In loving memory of Màámi 💖
Lately, I’ve been remembering Baba Oki a lot. Perhaps it’s because his demise signaled the beginning of the end of life as I had known it. I had witnessed other deaths before his, but none had the profound bearing on my life that his did. Baba Oki was my grandmother’s beloved neighbor and friend, instrumental in the completion of the house she lived in until her own last breath.
I remember my first time visiting the building while it was still in its early stages. We drove from our flat in Ring Road, where my grandma had lived with us temporarily after a life-threatening illness. When we arrived in Oki, the newly developed area from which Baba Oki earned his moniker as one of its first tenants, we parked in front of his house. My grandma called out to him, and he immediately came out to welcome us. His house had no fence, only a thin drainage gutter demarcated it from the motor-way, which also doubled as the pedestrian walkway when there was no car in sight.
There were five rooms in total; probably as head of the family, Baba Oki occupied the one closest to the entrance. His wife, Iya Oki, and their youngest daughter, Aunty Bose, took the rooms that followed. The last two rooms at the rear were rented out to private tenants. Of course, I didn’t know all of this immediately; it’s information I only garnered from the later years I spent living with my grandmother. That day, he let us into his house and brought refreshments. We later went to inspect the building, where workers were still plastering walls and glazing windows.
My grandma would often talk about how indebted she felt to Baba Oki because of all the monitoring he did while the building was taking place. Craftsmen were notorious for embezzling money and inflating building material prices. However, Baba Oki acted as overseer, diligently keeping a personal account of every bag of cement and block used, ensuring that inevitable theft was kept at the barest minimum. They, my grandma and Baba Oki, would often spend time talking about everything and anything. I often suspected this may have, at some point, made Iya Oki jealous, but even if she was, she never particularly showed it, and I truly respected her for it.
My grandmother has been dead for ten years today, and I remember the day she died like the back of my hand. But here I am, writing about Baba Oki instead, lol. Perhaps because in my head, their fates were intertwined towards the end, and when I saw her watch her friend’s untimely demise (he died after a brief illness), she reckoned with her own mortality too. A year before she died, she planted a coconut seed some two meters away from the spot where she ended up being buried at her house in Oki. On the day she planted this tree, I remember asking her, “Màámi, when will this tree bear fruit?” She told me many years from then.
I was disappointed. I imagined if one planted a seed, it was with the expectation to reap what one has sown. My young mind couldn’t comprehend why anyone would choose to do otherwise. For context, a coconut palm typically takes 6-10 years to start producing fruit, depending on many factors. My Màámi planted a tree, knowing fully well she may never see it bear its first fruit. She did it for posterity, and every day, I’m grateful to her for teaching me what life is all about.
