The Bell

Image Credit: ChatGPT 

By Sobowale Darasimi

The village of Aganran was a very special village. It was tucked between a river that knew too much and a forest that kept everybody’s secrets, and in it, there was this child named Morẹnikẹ́. And she swallowed a masquerade bell before she turned two. I did warn you that the village was special.

It was not intentional, of course. It happened during the Oro Festival. On this night, the drummers refused to stop and her father, Chief Arẹ̀mu, who was the feared custodian of the ancestral masquerade, had left his sacred costume lying carelessly on the veranda while he stepped inside for fried plantain.

See, nobody even knows how she reached the bell. Iya Belili said it rolled toward her, but Iya Jumie says she crawled “like a child possessed and stuffed it into her mouth, because she liked the way it jingled in her throat.” All we know is that by the time her mother screamed and lifted her up, the bell had disappeared. It didn’t roll under the mat like other normal bells would do o, this our dear bell found its way into Morenike’s tummy!

And from that day, Morẹnikẹ́’s throat rang. All through all of her growth years.

Not always, though. It rang only when she lied.

“I didn’t take the puff-puff,” she’d say, and somewhere beneath her collarbone: tín-tínnnn!
“It wasn’t me that drew eyebrows on the dog.” tín-tín!
“I’m fine.” tín.
“I forgive you.” tínnnn.

By the time she turned eight, no one played “Police and Thief” with her. She was too easy to catch. Her classmates would crowd around during break and ask questions like:

“Did Taye pee in the bucket?”
“Are you crushing on Mr. Dipo?”
“Was my hair rough yesterday?”

If she answered, they leaned close to her chest. If it rang, they gasped. If it didn’t, they just nodded solemnly.

Her parents took her from church, to shrine, to chemist. One prophetess said the bell was spiritual punishment for speaking before elders. A Babaláwo shook his head, spat on the floor and said that the ancestors put it there so her father would learn humility. A nurse from Ibadan just said, “It’s a miracle she’s still alive.”

And she was indeed fully alive. 

But that was only the beginning. 

When she turned twelve, something else happened. The bell began to ring even when she told the truth, but only in moments of danger.

Once, when she bent to collect her slippers outside, the bell rang just as a snake slithered past her heel. TÍNNNNN! Another time, she opened the compound gate and the bell rang, just seconds before a stray okada sped past like thunder. TIN-TIN-TINNN!

By fifteen, she stopped calling it a curse. She called it her warning bell.

But you see, her father, Chief Arẹ̀mu, hated it. (What kind of story writer would I be if I didn’t add at least one bad person to stress you?) Now, it wasn’t even because his daughter had “swallowed the gods’ alarm clock,” but simply because the bell embarrassed him. (Imagine.) It rang the day he lied at a town meeting, and rang when he told a boy, “I never took your land”, and rang when he said he loved his wife.

Morẹnikẹ́’s gift, well, if that’s what it was, followed her like a shadow. Boys never dated her because they were afraid of her. Girls even came to her with their secrets, because they were sure she would keep them, even if her body might snitch. In fact, teachers started to use her as an exam hall monitor. Neighbours begged her to come settle quarrels. Aunty Bisi even claimed that her malaria disappeared after she sat beside Morẹnikẹ́ for twenty minutes.

They began to call her Arábìnrin Agogo, the girl with the bell.

She didn’t mind, anyways. She lowkey liked how the tínnn sounded like a coin dropping into an offering bowl.

One day, the elders of Aganran gathered because one foreign company had come to drill near the sacred forest, and Chief Arẹ̀mu, who was now the town’s mouthpiece, stood to speak on the village’s behalf. The men in black suits smiled and the community watched. And his daughter, Morẹnikẹ́, stood at the back.

“We approve this. There is no danger, and no ancestors are buried there. The spirits have been consulted,” He said in his agbada that was starched enough to slice air, and the three foreigners in fine suits and shoes that had never touched red sand, smiled politely. One of them tapped his translator to whisper something, and the town hall, packed from palm-frond roof to cracked concrete floor, held its collective breath.

And then, from the back corner, it rang.

...TÍNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!

Now, this one was not a normal ring and it was not the tiny “tínnnn” people had come to associate with Morẹnikẹ́. This particular one shivered through the air, bounced off the zinc ceiling, ricocheted through the open windows, made a baby cry and a woman drop her big gourd of water.

