Water in The Sink

I’ve always treasured simplicity- you know, the clichéd ‘little things’ like quiet evening walks or listening to golden oldies on the radio. But for me the ideal permeated into more than just the things I liked. It also shaped my perspective and belief system. Take the issue of life-after-death as an example. Some believe that there is in fact, life after death. A heaven, a hell, eternal bliss or damnation… so on and so forth. Personally, I chose to believe that when one dies, that’s just it. You’re out. Nothing after that. ‘Why?’ you may ask. Well, friend, the answer is this: it keeps things simple. No. It kept things simple. Boy was I wrong. I’ve just realized that am talking to myself, again. s**t. Maybe those psychiatrists were right all along. Maybe I am cra-… No. No, f**k them! Besides, with the way things have been unfolding lately, I wouldn’t be surprised that there’s some being on another higher plane of existence reading my thoughts. Moving on. Back to that part where I said I was wrong. Back to April 15th 2017 when I finally managed to pry one of my eyelids open. Everything was blurry and for a while, all I could hear was a deafening white noise. My body was numb, I couldn’t move. I was, however, conscious that I was moving. How, I couldn’t tell at the moment. At some point, my mouth opened, gasping for air. That’s when a figure I couldn’t quite resolve placed a mask over my face. I breathed in. God, it hurt so badly! I breathed out. God, I want to die! The white noise gradually morphed into muffled voices. The only thing I could hear was the desperate pounding of my heart. My one-eyed vision remained virtually unchanged in what seemed like forever. I distinctively remember thinking to myself: “What the hell is happening?” And I really wanted to know but my will to stay awake was fading. Fading fast.  Slowly, my eye started to go weak. I was letting up. That’s when I heard the echo, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.” Darkness. In retrospect, experiences like these make you realize that things are far from what movies show us. It’s this easy to let go in real life. You won’t run away from the white light in slow-motion. A victory-themed song won’t play in the background. You won’t dive back into your lifeless body. No, that only happens in Hollywood. I woke up a couple of days later on a hospital bed with a ventilator mask on my face. A fly buzzed somewhere in the room. The pain I felt whenever I breathed wasn’t as severe but it was certainly there. They had wound bandage around my head, covering my left eye. My body ached; it felt sore and tired. More importantly, it felt weird. I carefully c****d my head to look at it. Before I go on, I need you to picture water sitting still in a sink. Any amount of water is fine. I’ll go with water that’s deep enough to keep my hand, from the wrist to the tip of my middle finger, submerged. And yes, I saw it too. I said middle finger and tip in the same sentence. Let’s try to be mature about it, alright? Keep picturing the water in the sink. It’ll later make sense why. Picking it up from where I left it off. The only limb not in a cast was my right arm. Both of my legs laid there suspended in mid-air by a strap hanging from the ceiling. My left arm, right-angled by chalky cast to my chest. I examined my right arm, not to count the ugly black scabs on it but to make sense of the complexion of my skin. It was light; and slightly wrinkled. This isn’t how it’s supposed to look like. I wiggled my fingers. These don’t look anything like my fingers. What’s wrong with my nails? My heart’s pace started to rise. No. No. This is my hand. Yes, yes. My birth mark. That birth mark that looks like a miniature version of Madagascar- So I turned my hand to look for it. It wasn’t there. f**k. There must be an explanation. Skin graft. Yes, maybe…maybe had a skin graft. But why? God! This isn’t my arm. This isn’t my body… this isn’t… A woman who had, apparently, been sleeping on a chair by my bed suddenly shot up, tears welling up in her eyes saying, “Baba! Baba! Umeamka! Ata sijui ningeanzia wapi kama unge- Thank goodness!” Dad! Dad! You’re awake! I don’t know what I would have done if you had- Thank goodness! Dad? Why is she calling me that? And who is she? Why am I here? I immediately started going into shock. I was convinced that my heart would rupture from how hard it thumped. The hurricane of thoughts swirling in my head chocked the sound out of everything around me:  the screeching beep of the E.C.G. machine that was beside me, that fly’s annoying buzz, that woman’s yells and the stomping of nurses and doctors into my room. Darkness. Again. Not Hollywood. I hope you’re still picturing that water in the sink. The point that I was to illustrate is just around the corner. Hold on to it a little longer, will ya? And that’s how it was for the next couple of weeks: waking up to this woman who called me ‘dad’. Passing out every time I felt like I was in someone else’s body.  