The House With Too Many Eyes

Windows That Never Breathe

I have always said our house had more windows than necessary, but none of them opened to fresh air. They were like eyes: forever watching, forever judging, forever catching the dust of Nsukka’s dry wind and the gossip of passersby.

My mother liked to say, “A house without windows is a coffin,” but she never asked why ours needed to look like a town hall, every room sprouting its own set of glassy lids.

Sometimes at night, I swore I could hear them blinking.

Our father—retired civil servant, part-time landlord, full-time paranoiac—would polish the window panes as if they were medals he earned from the Ministry of Works. He said windows were protection, though I often suspected what he really meant was surveillance. He distrusted walls that did not breathe and people who did not report. Even in retirement, he could not stop drafting inspection notes in his head, as if our house were a leaking bridge.

“Do not lean too much on the sill,” he would say, “the wood is imported and fragile.”

“Do not hang your underwear near the windows,” he warned my younger sister. “Neighbors will count how many pants you own.”

He hid money inside cooking pots. The metal clanged oddly when we lifted them to cook beans. He said no thief would search where hunger resided. Sometimes when mother poured out rice, crisp naira notes clung to the grains like dead insects. She shook them off without comment, as though even money in our house carried shame. Once, I teased her: “Mama, do you not fear that one day we will cook jollof with cash instead of crayfish?” She laughed too loudly, then sighed, “Ụwa a…… This world will not kill me, Amaka can.”

Mother, on the other hand, was a schoolteacher who spoke in Bible verses. Not full ones, only fragments, like pills she swallowed for survival. “Sufficient unto the day,” she would mutter when rain leaked through the zinc roof. “The stone the builders rejected,” she sighed whenever the landlord of another compound bought a new car. She laughed often, not because she found things funny, but because bitterness was easier to swallow when dissolved in giggles.

My siblings scattered like a broken rosary. Uju, beautiful and reckless, painted her eyebrows until they looked like question marks permanently etched across her forehead. 

“Amaka, do they look even?” she once asked, her face dangerously close to mine.

“They look like quarrelling birds,” I replied. She hissed, “Ị bụ onye nzuzu……you’re a fool” and still walked out smiling.

Chike, only sixteen, rehearsed sermons in the mirror, wagging his finger at imaginary sinners. 

“Repent! For the kingdom is at hand!” he boomed, and even the lizards on our compound wall froze like converts.

Adaeze devoured Nollywood films and reenacted funeral scenes in the corridor, throwing herself across the floor until neighbors asked if someone had died. 

And little Ekene, sharp as razor blades, carried gossip like a plate of hot moi-moi, passing it around carefully but never spilling.

Silence in our house was never really silence. It was the silence of swallowed secrets. The silence of things one dared not say while neighbors pressed their ears to the walls. The silence of our mother scrubbing blood from the bathroom floor after Uju’s accident years ago. The silence of me turning my face away when Uncle B’s hands lingered too long on my shoulder.

At night, I sometimes imagined the portraits in the parlor shifting in their frames, their eyes following us. My grandfather’s photograph seemed to scowl whenever Uju snuck in past curfew, as though the dead had better discipline than the living. Even the plastic clock on the wall, shaped like a rooster, watched us with one painted eye, ticking out disapproval.

But of course, nobody else saw this. Only me—Amaka, eldest daughter, compulsory observer, professional mocker of things too painful to name.

Lessons In Hunger

If I had known teaching meant standing in front of a pack of wolves dressed in fake uniforms, I would have chosen hawking oranges on the roadside. At least oranges don’t laugh when you mispronounce “photosynthesis.”

But beggars, daughters of paranoid landlords, and reluctant breadwinners cannot be choosers. When my father’s pension stopped flowing like palm wine and started dripping like reluctant water from a rusty tap, someone had to supplement the cooking pots he stuffed with money. My mother’s teacher’s salary could hardly keep up with her habit of lending Bible tracts and malt drinks to her church friends who never repaid. So it was me—Amaka, graduate of English Education, the family’s reluctant pride—who took the teaching job at Great Future International Academy.

Great Future was neither great nor international. The signboard sagged like a broken jaw, and the classrooms smelled of chalk, sweat, and frustration. The proprietor, Mr. Okeke, strutted around with the belly of a man who ate other people’s school fees for breakfast. He loved motivational speeches.

“Discipline,” he would say, wagging his finger, “is the backbone of education.”

