At the hospital, Timileyin learned that someone in his family had donated a kidney for his transplant. He couldn’t process it at first. The tests had shown neither of his sisters was a match, and they were the only ones who came to mind whenever he thought of family. After all, they were the last people left who seemed to care.
This wasn’t to say he had no other relatives. He had grown up under the care of his maternal aunt, Hanifa, but his world had always revolved around his immediate family — his mother, two elder sisters, and father, in that exact order.
His mother had died years ago, suddenly, and without warning. A heart attack struck her at home, and the delay in getting her to the hospital sealed her fate. His sisters, Oluwadara and Oreoluwa, had since built their own lives. Both married, both busy with their small families. They visited him at the hospital, taking turns, after he collapsed in his room one Friday night.
At just 24, Timi had already been through his fair share of struggles. He had left Aunt Hanifa’s house at 19, determined to be independent. He found a single-room apartment in Dopemu, Agege, not far from Lagos’s centre. It wasn’t much. Cheap rent came with compromises. The toilet was a walk away, and the kitchen was shared with eight other tenants. Oddly, the kitchen had once been the ninth apartment but had been converted after the tenants demanded it. Life in that place was hardly ideal. But, for Timi, it was home, for a while, at least.
Before turning 24, Timi had drifted through an assortment of jobs, each more uninspiring than the last. He washed cars under the merciless Lagos sun, manned the counter at a Bet9ja shop where dreams of fortune evaporated as quickly as they formed, and climbed rooftops as a DStv installer, coaxing signals into homes far steadier than his own. His most recent job, operating machinery in a detergent factory, felt like the end of the line. He told himself it would be his final stop before following his mother to wherever she now resided.
Timi’s path had diverged sharply from those of his sisters. While they pursued higher education and built stable lives, Timi abandoned the idea of school when his WAEC results came out. His sister, Oluwadara, had tried to convince him to rewrite the exams, but he refused, waving off her optimism with an air of resignation. He had long believed that school wasn’t meant for him.
Even before the results, school had been a place of defeat. Timi had spent most of his school days in the back row, his head resting against the cool surface of his desk, his position in the class rankings perpetually stuck near the bottom. Retaking the exams, he reasoned, would be an exercise in futility. The outcome was as clear as a cloudless sky, another failure waiting to happen.
Timi’s father, Jerry, occupied a strange and uncomfortable corner of his memories. A name at the bottom of his mental list of family ties, marked not by affection, but by something closer to regret. Timi couldn’t reconcile this man with the father his elder sisters had once admired so freely. But how could he? He had been just eight years old when Jerry’s world came crashing down, when the man lost his job and, with it, much of what made him whole.
Jerry had worked as a distribution substation operator for the now-defunct NEPA, a respectable position that demanded precision and caution. But his career ended in a single catastrophic moment, the kind of mistake that rewrote lives. Safety protocols were overlooked, and a linesman died — a man consumed by an unforgiving surge of 11,000 volts, and his body burned beyond recognition.
The incident wasn’t entirely Jerry’s doing. “Who racks out a feeder so early?” Jerry had grumbled, his irritation directed at Demola, the distribution station operator (DSO) he replaced that day. “What kind of idiot forgets to inform the next guy? Absolute incompetence.” The words rattled in his head, mingling with fatigue and the dull roar of his impatience.
That morning, Jerry had been thrown off course by a crushing wave of Lagos traffic, the type that sapped energy and scattered one’s focus. By the time he got to the station, he was running late, his mind already unravelling. In his frustration, he chose to restore power to an outgoing feeder, which Demola had failed to tag with safety markers.
The man who bore the weight of that decision was Idowu. Even at eight, Timi had etched that name into his memory, though the mechanics of the tragedy that took Idowu’s life were beyond his understanding. What he knew came from listening to his father’s grief spilled out in endless fragments. Idowu, he learned, had two wives and four children. He was tall and dark-skinned, his frame wiry, yet strong. He worked with cables the way an artist might handle a brush, his sharp chin lending an almost sculptural quality to his profile. These details, scattered through Jerry’s drunken laments, assembled themselves into an image that Timi couldn’t shake.