It became worse every time the doctor came to take off my bandages or saw off the casts on my healed limbs because then I had a glimpse of who I was. My mind just couldn’t reconcile this person I saw in the mirror with the person that intuition told me I was. Intuition told me that I wasn’t bald. She whispered that my skin wasn’t supposed to be this shade of brown; this light shade of brown. Intuition murmured that my eyebrows weren’t meant to be that thick. That my eyes weren’t supposed to be that far set apart.  That my hands shouldn’t be callused. Intuition screamed that I shouldn’t look like I was forty. Intuition pointed out that my voice wasn’t supposed to be husky when I finally mustered the strength to speak. It was a breezy, sunny afternoon, about two months after the first incident. That woman was seated silently in the chair. That is where she always was. Just sitting. Sitting the whole day away. Every now and then, she would adjust my pillow or the curtains. 9 p.m. is when she left but always came back the next day at exactly 8 a.m. with flowers, fruits and food. I often heard her mumble, perhaps in prayer. Sometimes she’d silently weep. “Who are you?” She got up, disbelief in her face. I am sure her reaction wasn’t because of the question but simply because of the fact that I spoke. She stood there, motionless, not sure if she had heard right or was imagining things. So, I cleared my throat and asked her again. “Who are you?” A smile slowly rippled across her face. It is funny how I hadn’t really taken notice of her features yet she was the only person I had been seeing on a regular basis. Well, her and the tall nurse. And the other nurse with a squeaky voice. And the porky doctor. The porky doctor whose sentences were punctuated by wheezes and heavy panting. I am not one to judge, but Jesus! You’re a freaking doctor man! Get a hold of your life man; instead of pies and sausages! But I digress. She had a bright, smooth, beautiful face with the most brilliant set of light brown eyes I had ever seen. Beneath them were bags, moulded by little distinct creases. They made her look really tired. I thought they looked cute. The creases. Her smile was held up by not the deepest pair of dimples. It revealed nicely spaced coconut-white teeth. I’d bet my bottom note that she was twenty-two. “Baba!” she went, her voice trembling with relief. And joy. With a dash of saltiness. Or sadness. She swooped down for a hug. I grunted in pain when her torso’s weight crushed the lower left part of my chest. She quickly got up. ‘Slightly shocked’ was written all over her face.  “Oh sorry! I forgot that your wound isn’t completely healed.” I wanted to say, “Its fine,” but she beat me to it. “Am…” she painfully swallowed a lump in her throat, “Natalie, Dad. Am Natalie. Doc said that you might not remember anything or anyone.” She then pointed at my head. “You got hit so badly that night the accident happened.” Accident? What happened? She read those questions off of my face and answered them while I carefully tried to sit up straight. Grunts. “You had left home for the bar at around quarter-past seven to go watch some soccer game,” she narrated, “You always did every weekend.” I winced at the mention of ‘soccer’. Lady Intuition was at it again, throwing a tantrum. You don’t love soccer! You don’t love soccer! You never have- I brushed her off. “I started to get worried when it was midnight and you hadn’t come back home. See, the latest you ever came back was eleven, so my being worried was justified. So, I called you. You didn’t pick up. I called and called and called…” went she. Restlessness. “Then your phone went off.” “That’s when I decided to come looking for you. I knew where the bar was, so I drove there.”  I followed intently, aware of the impeding dread that would follow in her story. But I listened nevertheless. “It was raining really hard outside that you could barely see anything. The whole while am hoping that you’re okay. I had only driven for about fifteen minutes when my eyes caught sight of some commotion up ahead,” she paused for a moment and stared into empty space with her mouth slightly agape. I pictured the state of her heart when she saw the commotion. It probably froze up. I could see the red flashing of an ambulance’s lights in her tear-flooded eyes as she narrated seeing one by the road side. She didn’t blink. Not even once. “I jumped out of the car and ran towards the ambulance. I, somehow, knew you were involved. I just couldn’t shake off that feeling. “ Her face must have been flushed. Her jet-black hair wet. The inside of her shoes soggy. Her slender fingers cold as she pushed through the little crowd looking down at something. Or someone. In the middle were two or three medics trying to load someone onto a stretcher. She must have hated the gasps of the on-lookers. She must have loathed the fact that the medics obscured