“You are Ezekiel Nwazue’s daughter, no?” Chichi’s mother asked, sitting back down on her book stack.

“Yes,” she said. “You know my father?”

“And your mother,” she said. “And I know of you, I’ve seen you around.”

“Who doesn’t notice her?” Chichi said. But she was smiling.

“So what are you reading?” Sunny asked.

“This dried-up old book?” Chichi’s mother answered. “It’s one of the few that I’ve read many, many times and will never trade back.”

“Why?”

“Carries too many secrets yet to be unlocked. Who’d have thought this would be the case with a book written by a white man, eh?”

“What’s it called?”

“In the Shadow of the Bush by P. Amaury Talbot. Nineteen twelve. Shadows, bushes, jungles, the Dark Continent. Sounds so stereotypical, but there’s much in this old thing. The man who wrote it managed to preserve some important information-unbeknownst to him.”

Sunny wanted to ask more, but something else was nagging at her. Her father believed that all one needed to succeed in life was an education. He had gone to school for many years to become a barrister, and then gone on to be the most successful child in his family. Sunny’s mother was an MD, and often talked about how excelling in school had opened opportunities to her that girls only two decades before didn’t normally get. So Sunny believed in education, too. But here was Chichi’s mother, surrounded by the hundreds of books she’d read, living in a decrepit old mud hut with her daughter.

They sipped their tea and talked about nothing in particular. After a little while, Chichi’s mother got up and said she had to go run some errands.

“Thanks for the tea, Mrs…” Sunny trailed off, embarrassed. She didn’t know whether Chichi’s mother went by Chichi’s father’s name or not. She didn’t even know Chichi’s last name.

“Call me Miss Nimm,” Chichi’s mother said. “Or you can call me Asuquo-that’s my first name.”