This, while slipping envelopes of exam fees into his pocket with the agility of a magician.

My students were older than me. Some had beards, others carried babies to class. They called me “Madam Amaka” with the sly smiles of men who wanted to remind me that respect was not the same as fear. One, a boy named Sunday, once offered me akara in exchange for a passing grade.

“Madam, this one hot,” he said, holding the nylon bag out like a bribe to a traffic police officer.

“Sunday, you think akara can pass WAEC?”

“Madam, akara dey give energy. Na the same thing wey book dey do.”

I laughed, but only because if I didn’t, I would scream.

The only relief in that school was Ngozi, another teacher, who came to work each morning with lip gloss brighter than her bruises. Everyone knew her husband beat her, but she wore her laughter like perfume.

“Amaka, men are like yam,” she would whisper while we graded papers. “You boil some, roast some, pound some. But at the end, na yam.”

I asked her once why she didn’t leave him. She shrugged. “Leave and go where? Back to my father’s house, so my mother will say, ‘You see, I warned you’? Better to decorate my wounds with powder.”

We laughed, but it was the kind of laughter that tasted like pepper in the throat.

Salaries came late, as though crawling on broken knees. Sometimes one month disappeared entirely, sacrificed to Abuja, where Mr. Okeke’s mysterious “friends” supposedly lived. A group of us once muttered about protest, about refusing to teach until we were paid. But everyone knew hunger was a louder master than dignity. By the next morning, we were back in class, chalk dust whitening our throats.

Then came the day I saw my father outside the school gate.

It was hot, the kind of heat that melted chalk before it reached the blackboard. I stepped out during break and there he was, half-hidden behind the mango tree, his cap pulled low like a spy in Nollywood films. He didn’t wave. He didn’t move. He just stood there, eyes fixed on me. For a moment, I thought maybe he was here to surprise me with lunch—then I remembered this was the man who once claimed love was “a Western conspiracy to weaken African men.”

I walked up to him.

“Papa, what are you doing here?”

He blinked, startled, like a child caught stealing groundnuts. “I was passing by.”

“Passing by? Our house is two streets away.”

“I wanted to check the road. They say kidnappers use this area.”

“Kidnappers? Papa, this is a school.”

He pulled his cap lower. “Go back to your class. Don’t be stubborn.”

That evening at home, when I asked him again, he denied it completely. “Me? At your school? You must be dreaming.” He laughed the nervous laugh of a man who tells lies too often to remember which one he is currently married to.

I didn’t press further. In our family, questions were like stones thrown into a pit—you never heard them hit the bottom.

But that night, as I lay awake, I thought of the silence that followed me home. The silence that wasn’t empty but swollen, heavy, like the belly of a woman carrying too much. And in that silence, the house eyes seemed to blink faster, as though they too had seen my father at the gate, watching. Always watching.

Devil In Black Coat

The day Uju became pregnant, our house became a Nollywood film without the budget.

She didn’t announce it. No girl ever does in families like ours. She just started vomiting into flower pots, the pink hibiscus wilting under the acid. Her stomach rounded like unripe pawpaw, and her skirts could no longer lie flat. At first, my mother said it was “infection,” as though pregnancy were chicken pox . But when Uju fainted during evening prayer, even the neighbors who peeked through our windows whispered what we all knew.

“Who is the father?” My father’s voice was thunder, shaking the zinc roof. He slammed his palm against the table so hard that money hidden inside the cooking pot rattled like guilty accomplices.

Uju’s eyebrows—those perpetual question marks—trembled, but her mouth held firm. “Uncle B.”

If our house had been full of swallowed secrets before, this was the day they vomited themselves out.

Uncle B, my father’s oldest friend, our so-called family guardian, the man who brought crates of malt during Christmas, who sat in our parlor like he owned the sofa—yes, that Uncle B. He denied it immediately. Called Uju a liar, possessed, a Jezebel seducing holy men. He raised his hands to heaven, swore by ancestors and Bible alike.

Father believed him. Of course he did. Men defend men the way goats defend their own smell. He turned to Uju and hissed, “I will call the police.”

Mother began quoting Psalms. “Though I walk through the valley…” she muttered, wiping her tears with her wrapper. Our youngest, Ekene, ran outside to tell the neighbors, because gossip in our house traveled faster than light.

