Where The Children Take Us
By Zain E. Asher
I can’t remember most of what happened that Sunday in September.
I couldn’t tell you what the Gospel reading was at Mass that morning or whether Aunty Fatou came over to braid my hair in cornrows, or which Culture Club song was playing on the broken radio in my bedroom.
None of that really matters anyway. Everything about that Sunday was so routine, so plain, so unremarkable. Until the phone rang.
My mother had been waiting for that sound since morning, never straying too far from the living room just in case she missed it. Everything she’d done that day – frying plantain, leafing through the Argos catalogue, ironing my brothers’ school shirts – was all a plot to fill time.
She kept telling us to turn down the television so nothing would drown out the sound. She was anxious, fidgety, we all were.
When the phone rang at 6:30 p.m., she finally gave herself permission to exhale.
‘Arinze?’
It was supposed to be my dad. He was supposed to explain why he still wasn’t home; to apologize for the eight hours of worry he’d put her through.
But the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t his.
This voice was nervous, it hesitated and stuttered. It took a deep breath and mumbled two sentences that brought one chapter of our lives to a swift and sudden end and started an entirely new book.
‘Your husband and your son have been involved in a car crash. One of them is dead and we don’t know which one.’
It’s human nature to fear the worst when we don’t hear from a loved one for several hours, but usually, the worst doesn’t happen. Usually, everyone ends up all right.
This was not one of those times.
My father and eleven-year-old brother were four thousand miles away on a father–son road trip; long-awaited quality time together after a busy summer. My brother gazing out the car window, wide-eyed and inquisitive. My father pointing and explaining: the sprawling textile markets, the street hawkers selling okpa, the overcrowded yellow buses with conductors riding on the outside. All distant flashes of rich culture, a universe away from the corner shops, pubs, and lollipop men that littered our neighbourhood in South London.
Somewhere along that six-hour stretch of bumpy highway between my father’s home state of Enugu and the buzzing West African metropolis of Lagos, the man driving my father and brother swerved into the opposite lane to cut traffic. As their car veered around a bend, it was crushed by a speeding tractor trailer. Everyone in the car was killed instantly, apart from one person in the back seat, where my father and brother were sitting.
Our relatives in Nigeria were initially told both of them had died. Then, hours later, that one had survived. Then again, that both were killed. They were still in the middle of arguing, trying to work out the facts, when someone made that dreaded call to my mother.
I was five, my eldest brother was fourteen, and my mother was four months pregnant at the time.
She hung up the phone in stunned silence. Every expression shrouded in disbelief, every movement weighed down by numbness. She prayed there’d been a mistake; prayed that perhaps in the whirlwind of sirens and stretchers that names and identities were mixed up; that somehow her husband and son had been spared. She thought maybe if she fell asleep, she’d wake up to the sound of my brother playing ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ on his recorder or my dad tapping his feet to atilogwu music in the living room.
She glanced over at me, her little girl, playing happily with a few figurines on the living room floor. Her son Obinze was watching TV. She closed her eyes.
God, if you grant me just one miracle for the rest of my life, let it please come tonight.
My parents owned a small chemist in Brixton, South London, opposite a council estate. After Obinze and I were asleep, my mother drove there in the middle of the night, oscillating between bracing for the worst and hoping for the best. She unlocked the rolling metal shutters and raided the shelves, throwing dozens of items into a tote bag – bandages, gauze, paracetamol, antiseptics, cold compresses. Her job now was to help whoever had survived.
She returned home and took her passport out of the brown envelope in her bottom dresser drawer. She tucked it into her handbag, threw some clothes into a tattered suitcase, arranged for our uncle Leo to care for us, and called a cab. By dawn she was on a six-hour flight to Nigeria. Six lonely hours with nothing to focus on besides the pain that awaited. She stared out of the window at the blanket of white clouds, drawing no comfort from the heavenly fluff. As the tears fell, she understood that far below those clouds lay an impossible reality.
