Letters to Sepia

They say the first thing you notice in Nsawam Prison is the heat. I say, they are wrong. The first thing you notice is the smell. It is the smell of rust, red-brown, the color of earth cracked and baked post-harmattan. In my head, it is a heavy color, a color that sinks to the bottom of your stomach and stays there.

My name is Klenam, I am ten years old, and my brother, Worlasi, is in prison. He is nineteen. Police say he stole motorbike parts from the Ashaiman market. Mama says the police are lying and that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time with that vagabond company he used to keep. His sentence, 8 years. It’d be 2014 by the time he gets out, and I’d be 18. I know he didn’t do it. Mama says I am still very small and that I don’t know a lot of things, but one thing I know is my brother’s smell.

Before prison, Worlasi smelled of sweat from the football pitch. It was sharp and alive, mixed with the scent of the Blue Ice cologne he always sprayed too much of. That smell was bright, like the color of midday sky on a Madina market day when every umbrella is up.

The first time me and Mama visit him in prison, I smell the rust before I see him. It clings to the bars, the walls, the guards. It clings to him. The smell turns his skin into an old roof in my mind. When he hugs me, I try to breathe in the old him, but the rust covers everything. I wonder if this is what prison does … it paints over your real smell until you forget it.

You see, I have a strange thing that Mama says I was born with. I smell colors, and I taste sounds. I don’t tell many people because they look at me like I’m crazy … Because why can’t Daavi Adzovi’s children be normal? Her boy is such a rebel who has found himself behind bars, her girl smells colors and tastes sounds. “God forbid bad thing!”, they’d curse under their breath and look at me with equal parts pity and equal parts suspicion. But I tell you, when I smell rust, I see a red that feels heavy in my knees, and when I smell fried plantain, I see a gold that dances in spirals of giddy laughter.

So, I keep a diary, a small book of smells. Each page is a day, each day is a scent. Like

March 10th: petrol from Massa landlord’s generator — silversparks.

March 11th: Kenkey steaming — warm beige, humming low like the gome drum.

I start writing these down so I can tell Worla everything the outside world smells like. If they are going to trap him behind walls, then I will send him smells so big they can break through.

On our second visit, I tell him:

“Worla!Today, outside smells like rain before it falls.”He closes his eyes like he’s trying to see

it. “That’sgreen,” he says. I nod with a biiiiiig smile.

The guard tells us not to talk about anything “strange.” I want to laugh. Is it strange to talk about rain? Is it stranger than keeping a boy locked up for stealing something he never touched? We sit there, and our words move slowly because the air is thick. His prison shirt smells of bleach. It is white, but it is not clean. I think about how bleach smells like something trying too hard to be pure, and I wonder if prison is like that, too. The other children in the visiting yard don’t smell like their houses anymore. They smell like waiting. “Waiting has no color”, I think to myself. It is just a quiet space where scents go to die.

It is August when I bring my diary to show him. I’m not supposed to because papers are checked, but I tuck it between my math notebook pages. His eyes move over the words, and he smiles the whole time through. When he finally closes the book, he says, pinching my nose playfully, “Keep writing Klenam. Even if I never come out, keep writing. Because smells don’t get old in your head. At most, they only get old in the air.”

That day, I smell something new from him … something … warm and stubborn, like wood smoke that clings hard to your clothes. I realize it is hope. Hope smells like deep brown that glows from inside.

On the next visit, I notice the rust smell is softer. Not gone … just … gentler, like it has been washed by rain. He tells me he has started playing football again in the yard with the other inmates. “When Irun,” he says, “the rust can’t catch me.” I smile. Then he says something that stays with me for days: “Klenam, Prison smells different when you laugh.” I think about that the whole ride home. I think about how maybe the real trap is when you forget that other smells exist.

Now, every evening before bed, I smell the air and think of how to describe it for him. Some nights it is a gentle cyan that tastes like boiled yam before it kisses the pork gravy. Some nights it is a restless orange that tastes like market noise. Some nights it is … nothing. But if you ask me, even nothing has a smell if you look hard enough.

I know the rust will always be there in his world. But if I keep sending him colors through my words, maybe one day, his cell will smell more like gold than red. And maybe, just maybe, the day he walks out, he will smell like himself again … bright blue, like the sky after rain, on a Madina market day when every umbrella is up.