By nightfall, half the street gathered at our gate. Some came with sympathy, others with popcorn smiles. Neighbors love tragedy better than free akara. Adaeze reenacted the whole scene for them like a Nollywood actress, throwing herself on the ground while imitating my mother’s tears. Even Chike, our future pastor, raised his voice: “This is abomination! The devil is among us!”

The house erupted. Arguments spilled out like palm oil on white cloth. Mother screamed, father roared, Uju cried, neighbors cackled. The walls shook with voices and the portraits on the wall stared harder than ever, as though our ancestors were spectators in this soap opera.

The next day, church elders arrived with solemn faces and empty stomachs. They claimed they came to “pray the truth out of Uju.” What they really wanted was malt, biscuits, and to enjoy the free theater. They circled my sister, laid their oily hands on her head, and shouted in tongues. One even demanded she confess while holding her nose, as if truth could be squeezed out like mucus.

Uju only wept harder.

And me? I stood in the corner, watching, remembering. Remembering the night when I was thirteen and Uncle B’s hands lingered too long on my chest as he pretended to tickle me. Remembering how I swallowed the incident like bitter herbs, convincing myself it was nothing, because children in houses like ours are trained to choke down shame before it grows teeth.

But watching Uju, I knew. I believed her, because her trembling was the same trembling my bones still carried.

Yet I said nothing.

That’s the thing about silence in our family—it is not weakness. It is inheritance. It is how we survive. Father’s paranoia, mother’s Bible, my sarcasm, Uju’s question-mark brows—we all have our shields. Mine just happens to be my tongue, sharpened but never unsheathed when it matters most.

For weeks, our house remained divided. Father spat whenever Uju entered the room. Mother muttered verses as though she could stitch her daughter’s shame into a psalm. Uju grew rounder, heavier, her defiance thinning into despair. Uncle B stopped visiting, but his absence screamed louder than his presence ever did.

Neighbors gossiped daily. “Did you hear? The landlord’s daughter—pregnant!” They stared at our windows like detectives, as if the glass would one day birth the father’s name. Our house became a zoo cage. Too many eyes, too many mouths.

And still, the silence inside stretched, taut like rope, waiting for the next eruption.

 Protests And Madness

The fuel price jumped overnight, like a goat leaping into forbidden yam. By morning, the whole town boiled. Long queues snaked around filling stations, tempers hotter than jollof firewood. Mothers fought with kegs, fathers cursed their ancestors, children carried placards they could not read.

Ngozi, my lipstick-and-bruises colleague, dragged me along.

“If we don’t shout, who will?” she said, pulling my hand. Her bangles clinked like chains.

I told her protests were for people with spare time, not daughters of retired civil servants who still owed their tailor. But she insisted, and something in her voice—half daring, half despair—made me follow.

The protest was a carnival of madness. Someone sold bottled water labeled Holy Water for Protection, two-for-one. A man brought his goat, painted its horns green-white-green, shouting, “The goat must also protest!” Young men drummed on empty fuel tanks, singing “No fuel, no future!” in a rhythm that sounded suspiciously like a highlife party.

I marched, but halfheartedly. I did not believe change came from shouting under the sun. But I believed in Ngozi’s laughter, and in her stubborn way of moving through the world as though her wounds were just new bracelets to show off.

Then the police arrived.

They did not come with negotiation. They came with batons and guns, with tear gas canisters they flung like angry fruits. The air burned. My chest clenched. We scattered like rats from a burning kitchen.

I remember one boy—skinny, his T-shirt reading Future President. He stood on a car roof, waving the flag. His voice cracked as he shouted, “Nigeria belongs to us!”

The bullet met him mid-sentence.

He fell, his body thudding against the metal, flag slipping from his hand like a surrender. The crowd gasped, then surged, then screamed. I did not know when I started running, when my sandals snapped, when Ngozi’s bangles stopped clinking behind me.

At home that evening, the TV showed nothing. My father sat in front of the news, arms folded, muttering, “It is all staged. White people’s camera tricks. Nigeria is stable.” He said this while sweat poured down his temples, as though denial itself required labor.

I tried to tell him what I saw, the boy falling, the flag stained with blood. But he raised his palm and silenced me. “Don’t bring lies into my house.”

Our house, full of too many eyes, refused to see.

Later, I called Ngozi. No answer. I called again. Nothing. The next day at school, her desk was empty, her laughter absent, her lip gloss missing from the edge of the staff table. The proprietor announced casually, “Ngozi’s husband says she ran away. Domestic matter. Nothing to concern us.”