Lost in her trance, she barely noticed when the plane landed with a thud on the runway. As the other passengers slowly gathered their belongings, she elbowed, squeezed, and pushed her way to the front of the plane. She normally would have apologized, at least said excuse me, but she kept her head forward. One of her boys needed her help. Their very survival might depend upon her. This was no time to be polite. She eventually untangled herself from the aeroplane’s clutches and scrambled to make her connecting flight.
She arrived at her final stop in Enugu three hours later. The looming moment of truth made it hard to breathe as she navigated the rush of activity in the arrivals hall: throngs of people hanging around the baggage claim, embracing families and barking taxi drivers. Barefoot children sold groundnuts, and area boys offered to carry her bags.
She clutched her overstuffed tote and focused on her feet – small steps forward – to keep from collapsing when a young driver approached.
‘Where you going? By yourself? You have more bags?’
She mumbled something about a hospital near the main market.
They drove there in silence.
After the car accident, the passengers were all assumed dead. Their bodies were flung one by one into the back of a truck and driven to a local morgue. It was only when the driver arrived at the morgue, opened the back of the truck, and began unloading the bodies, that he noticed one of them was still breathing.
My mother didn’t know any of that as the car pulled up to the hospital’s main entrance. The concrete bungalow was swarming with people, as most good hospitals in Nigeria usually are. She pushed her way through the crowd outside and into the waiting area, her gut heavy with dread. She scanned the reception: pregnant women fanning themselves in the brutal heat, patients and clerks arguing over hospital bills, the sick and wounded groaning from wooden benches while others slept on the floor.
She raced over to an unruly queue at the front desk, unable to bear not knowing her fate for a second longer. After only a few moments, she flagged down a passing nurse.
She gave the nurse her name and was told to wait. After twelve hours of travelling across two continents, twelve hours caught in a whirlpool of fear, she now had to sit and wait. The next few minutes felt like decades. She sank into a chair, caressed her pregnant belly, pulled a rosary from her purse, and squeezed the beads. Then an attendant appeared and asked her to follow.
The hospital was laid out in a series of bungalows connected through a maze of outdoor walkways. My mother looked down as she walked over the chipped, concrete floors. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered and buzzed, and the hum of a power generator was the only background music.
They continued until they reached a closed door that led to Ward 7. She followed the attendant into an open room lined with more than a dozen hospital beds, all of them occupied.
She paused on the threshold to take in the scene; monitors beeping, nurses scurrying, patients shouting for attention. Relatives were sleeping on the concrete floors next to their loved ones’ bedsides. She scanned the room twice, her heart pounding in her throat, as she searched for a face she knew. And then she saw him. A small boy, her small boy, lay helpless on a bed against the wall. She recognized his brown eyes peeking through the bloody bandages that cocooned his face.
For the first time, it was real. Her husband was dead; her son was alive, but barely.
Excerpt from “Where The Children Take Us” copyright © 2022 by Zain Ejiofor Asher. Published by 4th Estate.
About the book: Awaiting the return of her husband and young son from a road trip, Obiajulu Ejiofor receives shattering news: there’s been a fatal car crash, and one of them is dead. In this spellbinding memoir, popular CNN anchor Zain Asher pays tribute to her mother’s strength and determination to raise four successful children after a phone call changes their lives forever. When grief threatens to engulf her fractured family after the accident, Obiajulu, suddenly a single mother in a foreign land, refuses to accept defeat. Relying on generations-old Nigerian parenting techniques, the children exceed all expectations – becoming a CNN anchor, an Oscar-nominated actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a doctor and a thriving entrepreneur.
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Zain Ejiofor Asher was born to first-generation Nigerian parents in South London. A graduate of Oxford University and Columbia University, she is currently the anchor of One World with Zain Asher on CNN International.
You can read our interview with Zain Ejiofor-Asher here