Slowly, and very reluctantly, heads started to turn. First, it was the children. Then the women. Then the men.

Chief Arẹ̀mu’s neck stiffened. He didn’t look at her.

Morẹnikẹ́ did not move, either. She didn’t even bother to try to hide. Her arms were folded across her chest, her chin was raised, and her eyes were steady. Her bell had spoken, and it did not lie.

One of the foreigners whispered, “What was that sound?” and the translator shrugged.
Chief Arẹ̀mu cleared his throat. “That was…That is…” He gestured vaguely. “A… child’s toy.”

Another tíííínnnn slipped out. It was soft this time, amd was barely audible. It was a warning. Don’t lie again.

The elders exchanged glances. Pa Odugbo, who was the oldest among them, scratched his greying beard and leaned into the mic. “Perhaps... perhaps we should not read too much into it. Bells can ring. Children cough. You know, wind moves.”

A hush thickened.

Just hours ago, these same elders had hailed Morẹnikẹ́ as “Ọmọ Àìmọ̀nà tí Ọlọ́run fi kànlẹ̀”, the child God used as a bell. The girl who helped a woman find her missing son, who rang when the town well was poisoned, who once cried and the bell rang until someone remembered an old man who had fainted alone in his hut.

But now?

Now that there was foreign money involved? Now that Lagos newspapers were circling like hawks? Now that the oil deal, after months of negotiations, handshakes, promises of boreholes and “capacity building”, was on the line?

“She must be possessed,” whispered one woman in the crowd.
“Has the bell ever rung for her own lies?” hissed another.
“What if she’s cursed? Her mother was strange too.”

Morẹnikẹ́ stood still. Very still.

The foreigners had started to pack up their briefcases. One of them muttered something about “superstition disrupting progress.”

Her father’s face darkened. “This is exactly what we feared,” he snapped. “That this child and her…this thing…would ruin everything.”

He turned to the elders. “She cannot stay.”

There was a ripple through the air and Pa Odugbo did not look at her as he said the words: “For the peace of the village, and for her own protection… she must be sent away.”

The same lips that once called her ọmọ ìmọ̀lẹ̀ now called her ẹrú ayé, a walking curse. Her mother wept very quietly as they were escorted out before sunrise next morning. There were no drums, neither were there prayers. It was all cold stares and a bell that refused to ring, because nothing that was said was a lie. They actually did mean every betrayal.

Morẹnikẹ́ didn’t bother to cry. Not even when her father refused to say goodbye. Not even when her best friend, Bola, watched from the window but didn’t wave. She held her mother’s hand, carrying a calabash of clothes on her head and the sound of betrayal in her chest.

They walked past the palmwine joint where people used to beg her to “just sit for ten minutes” in case a lie was nearby, past the compound where the elders once gave her a seat higher than her age, and past the shrine where she used to kneel and pray for her bell to keep the town safe.

Nobody looked at her, and nobody called out. Nobody even whispered her name. Even the birds did not sing that morning. By the time they reached the edge of the village, the weight of what had happened began to settle, and there was a slow understanding that home was no longer home.

Her mother tried to say something. But what even is there to say when the people you bled for pretend they never knew your name?

So she adjusted the calabash on her head and kept walking.

They found refuge in a small town two rivers away that had never heard of the girl who swallowed a bell. And so she never spoke.

Never again.

They told people that her voice was soft from illness and she didn’t even tell anyone that her body still rang when people lied. She learned to cover her mouth when the sound came, or turn it into a cough, or a laugh, or, well, silence.

But this was not to be the end.

Years later, someone knocked on her door. It was Pa Odugbo’s son.

He looked older. Worn. Ashamed. “They say you should come home,” he said. “The oil dried up. The foreigners left. And now… well. We think we need your bell again.”

Morẹnikẹ́ blinked slowly. She hadn’t heard it ring in weeks.

She smiled, and it was a tired, not-unloving smile.

“Tell them the bell says no.”

And still, somewhere deep in her chest, the bell gave the softest, softest tíínn, because sometimes, the truth isn't in what people say, it’s in who they choose to silence, when their lies become too expensive to carry.