[Stories] The girl with the magic hands ( episode 5)

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can draw it though. And she knew she could. She could remember the many shapes perfectly. They were so simple but yet so striking. Swirls, animal shapes, zigzags, the women had drawn many shapes of the forest. I can do it too, Chidera thought. She sighed. She only had three pencils. And they were to last her for the school year. She’d used most of them up doodling during class.
It was at this moment that she looked down. There, between her sandaled feet, sat a fat black pen. The pen was simple with no brand name or any other kind of writing on it. It looked sturdy and had smudges and fingerprints from its top to bottom, as if it had been used many times and refilled just as many times.
“Like it has created many things,” she whispered, kneeling down to pick it up. It was heavy in her hands. Chidera straightened up and looked around. Several girls, still in their uniforms, were selling boiled eggs, peanuts, oranges and suya. A man rode by on his bicycle. A group of old men sat in a circle discussing the world. Someone pounded garri. Washed dishes. Talked on a mobile phone. Two women argued. Friends laughed. Everyone seemed to be occupied with his or her own activities.
Chidera removed the pen’s cap. The tip was made of felt. She touched it with her index finger. It left a dark tiny black dot. The dot was wet but quickly dried. She made another dot on her finger and laughed. It was a very good pen. She drew a circle on her thumb. This pen is perfect, she thought.
“Uli,” she said out loud. The word tasted like bursting black berries on her tongue. It was delicious. And so she said the word again and again. For the first time since she could remember, Chidera walked home with a smile on her face.
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“What is that on you hand?” her mother asked as Chidera helped her with dinner.
Her father looked up from his newspaper, the very newspaper that Chidera had been eyeing since she got home. The moment her father finished with it, she would take it to her tiny bedroom and use it to practice her drawings after she finished her homework.
“Huh? Oh, um…I, ah, it’s a leaf,” Chidera finally said.
“Obviously,” her mother said, as she dumped a plate full of sliced plantain into the pot of boiling oil. They sizzled softly as they cooked. Chidera was dicing peppers for the red stew. She sneezed.
“Bless you,” her mother said.
“Rubbish,” her father grumbled.
“I…found a pen today,” Chidera said. “A nice one.”
Chidera didn’t want to lie about not being the one to draw the leaf. The less she said, the better.
Her mother grunted and turned back to the frying plantain. Then she turned around again.
“Let me see,” she said.
Chidera bit her lip but obeyed, holding up her hand. Her mother looked closely at it for a long time. She had come home in her usual sour mood. She hadn’t sold much. Chidera had already started her chores, drawing more water from the well for their baths and sweeping the floor. When she saw her mother, Chidera felt the usual sadness sink into her bones. When her father came home an hour later, she felt the weight of his always-burning anger push her down more.
But now, her mother had a strange look on her face. It was a far away look. As if she were remembering a time in a past life; a time when she was happy. A time where she used to draw things that made her even happier. If Chidera had mentioned the word uli to her mother in that moment, her mother would have cried a rare cry of joy as strange memories came back to her. Memories from over two hundred years ago when she was a young woman in a village not far from this one. When she led a group of women, each with nma uli in their hands dipped in blue-black dye, to draw a lovely wall painting on the wall of the chief’s home. Such paintings were called murals.
But Chidera didn’t say the word uli , not even as her mother turned her hand over to look at the leaf. She didn’t say anything at all.
“It’s a nice pen and the leaf is pretty,” her mother said. Her father, who was grumbling to himself about how stupid and useless Nigeria’s leaders were, peeked from behind his newspaper.
“Come here,” he said, his voice slightly less fiery and more curious than usual. “Let me see your hand.”
For the third time, she held the back of her hand up to be looked at. He scowled as he stared at the simple leaf drawing made with black dye on Chidera’s dark brown hand.
“Humph, you smell like cheap perfume,” he said, but not with anger. He was just talking. Chidera would never have guessed that her father actually thought she smelled like the sweetest thing he’d ever encountered. His mind wandered elsewhere as he looked at the leaf. If Chidera had told her father that the leaf was an example of uli art, her father would not have recognised the word. But it would have given him an odd chill and he would have thought of his mother. And how during festivals when he was very young, he sometimes saw her with fingers blackened with dye.
