Chapter 5 Shattered Porcelain

If Tiara had known what Tuesday would bring, she might have stayed in the attic longer, hidden among the relics of the past. At least there she was safe, but Tuesdays were like every other day - a series of tasks to be accomplished, a series of small indignities to be endured.

It started ordinarily enough. Aunt Jola was hosting a bridge game in the evening-four women who came monthly to play cards, drink wine, and gossip. This meant Tiara had to prepare the house, clean the sitting room, arrange the 'fine china', prepare light snacks and listen to endless chatter and loud laughters.

She worked carefully, moving through the routines she'd perfected over the past two years. The porcelain dishes were the ones they used only for company-delicate, expensive, each one painted with a design of golden birds and vines. Tiara handled them with reverence, knowing that these were the kinds of things that mattered to people like Aunt Jola.

The snacks were arranged on platters: chin-chin, puff puffs, small cakes. Aunt Jola inspected her work and nodded curtly. "At least you're good for something."

By evening, the guests had arrived and the game was underway. Tiara was supposed to remain invisible-serving drinks when called upon, clearing empty glasses, fading into the background. She was good at this by now, the choreography of being present but unremarkable.

It was her cousins who destroyed it.

~~~~~

Tayo and Tobi were roughhousing in the corridor leading to the sitting room-a game of chase that had grown too wild. They were screaming, laughing, completely oblivious to the dangerous proximity between their bodies and Tiara's carefully balanced stack of dishes.

"Boys! Go outside!" Aunt Jola called out, but her attention was on her cards, on the game, on the wine warming in her glass.

Tiara tried to move out of their path. She pressed herself against the wall, cradling the stack of plates more carefully. But Tobi, running at full speed, didn't see her until it was too late. His shoulder caught hers and the plates-five or six of them-tumbled from her hands.

For one frozen moment, Tiara watched them fall. Time seemed to stretch: she saw each plate separate from its neighbor, watched them arc through the air, caught the flash of golden birds as they rotated. Then they hit the tile floor and shattered.

The sound was enormous. The crash echoed through the house, and every conversation stopped. Every head turned.

Aunt Jola stood slowly, her face a careful mask of calm that was somehow more terrifying than immediate anger. She walked toward the scene of destruction, stepped carefully over the broken porcelain, and looked at Tiara.

"Tell me", she said quietly, "that you did not just break our fine dishes."

"The boys were playing and-" Tiara began, but her aunt's hand came up.

"I don't want excuses. I asked a simple question: did you break these dishes?"

The truthful answer would have invoked Tobi-pointed out that he was the one who knocked into her, that her cousins were at fault. But Tiara had learned by now that truth was less valuable than obedience in this household.

"Yes," she said quietly. "I'm sorry."

Aunt Jola's eyes were cold as winter. "You should be sorry. Do you have any idea what these cost? Do you understand that we are feeding you, housing you, out of our own pockets, and this is how you repay us?"

"I didn't mean-"

"Didn't mean," Aunt Jola repeated, her voice dripping with contempt. She turned to her guests, offering them a tight smile. "Please, forgive the interruption. Girls like this need constant supervision." Then, turning back to Tiara with her voice lowered: "Clean this up, and then move your things to the servants' quarters. You'd be sleeping there henceforth and you'd have no supper tonight. Consider it payment toward what you've destroyed."

Tiara thought for a moment she was hearing wrong."Breaking dishes should have nothing to do with where I sleep Aunt Jola", she said very softly. She immediately wished she hadn't as Aunt Jola pierced her with a look that could kill.

"Oh yes, it does. I cannot trust a careless person sharing the same space with my daughter, especially at night. What if something were to happen to her?". She said, walking out of the room.

'These people must think the world revolves around them'. Tiara thought to herself

As she knelt to gather the broken pieces, Tobi passed by her and he whispered, "Good luck," as if this was a game, as if his actions and her consequences were all equally amusing.

~~~~~

Tiara swept up the porcelain silently, her movements mechanically precise. She was very good at hiding now-at keeping her face blank, her emotions contained. No one watching would have known that something inside her was fracturing.