At first, Timi approached his father’s dismissal with a kind of childlike detachment. He didn’t fully grasp why Jerry muttered Idowu’s name in his sleep or why he staggered home late, reeking of alcohol, bottles clinking in his hands. What he did notice was the change in how the man who once carried a semblance of order now seemed unmoored, as if whatever anchored him to the world had been cut loose. The father Timi thought he knew had become someone harder to recognise, someone blurred and unsteady, like a figure fading from a half-remembered dream.
Timi’s mother, a native of Abeokuta, took charge when Jerry faltered. She worked as a cleaner at the Lagos State Secretariat in Alausa, Ikeja, keeping to a strict schedule. By 8 a.m., she would leave the house, returning at 5 p.m., her routine alternating between workdays and rest days. Jerry’s previous job as a DSO had been less predictable, with Mondays and Thursdays on, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, each shift stretching from 7 a.m. to 7 a.m. the next day.
The DSO job offered more than just a meagre salary. Allowances and bribes had poured in steadily, often eclipsing his official earnings fourfold. Back then, Timi’s mother worked because she chose to, not out of necessity. But when Jerry lost his job, her modest income became their only lifeline.
Timi’s mother died when he was 10, and her absence became a constant source of unease for him. He often found himself staring at her photographs, feeling drawn to and disconnected from the woman they captured. Her features — the small eyes, the curved chin, the flat nose — felt strange, as though they belonged to a stranger wearing her name. This isn’t her, he would think, trying to summon an image that aligned with the mother he had known.
In his memories, she was a woman of substance, both in figure and presence. Her hands were puffy, her stomach pronounced, her frame exuding a tacit strength. Yet, she was beautiful. Dazzling, even. Her skin, deep and radiant, seemed to catch the sunlight, refracting it as though she held an inner brilliance. She didn’t just exist — she commanded attention, a vivid contrast to the dim reproduction in the photos his sisters clung to. They felt incomplete, distant from the woman who had been a world unto herself.
When the doubt became too much, another memory rose to the surface. It was the accident during his first year with Aunt Hanifa. A speeding car had grazed him, sending him tumbling onto the asphalt. His head struck the ground sharply, a crack that sent panic through the air. He was rushed to the hospital, where he survived. It was the only time in his life he had been taken to the hospital for something unrelated to his kidney failure.
Timi’s academic struggles couldn’t be pinned entirely on the accident. His father, Jerry, had studied mechanical engineering before becoming a DSO, and his mother, though working as a cleaner, had a polytechnic diploma in agricultural science. This contrast gnawed at Timi, leaving him to wonder why he alone seemed like the anomaly. In a simpler, more straightforward world, it would have been easy to believe he wasn’t Jerry’s son. Maybe that was closer to the truth than anyone cared to admit.
Yet, Jerry never treated him differently. There was no searching look, no unease, no hint of a question hovering in his father’s eyes. He never scolded Timi for his poor performance in school, never showed frustration or disappointment. If anything, it felt as though Jerry had expected it. His only son. Or, perhaps, not his son at all.
Why would he care about me? Timi would ask himself. I don’t even look like anyone else in this family.
No one had ever said anything to confirm his fears, but they didn’t need to. He felt it, the way one felt the shift of a breeze or the weight of a glance — something subtle, yet undeniable. Being an outsider wasn’t something anyone had to put into words for him to know. It was there, lodged deep inside, an unshakable truth that lived with him every day.
Timi’s resentment towards his father took root on one Saturday morning. He had returned from the playground, still flushed with the carefree energy of childhood, only to step into a scene that would stay with him forever. His mother lay crumpled on the floor. His father sprawled on the living room couch, reeking of alcohol, dead to the world in his drunken haze.
He didn’t know what was wrong with his mother, only that she needed help — immediate, urgent help. He tried to lift her, but she was too heavy for his small frame. Desperation drove him to his father, shaking him, calling out, and pleading for him to wake. But Jerry’s stupor was impenetrable, his body slack and unresponsive.
Timi ran to the neighbour’s house, his panic spilling into hurried, fragmented words. Together, they rushed back to the house, lifted his mother, and hurried her to the hospital. But it was too late. She didn’t make it. The doctor’s words were lost in the blur of that day, except for one line that stuck — it was a heart attack, and if she had been brought in earlier, she might have lived.