And if he could remember as far back as when he was a baby, he would recall drawings of dancing pythons, shining suns, and giant yams on the walls of the room in which he lay. But Chidera didn’t say a word as he looked at the leaf. She was marvelling at how her father’s face had smoothed out. How he sighed deeply, a sigh that was not one of anger but one of soft contentment.That very night, after Chidera had fished the newspaper from the trash and done the rest of her chores and her homework, she sat up in her bed. Her tiny room was lit only by a kerosene lamp. The pen felt perfect in her hand. Before long, the newspaper was covered with fish, circles, squares, flowers and butterflies. Her hand was shaky and nothing was perfect but she would practice more. The memory of the looks on her mother and father’s faces as they gazed at the simple leaf was enough to keep her going.
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Weeks went by and the leaf on her hand didn’t disappear.
She didn’t really want it to, but she could not help testing its durability. She washed it with soap and water. Rubbed it with oil. Scratched at it with her nail. The leaf did not smudge, nor run. It was permanent, as permanent as her new interest in drawing.
She drew and drew. And, in turn, she got better and better. Her lines grew straighter, her control of the pen increased, and her ideas for what to draw never diminished. Those things she had trouble producing, such as lizards, she kept practicing. And she got better at those, too.
She also began to pay closer attention to the world around her. Whenever she went to fetch water, she also stopped to listen to the wet spatter of water as it was poured from the bucket. She looked at the different kinds of trees, the different ways they grew, the different leaves they had. She noticed the lovely patterns on the women’s clothes. She noticed that the way the women spoke when they were at the well had a certain shape to it. On paper, she depicted it as many, many spirals linked to each other.
She drew the spiders she saw in the bathroom, the wasps that liked to hang around the ripe yellow black plantains in the kitchen, the eyes of the goats and the feet of the chickens. When she went with her mother to the market, she collected even more shapes and ideas. The hairy yams that the men sold. The many stacks of blue and red plastic flip-flops. The piles of dried stockfish. The narrow road that wound through the market. The lung stinging smoke rising from the cars that drove down the road. The baskets of round oranges, oval mangoes and spiky pineapples.
Chidera had new eyes now. And those new eyes could see worlds upon worlds. She wondered how she hadn’t been able to notice all these things before. Still, Chidera’s hands grew stained with newspaper ink and she grew tired of its musty smell. She longed for a place to draw that was clean of words. If she had known anything about painting and drawing she would have said she wanted a “clean canvas.” But she knew nothing about the words of art, really.
One night, as she sat on her bed, her kerosene lamp burning into the night, she looked up at her bedroom wall and then smiled. The small house she lived in with her parents was made of beige adobe. Her bedroom was mostly empty, with nothing in it but her bed, an uneven table for studying and her few items of clothing. She’d never thought much about decorating her bedroom. She’d always been too sad to think of such things. Until now.
She stared around her room with her new eyes and realized that the walls were practically begging for her to fill them up with uli. Oh how happy she would be whenever she stepped into her room and looked around. She bit her lip. She couldn’t do such a thing without the permission of her father and mother.
That morning, as she mixed some water and sugar with garri for breakfast, she stood waiting for her mother to come in after caring for the garden. Chidera put down her plate and ran to her room. She grabbed one of the many newspapers she’d drawn on. When she got back to the kitchen, her mother had come in and was getting a piece of bread to eat. Her father came from the bedroom and stepped around them, quickly kissing Chidera’s mother on the cheek and patting Chidera on the head. He left for work without any breakfast.
“What is it, Chidera?” her mother asked. “You’ll be late for school.”
Chidera paused, suddenly afraid. What if mommy says “no,” she thought. She didn’t know what she would do then. She was tired of drawing on newspapers. She looked at the leaf that was still on the back of her hand. Then she quickly said, “Mommy, can I…can I decorate my bedroom?”
Her mother frowned.
“We can’t afford…”
“It will not cost anything,” Chidera said. “Nothing but my time. I will do it myself.”
She handed her mother the newspaper she’d drawn all over. Her mother looked at it for a long time. On this page of newspaper, Chidera had drawn what she saw in the stream. There were eels and snakes and frogs, water plants, and wavy lines representing the water’s current. All these things she had arranged in a lovely pattern that was pleasing to the eye.
Maybe it was the leftover strange feeling the leaf on Chidera’s hand gave her mother. Or possible the shiver her mother got from the drawings she now held in her hands. It was just like the stream, except.........

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