally own up to her feelings for Talib, hinging it upon an unspoken hope that Koki will pull her back.
For now, they’re younger and she’s in love all over again. She rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes. The music fills the space between them, as if holding their fractured pieces together, if only for this fleeting moment.
This story has been adapted for film. Postproduction wraps soon.
All images from ChatGPT prompts.