‘You need to put on more weight,’ one said. ‘How can your womb function properly inside such a skinny body?’

‘I wonder how you manage the simplest household chores,’ yet another one said. ‘You look like a dried cornstalk that would break into two at the slightest push.’

‘I don’t even know what Paulinus found attractive about you in the first place,’ yet another one said. ‘No breasts, no buttocks… yet you call yourself a woman.’

One afternoon, after my father’s sisters had visited and left, Oluchi, my mother’s niece who was living with us at the time, carried me in her arms and patted my mother’s back until her sobbing subsided.

‘Mama Kingsley,’ she whispered, ‘there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you but I wasn’t sure how to say it before.’

My mother sniffed.

‘The last time I went home, there’s something my mother and Aunty Amaechi were talking about.’

My mother pricked up her ears.

‘They said that because of all these problems Papa Kingsley’s people have been having since their father died, that maybe somebody from their family has padlocked your womb and thrown away the keys so that you won’t be able to have more children.’

My paternal grandfather had died shortly after I was born, leaving behind some few plots of empty land and cassava farms which his living nine-sons-and-fifteen-daughters-from-three-wives had fought vigorously to put inside their pockets. The wrangling had produced such bile that there were suspicions of some family members engaging diabolical means to frustrate others into relinquishing their inheritance. From what Oluchi had said, it appeared that my mother’s family regarded her infertility as the outcome of one of such evil machinations.

Oluchi continued.

‘Mama Kingsley, I think you should do something about it.