I dusted the window panes and rolled up the curtains because Akwaugo was visiting. I first met her at the Lagos book festival. Someone in the crowd had stood up and asked a question on race in Africa, especially in black Africa. Did it exist? If we were all cleped ‘dark skinned’, was racism existent in our communities and office spaces? I stared at the direction from where the voice had come, but I only saw the few people sitting across from me. The rest was a blur. The facilitator cleared his voice to acknowledge the question when Akwaugo’s hand shot up. She sat about four seats away from me. My eyes could make out her hands, pale as milk. White.

“Another question?” the facilitator asked.

“No. An answer,” her shrill voice rang through the hall like small lightning. The facilitator looked confused. The audience wasn’t allowed to share their views until the end of the session. A volunteer, before the facilitator could make up his mind, handed a microphone to Akwaugo.

“Hi, thanks for this opportunity.” She sounded eager and excited. “Race has little to do with skin colour or the tribes and languages of people. Racism manifests in our preference of English to our mother tongue, and as colourism when our jobs favour only the light-skinned men and women, and our advert boards hold pictures of light-skinned people. Racism is the track of thought that our blackness is inferior to reds and yellows.”

A loud applause rocked the hall. Even the disgruntled facilitator nodded. Akwaugo sat down and looked across the room, at me because I was staring at her. She smiled. Googly eyes. White teeth. Had she spoken from a position of privilege?

She approached me after the session, her slender figure swishing to the left and right.

“Hi, my name is Akwaugo. Congratulations on the DAB award.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, “thank you so much.”

“I hear you live in Enugu.”

“Yes.”

“I live there too,” she said and smiled.

My bird cawed in the dream.

“I found someone for the urn,” I said to it.

“The lady from the festival?”

“Yes.”

“Do not let her near the urn.”

My bird’s voice did not resonate from yonder. It rang close; around the windows; on the ceilings. The year before, when I turned my thirty-five, the nub of my existence had started shriveling. I’d made futile searches for jobs, tried to engage with sewing and painting and writing. Nothing worked. I owed my apartment’s rent. The depressive episodes kicked in and I felt hunted and submerged by an inexplicable force. My mother took me to her one of her brothers, an old custodian of Udo, the oracle from her lineage.

“Udo!” my mother hailed the oracle from the entrance, “does anyone who knows you go hungry? Your daughter has come in lack. Will you not let her leave in abundance?” Her chubby arms shook as she ululated to the goddesses of her people. She was barefoot. She’d nudged me to remove my shoes too. The shrine was a mud house that stood at the base of Udi escarpment. The burbles of a nearby stream, Nwangele, filled our ears. Overgrown shrubs towered over the hut, giving the building a veiled look. It had a paved corridor. A closed door stood in the wall. There were about five carvings of goddesses sitting at the corridor. Three of the statues had a human face. Streaks of red paint ran from their eyes to their chin. Their arms birthed newer arms that entwined with one another. The remaining two was carved in human form, with birdlike heads. A smudge of fear spread in my heart.

The custodian, unbelievably thin and oblong-faced, appeared from the door in the wall and stood beside the carved deities. He looked like he was locked in a trance. His glassy eyes bore into us, unmoving. Then his body was racked with a loud sneeze, and he jumped, as if into sudden awareness. His eyes were blood shot like one who tumbled down from a place of deep slumber. He glared at us, looking at my mother first,