People laugh when I tell them how Maka died. They think I’m joking.
“Bole and fish ke? No be that one wey dey Mile 3?”
And then they laugh louder, like it’s just another Port Harcourt gist. Something to chew with cold Coke on a plastic chair under a leaking zinc roof.
But I never laugh. Not because I lack humor, but because once you’ve watched someone go quiet before their time, every joke starts to sound like a funeral drum.
Her name was Chiamaka. Everyone on our street called her Maka Bole, like she was married to the food. And in some way, I think she was. She loved it with a devotion that made everything else seem optional. Every Friday, no matter how broke she was or how angry the rain got, Maka would go to Mile 3 to buy from the same woman, Mama Confidence. Roasted plantain, smoky and sweet. Charred yam if the woman had done extra that day. And always catfish, its eyes wide, its belly soaked in pepper. She called it “deliverance in foil”.
She used to say, “If I ever die, bury me with that sauce. Let the angels know I had taste”.
She said things like that all the time. Maka had a way of dressing ordinary things in laughter and making them feel divine.
We met during NYSC in Calabar. She was the one who braided my hair when I couldn’t afford the salon. She laughed at the way I flinched and said that I had “Lagos scalp.” We didn’t become friends immediately, but one evening she invited me to eat white soup with her, and that was it. From then on, everything was shared—food, stories, plans, heartbreaks, and those long nights where light never came and the heat clung to your skin like punishment.
After service, we moved to Port Harcourt together. Maka got a job as a receptionist at a fading hotel near Rumuola, the kind where the AC never worked and the manager spoke like he was owed something by the world. I picked up a teaching gig at a private school in Rukpokwu that paid us whenever the principal remembered we were alive. We rented a self-contained in Diobu, the kind of place where the paint peeled in strips and rats moved like landlords.
But Maka made it feel like a home.
She filled the space with music. Old songs from Bright Chimezie, Onyeka Onwenu, and sometimes Asa, when she was feeling deep. She would fling her bra across the room like it had insulted her, tie one of my wrappers, and dance in front of the mirror while I graded student essays. Sometimes we sat on the floor to paint our toenails and complain about Nigeria like we were in charge of fixing it. She was loud and chaotic, but her presence softened the walls.
When she was sad, she never admitted it outright. She would simply say, “I need bole”, and off she would go, pink umbrella in hand, slippers slapping the wet ground, into the smoke and chaos of Mile 3. She said the rain made the bole sweeter, said the smoke met the plantain like lovers reuniting.
She used food to hold herself together. On the days when the hotel withheld salaries, when her period came late, when her mother called to ask for money she didn’t have—bole was her therapy. That soft plantain, the pepper, the char on the yam. It was how she reminded herself that joy could still be purchased with ₦1,500.
She used to keep all her food nylons in a corner of the kitchen. I once teased her that she could start her own recycling company, but she said they reminded her of what it meant to be alive. To crave something. To walk through the rain just to taste it. Some days, she’d rewrap the leftover foil and sniff it, eyes closed, like she was memorizing happiness.
One Friday, I begged her not to go.
The rain was violent that day. Port Harcourt rain, the type that pounds zinc like war drums. The kind that fills the street gutters and drags forgotten wrappers down the road. I called her while she was at work.
“Abeg, just come home. This rain get attitude.”
She laughed. Deep, throaty laughter. The kind that made you laugh too, even if you didn’t find it funny.
“Na now the fish go sweet pass,” she said. “When the rain meets the fire, something magical happens.”
And so, as always, she went.
She came home soaked, her umbrella mangled like a failed prayer. She changed into dry clothes, wrapped herself in one of my old Ankara wrappers, and spread the food on our bed like it was Christmas lunch. It was her ritual. Bole and fish on Fridays, shared on bare thighs, no spoons.
We took turns—one piece for her, one for me. She hummed between bites. Said the pepper had graduated to a new level. She licked her fingers and said, “If I marry, the person must accept that this is part of my bride price”.
I told her she was mad. She said, “Yes, but at least I’m mad with sense”.
Later that night, she coughed. Not a small cough. Not the type that comes and goes. This one sounded like it had claws. I brought her water. Rubbed her back. She waved it off and said it was the pepper, that she just needed to sleep.
She lay on the bed with her head resting against the pillow, eyes half-shut, still smiling.
I woke up before sunrise. NEPA had brought light. The room was quiet except for the hum of the fan. Maka wasn’t snoring. I thought she was in a deep sleep. I called her name. No answer. I shook her shoulder.
Still.
Her eyes were open. Not fully, but enough to unsettle me. Her mouth slightly parted. Her right hand curled beside her like it was still holding onto something. I knew then.
Before my loud screams attracted the neighbors. Before they banged my door, asking me to open. Before the landlord broke the door. Before the lamentations and prayers and someone pouring salt water into her mouth like it would resurrect her.
I knew.
The hospital said it was a reaction. Something in the food. Maybe the fish wasn’t properly preserved. Maybe the oil was reused too many times. Maybe it was the pepper. They used words like “toxins” and “histamines”. But none of the words brought her back.
She was twenty-seven.
Mama Confidence closed her stand for two weeks. When she returned, she looked thinner. Her face, usually unreadable, now seemed hollow. She didn’t say anything when I passed by. Just turned her head and dusted her tray like she was cleaning grief off it.
People still came. Even more than before.
“Na that woman wey her fish kill that girl,” they whispered.
And still they queued. Laughed. Bought more. Because that’s how people are. Morbid curiosity wrapped in nylon.
I never bought from her again.
Maka didn’t get a proper funeral. Her body was transported by bus to her family in Enugu, and I couldn’t afford the trip. I called her sister, Chioma, and we cried on the phone without saying much. She sent me a picture of the burial—red soil, a wooden cross, and a single white flower that looked out of place.
I packed Maka’s clothes in silence. I kept the wrappers. Burned her journal by mistake because it was tucked under the mattress with the old newspapers. I sat in that room for a whole week, listening to her playlist on repeat. She had a song for every emotion. Her grief song was Asa’s “Bibanke”. Her joy song was Bright Chimezie’s “Happy People”.
Sometimes I talked to her aloud. Told her how the landlord finally fixed the bathroom tap. How the rats had gone silent. How I saw her former manager on a keke and he looked like a man chasing his own shadow. I told her I still graded essays, still struggled to make rent, still didn’t have answers for the questions we once laughed about.
Port Harcourt people know how to mourn and move on in the same breath. Maka became gist. The girl who died for bole and fish.
Someone said her ghost still lingers there on rainy Fridays. That if you listen well when the zinc begins to rattle, you’ll hear her laugh in the smoke.
I moved out of our room a month later. I couldn’t stay. The wall still smelled of her body cream. Her slippers remained at the corner of the bed for days, like they were waiting for her. Every time it rained, I expected the door to open and her voice to fill the space with another joke.
Sometimes I still call her number. Just to hear it ring.
The craving still comes. Every now and then, I dream of the pepper. The softness of the plantain. The crunch of roasted yam dipped in sauce that burns your throat and blesses your soul.
But I don’t eat it.
Not anymore.
I sit with the craving, and with the grief it carries. Some days, I think of her and smile. Other days, I ache.
And when people ask me what happened to her, I tell them the truth.
Yes, she died. E