Ran away. As if women like Ngozi had wings.

The silence of our house that night was unbearable. My siblings chattered, mother prayed, father ranted about the price of kerosene. But underneath, the silence groaned, swollen with the absence of those who vanish and the voices of those we never save.

I could not sleep. I stared at the windows, at the glassy eyes of the house, and for the first time I felt they were not watching me—they were accusing me. For following Ngozi but not protecting her. For running when the boy fell. For surviving when others did not.

The portraits on the wall seemed to lean closer, whispering things I dared not hear.

The Funeral Of The Living

Uncle B died suddenly, the way a man chokes on his own pride. Stroke, they said. God is just, the neighbors declared. But whispers floated in our compound like smoke: maybe poison, maybe the work of angry ancestors, maybe Uju’s unborn child taking revenge from the womb.

Our family prepared for the funeral with the efficiency of people trained in disaster. Mother scrubbed pots until her knuckles bled, muttering psalms under her breath. Father ironed his one black suit, the fabric shining at the elbows like old yam peels. Uju insisted she would attend, her belly protruding like an accusation, but Mother slapped her face with Bible verses and dragged her back into the house. “You will not shame us twice.”

The funeral was grotesque theater. Uncle B’s wives wailed louder than car horns, tearing their wrappers into ribbons. The coffin was carried in, but one pallbearer slipped, and the box crashed to the ground with a hollow thud. Some swore they heard him knocking from inside. Others said it was just wood.

Quarrels erupted at the graveside. One wife accused another of poisoning him. Cousins argued about who should inherit his motorcycles. A drunk uncle stumbled forward to preach, slurring that death was a “democratic disease.” Children ran between graves, playing catch with sachet water. And the mourners—oh, the mourners!—they gossiped louder than they prayed, comparing wigs, weighing scandals, savoring every rotten detail of a man they now praised in public and condemned in whispers.

I stood there, sweating in my borrowed black dress, and felt the eyes of the house follow me even here. Not our windows this time, but the eyes of people who knew too much, who suspected too much, who measured grief like market tomatoes.

Then, while fetching water for the mourners, I overheard the secret. Two men, cousins of my father, leaning against a mango tree, their voices lowered but not enough to escape me.

“Do you know,” one said, “during the war, your brother Amadi took bribes? Sold food meant for soldiers. That’s how their cousin died. Starved while Amadi built his new house.”

“Shhh,” the other warned, glancing around. “His children don’t know.”

But I knew now.

I walked back with the water trembling in my hands. My father, pacing near the grave, shouting orders at gravediggers as though controlling soil would redeem him. My father, who silenced Uju, who denied my truth, who watched but never saw. My father, guilty and wounded, victim and villain all at once.

And suddenly, I realized: we were all the same. My mother with her Bible laughter, hiding her bitterness like contraband. My siblings, clinging to Nollywood, gossip, fake sermons. Uju, carrying her shame like a baby too heavy to deliver. Me, sharpening my tongue but swallowing every truth that mattered. Victims and villains, all of us. Guilty and wounded, guilty and wounded, round and round like a masquerade dance.

At the funeral’s end, when the coffin was finally buried and the ground flattened, the mourners drifted away, still gossiping. Our family returned home, our house of too many eyes waiting, blinking, judging.

That night, I sat by the window. The air was thick with kerosene smoke, dogs barking, radios blasting sermons. I stared at the glass panes reflecting my face.

The house still had too many windows, too many eyes. Some opened outward, spying on neighbors. Some opened inward, trapping secrets. And some—some never closed at all.

From the corridor came Adaeze’s muffled cries, not from grief but from rehearsal. Mother’s laughter rang out suddenly from the kitchen, sharp and brittle, the sound of a woman grinding sorrow into something edible. Father paced, coughing, as if the air itself accused him. Uju lay awake, her breath heavy, her shame heavier still.

I wondered if I would ever leave. Or if the house would swallow me whole, as it had swallowed Uju’s truth, my silence, Ngozi’s laughter, and Father’s sins. This house was no mere shelter; it was a ledger. Every secret inscribed, every silence witnessed, every wound remembered.

Perhaps that is what family is: a house with too many eyes, where someone must always see, even when others pretend to be blind.

And so I pressed my forehead to the window, whispering into the night:

“Anya anaghị ekwu okwu, ma ọ na-ele ihe niile.”

“The eye does not speak, but it sees everything.”