The Quiet Cost of Someone Else’s Japa Dream

The morning Chiamaka Eze finally got her American visa, she stood in the driveway of the small bungalow on Allen Avenue and screamed so loudly that Mrs. Okonkwo next door dropped a full bag of pure water on the ground.

It burst open, little sachets rolling across the gutter like startled animals, and Mrs. Okonkwo only stared, hand on her chest, waiting to hear if it was good news or bad news, because in Ikeja, a scream could be either.

Ah ahn, Chiamaka, you don kill somebody? she shouted across the low fence, already half climbing over it in her wrapper.

No oh, Mama, I don get visa! Chiamaka waved the blue passport above her head like a trophy, the embassy sticker still smelling faintly of fresh ink.

By afternoon the whole street knew. The man who sold roasted corn by the junction knew. The conductor on the route to Computer Village knew, shouting it to passengers as if it were his own personal achievement.

Chiamaka had been trying for this visa for three years, three different jobs, two failed relationships her mother blamed squarely on her “japa” obsession, and one very expensive cousin in Houston who kept promising an invitation letter and kept disappearing for months at a time.

What nobody on the street knew, not even Mrs. Okonkwo, who considered herself the unofficial Minister of Information for the entire compound, was that Chiamaka‘s younger brother Emeka had also been trying, quietly, secretly, for his own visa to Canada, and had been rejected exactly nine days before his sister’s approval came through.

He found out about her visa the same way everyone else did, standing in the parlour doorway watching his mother dance around the sitting room to a song playing from her phone, something with the rhythm of Kizz Daniel‘s Buga, except she was singing different words entirely, words about America and breakthrough and testimony.

Emeka, see your sister o, see your sister! his mother sang, pulling him by the wrist into the dance even though his face had gone the particular flat stillness of a man holding something heavy behind his teeth.

He smiled. He clapped. He even lifted his sister off the ground briefly, the way he used to when they were children and she’d come first in her class. But that night, lying on the lower bunk in the room they’d shared as kids and still shared whenever he visited from Surulere, he told her the truth.

They refused me, he said into the darkness, not looking at her. Study permit. Insufficient ties to home, the letter said. As if I no get house, work, mama, everything here.

Chiamaka sat up slowly. The ceiling fan above them clicked on every third rotation, a small persistent stutter neither of them had ever fixed.

Why you no tell me you applied? she asked.

Because if I tell you and I fail, then everybody go dey console me with sorry sorry, and I no want that. I wanted to surprise everybody. Just like you.

The silence between them stretched long enough that a generator somewhere on the street kicked on, its diesel growl filling the gaps where words should have been.

Chiamaka felt the specific, ugly guilt of someone who has gotten exactly what they wanted standing next to someone who has not, the kind of guilt that makes you want to apologize for your own joy.

I go help you reapply, she finally said. We go fix the documents, the bank statement, everything. I get small money saved, I fit support.

You go waste your relocation money on my visa wahala? Emeka turned to look at her now, his eyes catching the thin blue light from his phone screen on the floor.

Na you be my brother. Wetin you want make I do, dance for your failure too?

He laughed then, the real kind, surprised out of him, and for a moment the room felt like it used to when they were nine and twelve, plotting how to steal extra meat from the pot of egusi soup without their mother noticing.

Over the following weeks, the household became a strange theatre of two competing emotions running on the same stage.

There were the visa congratulation parties, three of them, hosted by aunties who each insisted on cooking their own version of jollof rice and arguing afterward about whose was better.

There were envelopes of cash pressed into Chiamaka‘s palm by relatives murmuring blessings for the journey, money she quietly funneled, almost all of it, into her brother’s reapplication fund without telling their mother, because their mother had a particular talent for turning generosity into gossip.

And there was Emeka, sitting at the dining table every evening with a stack of bank statements, employment letters, and a laptop borrowed from a friend in Yaba, redoing his Statement of Purpose for the fourth time while his sister read it over his shoulder, correcting his grammar, telling him where he sounded desperate instead of determined.

You dey beg them too much for this paragraph, she said one night, tapping the screen. You’re not asking permission to exist. You’re showing them why Canada go gain from your presence. Change the tone.

When did you become consultant? he muttered, but he changed it anyway.

The morning Chiamaka left for the airport, three months later, suitcases wrapped in cellophane the way Lagos travelers do, fearing both theft and the unpredictable hands of baggage handlers, Emeka was the one who carried the heaviest bag down to the car, ahead of uncles, ahead of cousins, ahead of even their father who stood by the gate with his hands clasped, trying not to show his face was wet.

Una go land first before me, Chiamaka told her brother at the departure gate of Murtala Muhammed International Airport, both of them ignoring the announcements crackling overhead, the smell of jet fuel and roasted plantain from a nearby kiosk mixing in a way that somehow smelled exactly like goodbye.

But I go still beat you for who reach Canada first sef, since na Toronto your school dey.

We no dey compete again, he said, pulling her into a hug that lasted a few seconds longer than either of them expected. We just dey go.

Six weeks after Chiamaka touched down in Houston, working double shifts at a hospital while studying for her licensing exams, she got the message from Emeka: a screenshot of an approval letter, study permit granted, University of Toronto, faculty of engineering.

She read it twice in the break room, then called her mother, who began screaming so loudly down the line that Chiamaka had to hold the phone away from her ear, laughing, crying a little too, four thousand miles away from a street in Ikeja where, somewhere, Mrs. Okonkwo was probably already telling someone else’s business as if it were breaking news.

Sometimes the people cheering loudest for your miracle are quietly carrying their own disappointment, and the realest love is the kind that keeps clapping anyway, then goes home and starts building you a way out too.