For Daddy, in this, his sixtieth year

He sits in white lace and pink cap. He is having a cup of tea. He asks me, “Do you think it is better to love than to be loved?” He says he thinks it is better to be loved, especially for a woman. That if you can’t have both, choose to be loved. Me, perhaps, buoyed by the optimism of youth respond: both; it is good to have both.

I saw his picture in his seventeenth year recently and somehow, the stories he has told me about his past seem more real. One day, he was summoned by his headmaster who asked where his parents were.

“Olubunmi Gaji!!! Where are your parents?” He stared down at the young boy dressed in his uniform of many colours- mismatched buttons, skipped button holes. It was not everyday the  headmaster called students to his office to make chitchat about their parents. You see, this headmaster had seen something unusual. He had seen kisa, he had seen a dog smoking cigarette, he had seen a cat beating a gong.  

Two well-dressed people sat in his office. The woman’s perfume was like nothing that had ever entered the headmaster’s office. They were impeccably dressed. They should be. The man was an Oxford-trained lawyer. It was 1967. The woman was a nurse. She was very beautiful, too- one must not leave that out. And they had sat before him asking after Olubunmi Gaji, their son, who never had any textbooks. He found it hard to believe that this boy, dressed so wretchedly, could be the child of these people.

Just two years earlier, my father had gone to his grandfather’s house in great eagerness to meet his mother. She was to arrive from London that day. He had no recollection of her. The last time she saw him, he was a three month old baby she was dropping off with her mother. And that day, he was so excited. He was going to meet his mother at last. She was a celebrity to him. She was his Marilyn Monroe- he had seen her in pictures. That was all. Pictures of her in beautiful gardens in London. Did he wake up specially early to see her? Did he look at his tattered clothes to pick out the least tattered one? Did he rub pomade on his face? These are thoughts I grapple with.

When he got to his grandpa’s, he waited all day long. He waited till he fell asleep. He was 8 years old. He woke up with a start. It was dark. “Where is my mother?”

“Oh, your mother? She left already.”

He was dejected. She came and left without a single word to her eight year old boy who had waited years to meet her. He would meet her shortly after and she would only deign to look him over once before she moved on.

Years pass by. He becomes a man. He builds his own house and has done well without her. He still loves her so much. She is his Elizabeth Taylor, his Katherine Hepburn. The star. She is older. Her full hair is now a white halo and she tells stories of London. Of her responding with “White Pork” to “Black Monkey” when a racist man crossed her path. She died happy.

The day she died, she was the star. I saw a look on his face that spoke of pure shock. Perhaps, he never thought she could die, despite weeks of being in a coma. People like that weren’t meant to die. 

In spite of it all, he loved her. And he let her know it in many ways.

And now, I sit before him and I think he is probably thinking of the first love of his life: his mother, as he tells me it is better to be loved than to love. But he loves us and we love him- and what we have is the best.