That day reshaped Timi’s feelings towards his father, turning indifference into a slow-burning resentment. His sisters didn’t share his anger. They looked at Jerry with pity, as if he, too, was a victim of the tragedy. Jerry seemed shaken by the loss, sobered by the realisation that his children now depended on him. Or, as Timi saw it, that his two daughters depended on him.
A few months after his mother’s death, Timi was sent to live with Aunty Hanifa in Badagry, while Jerry took up a job as a revenue collector at a bus stop in Oshodi, where they had lived.
In Badagry, Timi was enrolled in a government school as a JSS1 student, though he should have been placed in JSS2. He didn’t pass the entrance exams, and the principal, a man with the shortest cropped hair Timi had ever seen, decided to hold him back.
Where Timi struggled academically, he made up for it with an almost uncanny intuition. Even as a child, he had a way of understanding things others left unsaid. He could tell when his parents weren’t on good terms, even though their fights were rare. He also picked up on patterns with his sisters. For instance, whenever Oluwadara, the eldest, called home from FUTA during her third year, her request to speak directly to their mother always meant one thing — she needed money. These subtleties rarely escaped Timi, even though no one ever spelled them out for him.
In Badagry, Timi’s knack for reading situations kept him out of trouble as much as possible. Yet, life with his mother’s step-sister presented its challenges. He wasn’t openly mistreated, but the signs of his outsider status were etched into the fabric of daily life. His plate stood apart, his bed was the smallest in the house, and while Aunty Hanifa’s children wore crisp uniforms to private schools, he trudged to the local government school. Even his lack of chores, a detail that might have seemed a privilege, felt like a quiet rejection. He wasn’t part of their rhythm, their system. It was as though they viewed him as something delicate or unwanted, requiring careful handling, lest he disrupt their fragile balance.
The way they treated him was efficient, not cruel, like managing a problem they hadn’t asked for but couldn’t discard. At night, when everyone else was asleep, he would steal moments with the television, as if reclaiming some small part of himself. His aunt and her husband only took him to school once, for the entrance exams, and never again. PTA meetings, report cards, and even the simple act of asking about his day weren’t for him. He existed at the edges of their lives, a figure present but unacknowledged, like a shadow cast in the wrong direction.
For years, Timi harboured a quiet hope that his father would come and take him back. But the call never came, and the knock never came. His sisters called him often, their questions skimming the surface of his reality.
“How are you?” they would ask.
“I’m fine. Aunt Hanifa and her husband are treating me well,”he would reply, the words automatic, hollow.
When they asked about school, he gave the same refrain: “Fine.”
It was easier that way, easier than letting the truth slip out. The truth wasn’t a clean thing he could simply say. It was caught in his throat, tangled in his chest, until all he could do was hold his breath and wait for the call to end.
Timi’s only friends in Badagry were Ali and Ridwan, a trio bound by circumstance rather than similarity. Ridwan, with his sharp wit and streetwise charm, lived with his grandmother. His older brothers, deep into the world of internet fraud, had stashed her away in a modest house in Badagry, a contingency plan for when their flashy Island life inevitably collapsed. They sent Ridwan along for good measure, hoping the distance might rewrite his story.
Ali, by contrast, came from the chaos of a sprawling polygamous family, where siblings numbered somewhere north of twenty-one, each fighting for space in a home that never seemed big enough.
It was Ridwan who first handed Timi a roll of Indian hemp.
“Don’t worry,” he said, lighting up with practised ease. “This stuff sharpens the mind. Your Fs? They’ll turn into Bs. Want an A? You’ll need colos for that. But let’s be real, you can’t afford it.” He smirked as if daring Timi to prove him wrong.
Ridwan wasn’t exactly a star student, but he was sharp enough to hold a spot in the top ten of their class of eighty. Timi’s decision to smoke had nothing to do with ambitions of academic brilliance, though. It wasn’t about grades or climbing out of mediocrity. It was about building a wall between himself and the void he carried, the one that had grown deeper since his mother’s death. Smoking offered a way to step back, to detach from the world that demanded his presence but gave nothing in return.
