DAD
We always had this unspoken rule that turned into an unconscious tradition; everyone eats together at the dining table. No TV, no toys; full concentration on food and family only. We get to talk to each other, questions flood in, and sometimes fights happen.
‘How was school today?’
‘Have you done your homework?’
‘How is work going?’
“Don’t touch my meat!”
“Why are you pinching me?”
“Mommy, tell her to stop, I don’t like it!”
The bickering goes on and on.
Our dining table wasn’t a magnificent one; we were middle-class. It was wooden and had four legs, and freshly laid with table cloth, a big round cooler and a smaller version of the same to follow. The big one carried the swallow, and the smaller one carried the soup and meat. A bowl of water for washing hands is set for Dad. We wash our hands in the kitchen.
What happened around it was what mattered. Mom would set the food out and yell our names to come to the table. Dad would wash his hands, sit down first, and wait. He had this way of looking at a full table, his wife, his children, the food, like he was quietly taking note of something he had prayed for. We didn’t really know that we were the answer to a prayer. We just knew we were hungry.
Dad also had a way of turning dinner into a lecture.
Not intentionally. He would just be sitting there, watching me push the Eba around my plate, looking at the disappointment on my face, and something in his own face would shift, and then the stories would come.
“Do you know what 0-0-1 means?”
I was twelve. I looked up. “They are numbers.”
He laughed. Hard. The kind of laugh that meant the answer was both yes and no.
“It is a food code,” he said. “Each ‘1’ is a meal, and it could be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. When I was your age, we mostly went 0-0-1. Meaning we only had dinner. And dinner…” he paused, the way he always paused when he wanted the words to land, “…you have no idea what dinner was.”
“It wasn’t good?”
“It was the best thing we were ever offered. We anticipated every evening with gratitude.” He said it quietly. Not with bitterness, I could say he was nostalgic.
“There were times we went 0-0-0.”
“Kai, that’s not possible. You can’t go a whole day without eating anything now. You wouldn’t survive, when it is not that you are fasting,” I said bluntly.
He looked at me the way adults look at children who have never been hungry and laughed again. Mom smiled at that. “You wouldn’t know. You have food on this table every day.” He nodded at my plate. “So don’t tell your mother you don’t want to eat eba or you want to eat rice. Eat the food you are given.”
I felt attacked. I always felt attacked.
He didn’t stop there either. After masticating half of his brisket bone, he leaned back a little, the way he did when a story was coming, whether you wanted to hear it or not. He told me about the bicycle. How, in his secondary school, his mathematics teacher, Mr. Hassan, rode to school every morning on a bicycle, and how that bicycle was the most impressive thing he had ever seen up close. Not a car. Not a house. A bicycle. He and his friends would watch Mr. Hassan park it under the mango tree beside the staff room, and they would discuss it seriously, the way boys discuss things they have decided to want.
He, like his friends, vowed they must own a bicycle in this life before they die.
He worked on farmlands during the holidays to save money. He carried dried cassava on his head to the market. He did what needed doing. He sent himself to school, paid his school fees and guess what?
“What?” I asked.
“I never did buy a bicycle for myself; I bought a car instead because, before I finished and got a job, bicycles were outdated. I bought one for your grandfather in the village, though.”
“The things you work for with your hands, you don’t take for granted. You understand their value because you know what they cost you.”
That was dad’s way. He carried the past as if it shouldn’t change, always present, always taking up space at the table. He spoke of train stations with actual trains. Post offices where letters took weeks to get to the receiver, and people still wrote them. He spoke of his university lecturers, who were white people who wore suits in the Nigerian heat and taught with a seriousness only a few understood. He spoke of the Nigerian currency with something close to grief, how its value depreciated daily, how you had to work honestly to earn it, how coins had weight and meaning.
He was nostalgic. I thought he was just getting old.
I would sit at the table, nodding at the right moments, waiting for him to stop talking. The past was the past. We had moved. We had microwaves now and cable television and Nokia Asha series that could do more than call and send text messages. You don’t have to go to the post office. We had a computer where we learned how to type on Mavis Beacon and play games. What was the point of looking back?
But I was wrong. Very wrong.
