A Tempered Destiny By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Our father told us on a harmattan morning. Outside the dining room window, the wind was cold and dry, the whistling pine was swaying, a cock was chasing a squawking hen, the red dust was rising and our mother’s spirit was dancing in its whirls. My brother Chuma and I, lips smeared with Vaseline, were playing scrabble at the dining table and listening to Celestine Ukwu on the stereo. A drop of pap, which had not been cleaned off after our breakfast of akamu and akara, had become a hard-dried smudge on the table mat. I remember the details of that morning well because this way I don’t have to remember our father’s exact words as he told us that he and Aunty Ife were getting married and we would all be moving with her to Lagos. Chuma and I stared at him. We were not surprised about the marriage, far from it; we had followed the courtship for six years. Our father took us to her house every Sunday for lunch. She made something she called Fruit Crumble Pie, when she piled sliced mangoes and oranges and cinnamon on a flat piece of dough and baked it until her whole house smelled edible. She collected tiny animal figurines, the ones that came in Elephant detergent cartons, and she arranged them all over her dining table; and so in addition to lecture notes and hardcover books, we had to move aside plastic blue rhinos and giraffes to make room for our plates. Her hallway was so full of potted plants it looked like a garden and sometimes, snails and caterpillars wiggled on the floor, next to the cartons of toilet soap and dried milk. She took those cartons to the Motherless Babies Home on Saturdays. Chuma and I went with her sometimes. “Hold the children as if you know them,” she would say, before we went into the room full of tattered toddlers and screaming babies. Aunty Ife was perhaps our father’s age and had never married, but on her shelves were photos of nephews and nieces and children of friends, with birthdays scrawled on the cardboard frames. Mine and Chuma’s had been displayed shortly after we met her. We stayed with her whenever our father went away to a conference. It was on one such visit that Chuma hit me on the stomach and as I screamed, Aunty Ife came into the room, roughly pushed me towards Chuma and said, “Fight for yourself! Hit him back!” At first, I was too startled to do anything, then I hit Chuma in the stomach and he was too startled to hit back. I do not remember Chuma ever hitting me again.

We liked Aunty Ife. We liked that she wore billowy adire boubous and never tried to be our mother and always humoured the stories our father told us about our mother’s spirit being in the wind, in the rainbow, in the growing grass. We liked that her hair was a natural afro and that she could argue loudly with our father, both of them professors of political science, and that her name Ifeadigo meant “Light Has Come” and that her presence in our lives was a light about which she was entirely unselfconscious although we were of course not aware of this at the time. We liked her. And so we were not sad that she and our father were finally getting married – it was not the reason we stared silently when he told us. The reason was that we would move to Lagos. That we would leave Nsukka.

I am sitting on a New York to Lagos flight now,  Read More,

This girl is good, no wonder she's much celebrated. Excellent crafting, i bet i need some lessons from her

How can I get e-book version of her publications?
I need to buy them