Yet, there was something about Aunty Hanifa that kept Timi guessing. She wasn’t one to show affection outright, but her actions spoke in ways she likely didn’t realise. Late at night, when she thought he was asleep, her eyes would linger on him, her face drawn into an expression he couldn’t name. When he came home late, she never raised her voice or asked questions, but her concern was evident in the way she moved — quieter, slower, as if waiting for something to go wrong.
Sometimes, she left food aside for him. On nights when the pot was empty, she would prepare a meal and tuck it away in the fridge. It wasn’t much, but it was there, waiting, like a quiet reassurance. Timi would come home, eat without a word, and slip back to his room. There was an unspoken thread between them, fragile yet steady, pulling just enough to remind them of each other. Neither dared to address it, as though giving it form might unravel whatever tenuous understanding they shared.
When the doctor told Timi that his father had donated a kidney for his transplant, it felt like a floodgate had opened, memories surging through him in chaotic waves. Jerry had disappeared from his life when he was ten. Since then, they hadn’t spoken, not a single word exchanged. Timi had never dared to ask about him. Not directly or through anyone. Oddly, even though Timi now lived in Dopemu, Agege, a short distance from Oshodi, where Jerry had once worked, their lives never intersected. It felt intentional, as if some unseen hand had drawn a line between them, holding them apart for reasons unknown.
In Badagry, Jerry was a ghost unspoken of. Aunty Hanifa’s household never mentioned his name, and for years, it seemed as though he had been erased from existence. Perhaps they thought it kinder that way, or maybe they simply didn’t think Timi deserved the privilege of knowing.
Before Timi started smoking at thirteen, Jerry would appear to him in dreams. In one, Jerry pulled him into a tight embrace, murmuring words of apology, though Timi couldn’t remember what they were. Then, his mother emerged from a car, her hand motioning for them to join her. She didn’t look like the faded photograph everyone had claimed was her. She looked alive and radiant. Together, they climbed into the car and drove to a garden where the world seemed to bloom just for them. The grass was impossibly green, almost luminous, and a picnic mat lay spread beneath a wide tree, laden with snacks and drinks. The air smelled of lilies, softened with the faintest trace of strawberries. The breeze moved through the scene like a melody, rustling the trees and coaxing leaves to fall, each one drifting down as though choreographed to perfection.
It was a dream unlike any other, the kind that stayed with him, that lingered, nestled deep in his mind like a secret refuge. Even now, he couldn’t remember what had pulled him from it, but its warmth lingered, a fleeting oasis of solace. In reality, he didn’t long for grand gestures. That would have been asking for too much. All he ever truly wanted was simple — to see Jerry and his mother again, to be a family, however broken.
But thoughts of his mother’s death always shifted something within him, stirring an ache too heavy to bear. Resentment for Jerry would rise, choking any fragile hope of reconciliation. He carried that bitterness in silence, with no one to share it with, no way to untangle the knotted emotions inside him.
When Timi started smoking, it became his release, a pathway to somewhere distant, somewhere his pain couldn’t follow. But this new dreamscape wasn’t about Jerry or his mother. It was about something else entirely. It was about breaking free, finding success, and living on his own terms. No family. No ties. Just himself, alone and unburdened.
Timi was never the archetype of a teenager. As he grew older, he avoided the usual trappings of youth. No romances, no late-night parties promising chaos and abandon. His routine was simple — school, home, and then the uncompleted building where he and Ridwan smoked. He was careful not to get caught and managed to keep it hidden from everyone, including Aunty Hanifa, at least, until he turned 24, when the doctor revealed that his kidney failure was caused by his habits. Or perhaps she had simply chosen to ignore it all along.
However, life at Aunty Hanifa’s house was a far cry from anything Timi had known. At his parents’, mornings began at 6 a.m. In Hanifa’s world, the day started at 4 a.m. The family would gather for prayers, a ritual that marked the beginning of a tightly choreographed routine. Chores followed swiftly, though Timi was spared from these. Even so, sleep wasn’t an option once the day began. By 6 a.m., the house was abuzz, everyone dressed and ready to face the long day ahead. They left the house together, a small procession moving with precision, bound by necessity.