her view of Someone. The raining must have made it even harder. She must have been annoyed by the lights. Both the ambulance’s flashing lights and the blinking lights- the blinking lights a few meters from where she stood. There she trained her eyes. Her brain must have immediately got accustomed to the pattern: the ons and offs of the light-yellow indicators. She must have waited for them to go off, for a moment, because then she would be able to see more. Off. The flashing ambulance’s lights must have grazed the vehicle in that second. Natalie must have seen the mangled up white pick-up truck lying upside down a few meters from where she stood. On. “I knew that was you, Baba!” she broke into tears. I felt for her. But I was also confused because I just couldn’t remember any of that. ‘Baba!’ she must have called out as she pushed one of the medics to see Someone. Someone must have been bloody, muddy and in wet tattered clothes. “That’s when I saw you,” she went, her eyes still fixed at empty space. Her face was pale, petrified. She must have tried helping. The medics must have stopped her. They must have known that she knew Someone. That is why they let her ride with them in the ambulance. “From what I gathered, you had lost control of your truck and veered off of the road. They told me that it flipped a bunch of times before finally coming to a stop,” she sniffled in between sentences. “As we got closer to the hospital, your heart stopped beating and…” sniff, “they said you were dead.” You can now pull the plug. What? Don’t tell me you forgot about the water in the sink. That’s what I meant. Now, pull the plug and watch the water go down the drain. Mine swirled down the drain in an anti-clockwise fashion. Not that that means anything significant. Just a little side-note. Did you pull yours? Good. You haven’t done this in vain. I’ll get to explaining why in a few. I didn’t let you down last time, neither will I this time. A tear slipped freely from her right eye. Another sped down her left cheek. She ran her hand across her face, wiping off the watery mucus that was dripping from her now reddish nose. “I couldn’t cry, Baba, even when I knew that I should have been crying. Everything around me went mute for a while. Then I felt an immense amount of loss and emptiness… I mean, first Mum then you… I just couldn’t…” she went, her eyes now closed. She then went quiet for a second or two. I watched as her eyeballs played beneath thin eyelids. I watched as they suddenly opened, revealing eyes drenched in more than just tears. They gleamed with hope. “That’s when a warm hand wrapped its fingers around my arm. I turned to look at its owner. It belonged to one of the medics. He was saying something. But I couldn’t hear anything. Then he turned to look at the direction where you laid. I traced his eye movement and found my way to your chest. It rose and fell. It was alive! You were alive! I sat there in disbelief, the medics busy doing this and that. That’s when I reached out and tightly held on to your clothes.” A sudden rush of resolve must have come over her. She must have said to herself: “I won’t let you leave me again, Baba!” She must have held on till they made it to the hospital. As they rushed him down the white isles of the hospital. She must have held on until the doors of the emergency room were shut closed. But that didn’t mean that she had let go. She must have held on as they took out the object lodged deep in his lung. Her grip never loosened as the last blood clot in his brain got removed. She held on until he opened his eyes. Her fingers remained tightly wound around him as they unwound every bandage. Until they had all casts taken off. Even when he couldn’t speak or recognize her, she still held on. I sat there, letting all that soak in. It was a lot. My brain still couldn’t find any record, any memory before April 15th 2017. I felt a familiar choking feeling of panic creeping around me. Every inch of self screamed that everything wasn’t alright. Natalie walked up to me and hugged me. Assurance. That dark cloud drifted away. I slowly started to accept everything. Nothing makes sense right now but everything will, eventually. I might not remember it, but this girl, Natalie, is my daughter. I am her father.  And that’s what I wrote in what felt like the first page of my life. I wrote it in every page until I was discharged. It didn’t silence Lady Intuition but it did make her yells bearable. I no longer passed out whenever I looked in the mirror. Day by day, I grew less conscious of my voice whenever I spoke. The name Edward Masakhala seemed less alien than it was before. I am Edward Masakhala. I recognized myself in family photo albums Natalie showed me. The doctor said doing so would help me remember things. I couldn’t remember posing for the camera with little Natalie; but I knew who that was holding her. That is Edward Masakhala holding ten-year-old Natalie. I am Edward Masakhala.