He fell in love with her smile when she was still a house officer who had quietly, untainted by any scandal of note, garnered the reputation of having had a thing with some of the most wealthy men in Abuja, without being ensnared by their promises of making her a fashionably corpulent and contented wife.
Every time Yaro thought of her, and this was often, it was her melancholic smile, like twilight shimmering through a lazy fog— a faint promise of happiness persisting through the haze, that came to his mind. It was the first thing about her that struck him the day she walked in late to his seminar on child and maternal health. She sat down and fiddled with the wooden bangle on her right arm and her cowrie necklace. He had thought her apparent eccentricity was more suitable to a writer or some other creative-minded hobo than a medical doctor.
During the coffee break, she walked up to him, shook his hand and said, ‘I am called Inara. Have coffee with me.’
He couldn’t say no when she smiled.
It took him two more coffee dates, caught on the occasions their duties allowed, and a whole day of daydreaming to the tinkles of the half a dozen bracelets 163on her left arm to convince himself that he had fallen in love with the houseman at the National Hospital.
She loved as she lived, without inhibitions, and laughed like wind chimes in the night. She dazzled his austere world with the colours of her fervour and painted the four grey walls of his bedroom canary yellow, lime green, azure and carnation.
When he walked in, she was putting the finishing touches, covering the last bit of grey with bright yellow.
‘God in heaven! Inara, you crazy girl, what have you done, saboda Allah fa?’
She smiled, her face splotched with a riot of colours. “Your room looked too sterile, like your consultation room at the hospital. Now each wall has a different mood. Feel it.” She closed her eyes as if absorbing the ambience through her skin.
She loved the outrage out of him and lay in his arms, her head cushioned by his biceps.
Drifting in post-copulation bliss, he looked at the yellow, blue, green and pink walls, shook his head and smiled.
Two months later, after she had invaded his life with her contagious energy, she looked around at her handiwork, at the decorated gourds she had fixed on his walls, at the abstract tribal totem carved out of a massive bull horn she had dangling from his ceiling, and sighed, ‘I could live here forever, you know.’
‘So do.’ He put his arms around her.
She looked away. ‘I can’t. I have to go. Do you understand? I have to leave you.’164
She had signed up with a field mission team of Médecins Sans Frontières and was going to Darfur to help with the humanitarian crises there. She had no idea when she would be back.
‘I am not letting you go. I need you.’
‘Those people need me more, darling.’
‘I love you, I really do.’
She kissed him.
‘Marry me, Inara.’
She looked into his eyes and finally said, “Don’t be silly. That is so unromantic! Is that how you would propose to me, if you were serious?”
‘But I am. I am serious. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
She smiled her sad smile, kissed him on the lips and said, ‘You won’t marry my type, Dr. Yaro, we both know that. Besides, this is what I want to do, to help. You will be fine without me.’
Sometimes she replied to his emails weeks after he had sent them. Sometimes not at all. Because internet connection in Darfur was poor. Because she was busy helping. Because she did not know what to tell him. Eventually she wrote to him about a boy she had tried to save, about how despite his bullet wound he had seemed more interested in his pet canary. After the boy had died, she had let the bird out of the cage so it would fly after the boy’s soul, or to its salvation or doom. Whatever, it would be on its own terms. She did not believe in caging things, even if done in the name of love. That was the last email she sent to him.165
His colleagues remarked on his slouching posture, about the hollowness in his eyes, in his voice, about how totally committed he seemed to the task of cutting people up and stitching them together again, about how uninterested he seemed in the things that made young people think they would live forever.
‘What else are surgeons supposed to do?’ he would say, his voice dry and nippy like the harmattan wind howling outside and stripping the trees of their leaves.
During his stopover at Charles De Gaulle, on his way to Ontario for a conference, she appeared out of the crowd in a departure lounge.
‘Dr. Yaro. Two years and 58 days,’ she said. ‘The years have been fair to you.’
‘And 58 days?’ He held her at arms length so he could look at her face. ‘Have you been counting the days since you left me?’
She fiddled with the coral-bead bangle she was wearing. ‘You are slimmer.’ Her smile was even hazier.
‘And you look good, Inara. You stopped writing.’
‘Long story,’ she said and turned to look at the men who were waiting for her some distance away. ‘My field team, from MSF. We are heading to Bangui.’
‘Yes, the war there.’
She nodded.
‘Please be careful.’
‘I will.’
‘I’ve missed you. I miss you still.’
‘I thought you had forgotten all about me and married a fine, wifely woman.’166
‘I haven’t forgotten you. When I said I love you, you thought I wasn’t serious.’
‘I have missed you too, you have no idea how much.’
‘Then come back to me. Let me show you that love is not a cage.’
She laughed but her eyes were misty. ‘You wouldn’t want me. You are a good man. And I am a crazy woman. I will paint your shoes turquoise and your car scarlet.’ She laughed and looked at her colleagues behind her. One of them pointed at his wrist watch. ‘I have to go. But we should be in touch, yes?’
She took his card and promised to contact him once she got to Central African Republic.
For the next three weeks, he checked his emails and his spam box every hour. He kept his phone at hand. He searched for her on Facebook but couldn’t find her.
A year later, while his new girlfriend, who worked in a bank, wore high heels, crispy corporate suits and wanted him to paint his bedroom white, was lying in his arms, he caught a glimpse of Inara on CNN, in a news report from a Syrian refugee camp. He envied her free spirit, her travels and convictions and her refusal to be caged by commitments and conventions, romantic or otherwise.
One sunny Saturday morning in July, thirteen months after he had seen a flash of her on TV, he answered the door and found her fiddling with the end of her braid, rubbing it against her lips, her bracelets tinkling sweetly.
‘Did you meet another woman?’ she asked.
‘No… I mean, yes.’
‘Did you marry her?’167
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, she was… she… she wanted me to paint my walls white.’
That was when she smiled. ‘Why didn’t you come for me all these years?’
‘I didn’t know where you were or if you wanted to be found. But I was hoping you’d find your way back – to me.’
‘You are just a silly man,” she said. “But I am here now. Show me how love is not a cage.’