Hanifa worked as a trader at Trade Fair Market, a sprawling hub of commerce miles away from Badagry. Her husband, a banker, commuted in the same direction to LASU’s GTBank branch. Every morning, the family trekked for thirty minutes to reach the nearest bus stop, navigating the pothole-riddled roads with practised resilience. The children’s school was conveniently along the way in Iyana-Iba, a stop that aligned with their parents’ route.
Timi, however, had a solitary journey. His school was close enough to walk to, but far enough to require an almost hour-long trek each day.
The roads in Badagry, notorious for their deep craters and uneven terrain, made vehicular transport expensive and impractical. Motorbike fares, accumulated over a month, were steep enough to feed a person for weeks. To offset his daily walk, Aunty Hanifa gave him ₦150 instead of the usual ₦100 for transport, with a small concession for the distance he covered on foot.
Each day, Timi arrived at school as early as 6:40 a.m., long before even the most dedicated teachers showed up around 7:30. His early arrival and immaculate appearance became defining traits, earning him a reputation among his peers. Yet, when he became the punctuality prefect, he defied expectations. He rarely handed out punishments for tardiness. Instead, he sympathised with the challenges others faced in getting to school on time. His leniency wasn’t a weakness. It was understanding, and it solidified the bond between him and his fellow students, making him one of the most respected prefects in the school.
By the time Timi graduated from secondary school at 16, he and Ali had started frequenting Ridwan’s house. It was there they decided, almost inevitably, to try their hands at internet fraud. Their decision wasn’t born out of ambition but a shared sense of defeat. Having failed their WAEC exams and believing their families didn’t care, they saw no other path forward.
For Timi, though, that belief wasn’t entirely true. When news of his kidney failure reached Aunty Hanifa, she wasted no time informing his sisters. They reached out, urging him to retake the exams, but Timi was adamant in his refusal. Strangely, it was Aunty Hanifa who seemed the least involved. After a few complaints, she let the issue drop entirely, her silence giving him the freedom to continue down the road he had chosen.
At 17, he and his friends had begun earning enough from their schemes to draw attention. By the time Timi turned 18, Ridwan and Ali decided it was time to move to Lagos Island, chasing bigger opportunities. But Timi hesitated. Despite the lukewarm treatment he received at Aunty Hanifa’s home, he couldn’t bring himself to leave. He felt indebted to her family in ways he couldn’t quite articulate. Moving away felt like a betrayal. So, while his friends pursued new horizons, Timi stayed behind, tethered to a household that barely acknowledged him. It was the beginning of a slow, inevitable separation from the only friends he had ever had.
By the time Timi turned 19, the internet fraud business — which was once a steady source of income — had dried up, leaving him and his friends scraping by on their savings. Ali had returned to the neighbourhood briefly, only to leave again for the North with his family after his father’s death. Ridwan had moved to share a cramped apartment with his elder brother. And so, Timi found himself alone. It was then, sitting in the echo of their absence, that he realised it might finally be time to find a place of his own.
The day he left Aunty Hanifa’s house, he noticed tears welling in her eyes. She had just stepped out of the kitchen, so he told himself it was from the onions she had been chopping. But the image stayed with him, hovering at the edges of his mind like a question no one dared to ask.
In his first month at Dopemu, Aunty Hanifa called him just once to check on him. “How are you settling in?” she asked, her voice carrying the warmth of distant coals. It was the only call he received from her until much later when illness, like an uninvited guest, came knocking, and his failing kidneys demanded a transplant.
Dopemu had its own rhythm, a subtle thrum beneath the chaos, and in that rhythm, Timi found the threads of connection to his siblings. They welcomed him into family events — naming ceremonies, birthdays, gatherings where memories were reknit. They asked polite questions about his life, their expressions hovering somewhere between concern and restrained judgment. They weren’t thrilled with his progress, but they didn’t seem disappointed either.
Before landing a job as a machine operator at a detergent factory, Timi found himself swept up in the fervour of a Lagos governorship election. In Dopemu, he rallied the youth with a determination that surprised even him. The party he supported claimed victory, and as a reward, he was enrolled in a training programme. There, he learned the precision of operating machines, his mind absorbing the process with surprising ease. It was strange, he thought, how years of smoking weed seemed to have sharpened certain corners of his intellect, as though dormant parts of his brain had been coaxed awake.
