The first day she joined our class, the teacher asked her, “Where do you want to sit?” She looked around and pointed in my direction. She said, “I want to sit next to him.” She walked straight to me, picked the chair next to me, and sat on it. Everyone in the class looked in my direction. Some classmates started clearing their throats. The teacher screamed, “Keep quiet everybody.”

I couldn’t look at her twice. She was so fair I thought my skin was dirty. She didn’t speak any language apart from English. Clearly, she had come from a better school but why her parents chose our school for her was something I could not understand. I couldn’t speak to her for days. She’ll pick my things without my permission. I would warn her in the local language and she’ll say, “Pardon?” I wouldn’t know what next to say so I allowed her to do whatever she wanted with my things.

Then our classmates started calling us couples. At first, it was a joke until it picked steam. She cried about it. She reported one guy to our headmaster and I remember the guy was spread on a table and was lashed in front of the whole class. From there the teasing stopped but I grew more scared of her because I didn’t know what else she was capable of.

When she realized I couldn’t speak English properly, she started teaching me. She’ll say a word and tell me what that word means. I will try using the word in a sentence. I will get it wrong and she’ll laugh at me. She said, “Keep trying you’ll speak better English very soon.” I tried. I continued making mistakes and she continued correcting them. At JSS one she gave me a grammar book and asked me to learn. At JSS two, I was the one doing her technical drawing assignment for her because she couldn’t draw a line and get it to be straight. She helped with English Language and I helped her with Technical drawing.

In form three, I proposed to her. I said it in a letter. A day later, she came to school with the letter and corrected all the grammar in the letter. She said, “Write it again before I will respond to your proposal.” It took me six attempts before I wrote a flawless letter. She said yes. A month later, we wrote our final exams and completed school.” We wrote to each other when we were in secondary school. I loved to read her letters but it looked like she didn’t enjoy reading mine. She returned every letter I wrote to her with red markings. She said, “Correct these sentences. At your level, you shouldn’t be making such mistakes.” I called her English madam. She said, “Speak it properly and you wouldn’t need me to be your madam.

One day I wrote her a letter and I never received a reply. I wrote again and again and again but I had no response. My heart was broken for a while but I moved on when I wasn’t hearing from her again.

I completed secondary school and went to the university and majored in English. The Irony of it. While at the university, I thought of her and thought of the days when we could talk through letters every day. I thought of the first day she stepped into our class. I thought about the fight. I thought about the grammar corrections. I thought about her skin color. I shook my head. I smiled.

After my university education, I was posted to a secondary school in Accra as a teacher. I taught for two years and later bought a taxi. The driver who was driving my taxi always came home with faults and a little money. Sometimes, he’ll come and park the car without the day’s sales. He will tell me, “I had a fault with the gasket. I sent to the fitting shop and they took all the sales.” At some point, I got tired of his lies so I took my taxi and drove it myself.

After school each day, I will hit the road looking for passengers. One afternoon, I picked a certain whiteman at Achimota. He said he was going to the airport. When we got to the airport it was drizzling. Immediately the whitman stepped out, a lady with a kid rushed out of a shed and signaled me to stop. I stopped. She stepped in with her kid. I asked, “Where to please?” She said, “Take me to Osu.” I looked through the rear-view mirror and saw her face. There was something familiar about that face. I looked again and again. I said, “Uriel?” She looked up and asked, “Did you call my name?” I said, “You’re Uriel, right?” She said, “Yes. Have we met before?” I stopped driving. I turned and looked at her. She screamed, “Mintah!” I said, “Yes darling.”

She hugged my neck from behind of my seat. She was screaming like a madwoman. She asked, “What happened to you? Why are you driving a taxi?” I told her my story. I told her I majored in English and she said, “Your lecturers have questions to answer. How much did you pay them?” We laughed about it. When we got to Osu, it was still raining. She sat in the car for a while. We talked a lot more. She said, “I don’t have a local number yet. Can I have yours? I will call you immediately I get a new number.” I gave her my number. Before going out, she said, “And this is my daughter. She’s Mia.” I waved at her.

That was May 2001.

A day later, she called; “Uriel here. Are you ‘taxiing’ or you’re teaching?” I laughed. I said, “I’m not going to be on the road today. I’m tired.” She said, “That’s good. Let’s meet. Let’s catch up. A lot of things to talk about. A lot of past moments to relive.” We met and it was JSS all over again. We talked about how we lost touch. She said, “I didn’t complete school. One day my parents came for me in school and the next day we were in the United States. I didn’t even get time to say goodbye to a lot of people. Sorry about that.” I said, “You had my address so why didn’t you write when you traveled?” She said, “I can’t remember why. Maybe the change was too much for me to bear.”

Then she talked about how she got her daughter; “I married a Whiteman. The marriage lasted for only a year. I was pregnant with Mia when we finalized our divorce.” She talked about so many things that didn’t go well for her. I told her, “We can’t simply understand everything in the universe. We can only learn to live with it.”

She spent three months in Ghana before returning to the US. I drove her to the airport that day. When she waved at me the last time, the light in me dimmed. It felt like I was losing something. Three days later, she called. I said, “I felt the old spark again when you said goodbye. I thought it died but the way I see it, it was only burning silently under its own ashes. We are old now. Can we pick it up again?” She said, “Write me a letter. I miss marking your English.”

So, I wrote a six-page letter. I edited it severally to ensure there were no mistakes. When her reply came a few weeks later, I shuddered to open it. She wrote only one sentence. She said, “Your English is better now so yes.”

In August 2003, we got married. I moved with her to the USA in 2004 and since then, it’s been eighteen years of total bliss with showers of confusion and struggle. We are currently raising two children together, Arnold and Efe. Mia is old now and has left home long ago. We still fight about whose English is the best. One day I gave her a note of things to buy. She came home and didn’t buy one of the things on the list. I said, “Uriel, you missed one of the items.” She said, “Yeah, you missed a comma when you wrote the name of the item so I also missed it. Next time write it well. Punctuation is part of the English language.”

Such an annoying lovely wife.

–Mintah

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