IT WAS A SATURDAY IN 1984. I was playing with my little brother Kenechukwu near the water tank in our large flower-filled compound in Nsukka — that dusty, serene university town in eastern Nigeria where I grew up. My mother stood by the backdoor and said: “Bianu kene mmadu.” Come and greet somebody. Our new houseboy had come. Kenechukwu and I washed our hands and went inside. The new houseboy was sitting on a sofa in the living room, his legs cradling a black plastic bag that held his belongings. A man with a wise, narrow, elegantly wrinkled face sat next to him.

“This is Fide, the person who will live with us, and this is his father,” my mother said in Igbo.

“Good afternoon,” Kenechukwu and I said. “Nno.” Welcome.

Later, after my mother showed Fide his room in the detached Boys’ Quarters at the back of the house, she told us: “Fide has come from the village and he has never seen a telephone or a gas cooker. So we will all help teach him and get him settled.”

I stared at Fide, fascinated. Our former houseboy, who had left the week before after stealing some money from my father’s study, was knowingly urban, had sometimes fixed the stereo. Fide had never seen a refrigerator. He was light-skinned and his lips were so thick and wide they took up the most space on his face. He spoke a rural dialect of Igbo that was not Anglicised like ours and he chewed rice with his mouth open and you saw the rice, soggy like old cereal, until he swallowed. When he answered the phone, he said, “Hold on”, as we had taught him to, but then he would drop the phone back on the cradle.

He washed our clothes in metal basins, and pegged them on the line tied from the mango to the guava tree in the backyard. It took him hours. At first, my mother shouted: “Don’t stop your work to stare at every single lizard that goes by!” Then, later, she left him alone until he was done. Whenever. Kenechukwu and I sat on the steps while he worked. The air smelled faintly of smoke from people burning things far away and the kree-kree-kree sounds came from grasshoppers in the lawn and blue birds and yellow butterflies flitted around and Fide told us stories about magic.

“One woman in my village turned into a cat and came to attack her neighbour but the neighbour broke the leg of the cat and the next morning, the woman was limping,” he would say, as though magic was something we all practised. He would shift on the low wooden stool, his legs on either side of the metal wash basin, before launching into another story. On hot afternoons when the sun made topaz patterns on the glass louvres of the kitchen, Fide told us stories about birds; folk stories where birds flew up to the sky to ask God for rain, and nature stories where birds made their nests with bits of hair they picked up outside the barber’s hut in his village.

“I can catch some birds for you,” he said. And he dropped breadcrumbs in a staggered line from the dustbin outside, up the short steps that led into the kitchen, through the open backdoor, and into the kitchen. He crouched behind the door. When the birds followed the breadcrumbs into the kitchen, he slammed the door and dashed after them. Once he cracked a louvre, once he tore the mosquito netting on the window, once he broke my mother’s bowl. But he always caught the birds. He put them in punctured cartons for us and we fed them bread and garri. The birds died after a day or two. One stayed four days, and when it finally died, Fide held its rigid, feathery form in his hand and said, joking: “It’s in the sky now asking God for bread.”

Many years later, after Fide died, I would think about this: an image of a bird raising a stiff wing to ask God for bread.

MY MOTHER OFTEN SHOUTED at Fide. She was creative with her Igbo insults. “You are a fat millipede, nnukwu esu!” she would say when he took too long to do something. “Look at him, ike akpi, with the buttocks of a scorpion,” when he forgot yet another thing she’d asked him to do. Or: “May dogs lick your eyes!” when he didn't tell the truth. Or: “May cholera strike you!” When she shouted at him in English, it was less interesting.

She asked Fide to start dinner in the afternoons because of how long it took him — jollof rice alone took him four hours. Years later, when I started to cook, I wondered just what it was that made Fide so slow. One afternoon stands out in my mind. Fide at the Formica-topped kitchen table, the one that had cockroach eggs underneath, scraping the scales off a tilapia with a knife. The tilapia’s dead, beady eyes stared at me. Fide worked with slow, deliberate motions, scrape, pause, scrape, pause. The raw-fish smell sickened me. There were transparent scales on Fide’s chin, on his arms, on the kitchen floor.

“You’re taking for ever to do that!” I said.

“It’s like preparing a body for funeral,” Fide said. “You take your time to do it well.”

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