ME
In the space of twenty years and more, from 2000 to 2026, something happened that I don’t have the words to explain. The world didn’t just change. It accelerated with speed. What used to take a generation now takes eighteen months or less. Entire industries have appeared and disappeared in the time it takes a child to start and finish secondary school. I have watched ways of living become extinct before they were fully understood. I have watched my own lifestyle quietly go out of date.
I remember when sending an email felt like the future, when owning a laptop felt like arrival, just the way my father felt about the bicycle. I remember the first Android I held, turning it over in my hands like it was a small miracle. There was no need for buttons anymore; you just tap the screen. I was not wrong about that. It felt miraculous. This miracle became the order of the day, and the normal became not enough, and the insufficient became something to complain about. We moved through wonder so fast that we forgot to be grateful for the last thing. That is the price of speed; it seizes your sense of enough. The things my dad recollected, I now understand, though differently. He wasn’t asking the world to stop. He was asking me to remember. That’s the difference.
One evening, sitting in the kitchen with my son, who was complaining about his internet connection being too slow, we changed our router to Fibre One for better internet access so he could play video games on his tablet. He is just seven years old. I heard something come out of my mouth that made me think.
“You don’t know how good you have it.”
I heard Dad.
I stood there in my own kitchen, in my own house, staring into the distance between twelve-year-old me rolling my eyes at the dining table and this exact moment. My son looked up at me with the same expression I must have worn a long time ago: mild irritation, polite patience, the face of a child waiting for the old person to finish talking. He did not know he was looking at a loop, but I did.
Deja vu.
I laughed again because it felt like karma caught up with me. He did not know I had been him at one point, that his grandfather is me now, that this conversation was older than any of us.
I laughed. Not because it was funny. It simply was the only response that felt honest.
“Drop that tablet and do your homework,” I instructed, instead of finishing the thought. He went. But I stayed in the kitchen a little longer than I needed to, thinking about my dad, his bicycle story and the tablet my son has never once considered a miracle.
I called him that weekend. We talked for a long time, longer than we usually do, after the pleasantries.
“Do you remember the train stations, the post offices? What it felt like to want a bicycle the way you would want something extraordinary that changes your status quo?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he began to narrate it all over again, and this time, I listened. Really listened, not for a pause in which to respond, not with one ear and half a mind, but the way you listen when you understand that a person is handing you something precious. He talked about the train from Kaduna, the noise and the smoke of it, the way it was always crowded and stuffy. He talked about writing letters. The way they chose words carefully because paper was limited. He talked about a Nigeria that was difficult and beautiful in ways difficult to translate to anyone who hadn’t been there. I didn’t interrupt. I just listened quietly.
I had heard those stories as complaints. Now I know better.
They were a guide.
I miss the unspoken rule of eating at the table with no distractions. At my own home, unconsciously, everyone’s face is glued to a blue screen, including mine, and there’s hardly anything to discuss. No conversations. Nothing. Sometimes we hardly even sit at the table. The questions that used to flood in at dinner, the little fights, have all been replaced by the sound of YouTube videos and Instagram reels. We are together but somehow not together.
I miss it.
I am thinking of bringing it back. Not because the past was perfect, it wasn’t. It is because some things were right before they became old-fashioned, and a dinner table with no screens might be one of them. My son will complain. He will look at me the way I once looked at Dad. And maybe one day, twenty years from now, he will be standing in his own kitchen hearing his own voice say something that stops him. Maybe, maybe not.
The balance, I think, is not choosing between the past and the present. It is knowing the difference between what must be carried and what must be released, knowing which roots are holding you steady and which ones are holding you down.
The world will keep moving. It will not ask permission or slow down. I preserve these things not because they are perfect and not because the changing world is bad, but because losing them would mean losing the version of myself that knew them.
Author’s Biography
Mok Numaliya is a creative with a B.A. in English Language from Kaduna State University. She is a storyteller with a sharp eye that identifies certain human experiences. She loves to communicate these experiences through her writing. She writes short stories and poetry. Her story won first place at the 2024 Initiative for Creative Arts and Development for Disabilities (ICAD) short story competition.