She worked until every piece was gone, every shard cleared. Then she washed the floor, making sure no one would cut themselves on fragments she'd missed. The work took hours, and by the time she finished, her hands were raw and bleeding from multiple small cuts from porcelain shards.

She moved her things out of the room she shared with Tola, 'her room' and into the servants' quarters. Better to go on her own, than with force. She was seventeen now meaning she had endured two extra years in this house. Years of servitude, of invisibility, of being blamed for things that weren't her fault and thanked for nothing that was.

She thought about what Mrs. Okafor had said: One day you'll be old enough to fight back.

But what if she wasn't? What if she was old enough but still powerless? What if this was all life had to offer - an endless cycle of breaking, cleaning, and starting again?

The despair was almost physical. It sat on her chest and made breathing difficult. She reached under the mattress where she kept her most precious possession and pulled out her diary. She turned to a blank page and began to write.

'I broke dishes today. Or rather, I was blamed for breaking dishes. The truth doesn't matter here. Only obedience matters. Only compliance. Only the ability to disappear and reappear on command.

I'm tired. I'm so tired I can barely remember what it felt like to be happy. I'm seventeen and I feel ancient. I'm seventeen and I feel like I've already lived a hundred years.

Why should I keep fighting? What is the point of holding out if this is all it leads to-endless work, endless humiliation, endless erasure?

Maybe it would be easier to just give up. To stop writing, stop dreaming, stop believing that anything better exists. To become what they say I am: a servant, a burden, a mistake they have to tolerate.'

She stared at the words, shocked by their darkness. This wasn't like her. Her diary was usually full of resistance, of future planning, of stubborn hope. Not tonight though, that hope felt paper-thin.

~~~~~

Hours later, when the whole house had settled into a deep sleep, Tiara did something she hadn't done since she was eight years old: she snuck out into the garden in the middle of the night.

The lemon tree was vast now, older and stronger. She pressed her palms against its bark and let herself cry-not silent tears, but deep, wrenching sobs that came from somewhere primal inside her.

"I can't do this anymore," she whispered to the tree. "I can't keep pretending. I can't keep surviving. It's too hard."

The tree, of course, didn't answer. But as her tears fell, something shifted. A breeze moved through the branches, and a single lemon fell at her feet. She picked it up-perfectly ripe, glowing faintly in the moonlight.

She thought about what her father had said: Bitterness grows in the fruit, sweetness in the heart.

The lemon's taste was harsh, overwhelming, exactly as bitter as despair. She sucked on it anyway, letting the juice coat her throat, burn her tongue, remind her that she was still alive.

And then she understood something that changed everything: the bitterness wasn't punishment. It was data. It was information. It was the flavor of the world telling her exactly how much she needed to change herself.

She returned to her new room and to her diary. But this time, she wrote something different:

I was wrong to think about giving up. Not because I'm strong-I don't feel strong. But because giving up would mean they win. It would mean my parents' sacrifice meant nothing. It would mean every moment of suffering was wasted.

I don't have to be okay with this. I don't have to accept it. But I do have to endure it-not because it's right, but because the only alternative is complete destruction. And I refuse to be destroyed by people so small and petty and cruel.

Therefore, here's my new vow: I will use their cruelty as a propellant. I will let my anger become my teacher. I will transform this bitterness into something useful. And one day-I don't know when, but one day-I will leave this place. And when I do, I will have learned things they could never teach me. I will be someone they never dared to imagine I could become.

They broke a few dishes. But I am not porcelain. I cannot be shattered by their hands. And that, I think, is worth surviving for.

~~~~~

The next morning, Tiara woke early as always. She performed her duties, answered questions in monosyllables, and remained invisible. But something inside her had shifted. The despair had morphed into something sharper-purpose.

She began to plan more deliberately. She saved every naira she could earn or was paid, hiding money in a small tin buried beneath a loose floorboard. She studied harder and borrowed more books. After all, there was no such thing as too much knowledge. She made notes of places that existed beyond her uncle's house, jobs that were possible, opportunities that were waiting.

Mrs. Okafor noticed the change. One afternoon, as they worked in the kitchen, she said quietly, "You're different. Harder somehow. Less like a girl, more like a young woman."

"I have to be," Tiara replied.

"Yes," Mrs. Okafor agreed. "Yes, I suppose you do."