The factory paid him a salary of just over ₦400,000 a month. It wasn’t extravagant, but was enough to fuel his dreams. Timi began saving diligently, sketching plans for a better life and apartment. But, then, like a thief in the night, his health betrayed him.
The day the doctor told him to prepare for surgery was the day two figures visited his sickbed. One was Aunty Hanifa. Beside her stood a man Timi didn’t recognise, though something about him felt oddly familiar. The man offered a smile, awkward and uneven. Timi stared, his breath catching as the realisation struck. The man looked like him — older, worn down by years, but unmistakably similar. It was as if time had taken his face and etched its marks deeply onto another.
Aunty Hanifa stepped forward, the man trailing just a step behind her. Timi’s gaze locked onto her, his chest tightening with anticipation. He waited, braced for the explanation that had been simmering in her silence for so many years.
When she began to speak, her words were tangled, hesitant. Timi tried to focus, but the beginning of her confession slipped past him, like water through cupped hands.
“Jerry isn’t your biological father,” she finally said, her voice breaking. “This man is…”
“What do you mean?” Timi asked. “Then, who is Jerry to me? Who am I to my sisters?”
Hanifa’s lips trembled. “Jerry… Jerry is my sister’s husband. And, I… I’m your biological mother.” Her tears came now, falling in slow, deliberate trails.
Timi’s breath caught. His thoughts collided, scattering in all directions. “You’re lying.”
The man, who had stood silent until now, took a cautious step forward. “I’m sorry, my son,” he said softly, reaching out as if to bridge the chasm forming between them.
“Don’t touch me!” Timi snapped. He turned his fury back to Aunty Hanifa, his voice low but charged. “Where’s my father, Jerry? Where’s my father?”
She looked down, avoiding his gaze. “Jerry… Jerry died a few weeks after he sent you to live with me.”
“No,” Timi whispered, shaking his head as though the motion might undo her words. “That can’t be true.”
“Honestly,” she said, her voice steady, despite the tears still streaming down. “This is the truth.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he demanded. His tone cracked, rising in desperation.
“Because,” she said, “we thought… losing both your parents so close together, at that age, would be too much. We thought it would break you.”
Timi laughed bitterly, a sound devoid of humour. “And watching me suffer in silence wasn’t too much?” He glared at her. “You let me believe I had no one. You let me suffer, and you claim to be my mother?”
“I wanted to hold you,” she said, her voice pleading now, barely audible. “I wanted to tell you the truth, but…”
“But what?” Timi’s voice was cold, relentless.
“I wasn’t proud,” she said, her head bowing further. “I wasn’t proud of bringing you into this world.”
Timi froze, the weight of her words pressing down on him like a stone. He took a slow breath and then spoke, his voice barely a whisper. “I hope you’ll be proud of my death.”
“Don’t say that,” she pleaded, her voice trembling as she stepped forward, reaching out as if to take his hand. But he pulled it away, retreating beyond her grasp. “Please, don’t say that.”
“Just one more question,” he said. “Do my sisters know? Did they know I wasn’t their brother?”
Hanifa hesitated, her silence answering before her words could. “Yes,” she finally said. “Everyone knew… except you.”
Timi didn’t respond. He lay there, unmoving, as if the world had lost its balance and he was searching for something to hold on to. It seemed another bout of kidney failure had struck, most likely because the transplant was failing. Then, with barely a sign, he slipped into unconsciousness.
When his eyes fluttered open again, he was no longer in the hospital. Instead, he found himself in a garden he recognised, a place that had always lingered in his dreams. The air was sweet, carrying a faint floral scent, and the trees rose high, their branches swaying gently as though moved by an unseen rhythm. Beneath one of them stood Jerry and his wife, their faces alight with a warmth that seemed otherworldly. They greeted him as if they had been waiting for this moment all along. ♦
Haliru Ali Musa is a Nigerian writer and power engineer. He believes that before problems can be solved, people must first care about them. Whether working on Nigeria’s electrical grid or crafting narratives, his goal remains the same — connecting people to causes that matter. He’s an alumnus of the Nigerian Academy of Letters’ Creative Writing Workshop and the winner of the inaugural Alexander Nderitu Prize for World Literature 2024. His work has appeared in Farafina Blog, Akpata Magazine, The African Griot Review, and elsewhere.
