Every Saturday my grandmother cooked jollof for a family we did not know.
She made it in the big black pot, the one with the dent from before I was born, and she did not eat from it herself. This one is not ours, she would say, and cover it with a clean cloth. In the evening a boy would come to the gate, quiet, holding a bowl, and she would fill it and send him back into the dark.
I thought she was being holy. I was fifteen and I found holiness embarrassing. Why them? I asked once, watching the steam curl off the rice. You don't even know their names.
She scraped the crust from the bottom, the part everyone fights for. When your grandfather died, I had four children and no fire in the kitchen for three weeks. A woman I never greeted well used to leave food at my gate. No note. She was ashamed for me, so she hid herself. She tapped the spoon on the pot. I never found out who. So now I cook for everybody's grandmother.
That was the last Saturday she stood at the stove. When she passed, the pot came to me, dent and all.
Last week my neighbour lost her husband. I heard it through the wall, the particular quiet a house makes when it is holding its breath. I did not knock. I made jollof in the black pot, scraped up the crust that everyone fights for, and left it at her gate in the dark.
No note. Let her think it was God, or an angel, or the ghost of some kind old woman. She does not need to know my name. She only needs to know she was not forgotten.