In the final days of lockdown, I lay in bed thinking of all the things I left unsaid throughout the years, and all my futures that never were.

Why do we remember what we remember? Which reels from our past assert their vivid selves and which remain dim, just out of reach? I remembered some fleeting encounters so clearly that I wondered if the remembering itself was significant.

The Qatari man in London who I met at Harrods, of all places, who said he had come to pick up his sister.

“Hey gorgeous,”

was his greeting.

It sounded so contrived that it was interesting.

Hey gorgeous.

Maybe he thought this was what you said to a woman, a Black woman, you had run into, and then impulsively decided to talk to, at Harrods.

“I just want to let you know, you’re beautiful,” he said.

He looked younger than me, his skin unusually clear, as though smoothed all over with foundation.

The trendy hip-hop stir about him, his expensive sporty clothes and enormous sneakers should have put me off.

But as he spoke, I thought his Arabic accent was the sexiest accent in the world, and I did not want him to stop talking, and I imagined other things said in that accent.

He was nervous, moving his big shiny phone from hand to hand.

His nervousness enchanted me because it spoke of things unpracticed.

His sister was upstairs and he asked if I would give him my number, and I said, smiling, “Go get your sister first,”

because I wanted to be flirtatious and mysterious.

He hesitated.

It was the smallest of silences, but in that delay of time came a dawning; I remembered somebody once saying Arab men date Black women, but only in secret.

“Okay, see you in a bit, yeah?”

he said, and then added, “Promise you won’t go anywhere.”

He turned to go upstairs and I walked to the exit and out into the street.

That hesitation, his brief debate with uncertainty, meant he didn’t want his sister to see me.

Later I wondered if he returned to roam the halls of Harrods looking for me.

What if I had been wrong and he hesitated only because he feared I might leave without giving him my number? Why hadn’t I just given him my number, and given it a chance?

And there was the man from Argentina with a Danish surname who I met in Santiago.

His craggy face spoke of time in the harsh outdoors; he climbed mountains and played football.

At a bar we playfully bantered about the Argentina and Nigeria football teams.

“You’re good but we’re better,”

he said, and I said, “No we are better, we just don’t have organization,”

and he said, “Yes, which means we are better.”

He was impressed that I knew so much about football.

“I have two brothers,”

I said.

“I’ll never forget the day Nigeria beat Argentina in the Atlanta Olympics.

I felt like I was floating in the air.”

“Jay-Jay and Kanu! I cannot ever forgive that team.”

“Our Dream Team!”

“You must visit Argentina again,”

he said.

“I’ll show you a game.”

“I’ve actually been thinking of going to Bariloche, just to see the lakes, but I heard that’s where all the Nazis from Germany escaped to.

Will I make it out alive if I go?” I teased.

“I’ll protect you,”

he said, and his knee grazed mine.

We were flirting and I liked the lighthearted air, and wanted to keep it that way, but two drinks in and he became intense, moving too close, his eyes a washed-out gray.

“I am looking at a beautiful woman.

A very beautiful woman.

You know what we both want.”

“What?”

“You know what we want.

You know.

Do you want to go to my hotel or I come to yours?”

How quickly the delicate threads of promise turn crude and bristly.

A pall came over me.

Had I given a wrong signal? But how and when? I was flirting and open, not sure where it would end, waiting to see, but he already saw an end and presumably thought I did too.

Everything was spoiled.

The bar’s dimness had become a shadowy threat.

I said, “I need the toilet, I’ll be right back.”

“I can watch your bag, you don’t need to take it with you,” he said.

I stuttered and said, “Oh, I just need my hand cream.”

Had he been menacing? Was he trying to control me, to keep me from leaving? I walked toward the toilet and then cut to the door and left the bar.

Later I asked myself if perhaps the failure of that day had been a failure of language—my Spanish was poor, his English was functional, and he paused often to search for words.

Had I misunderstood him, and had I missed out?

There was a Kenyan man I met on an Ethiopian Airlines flight.

When we boarded in Addis, he asked the flight attendant if she had a pen.

His voice attracted me, polite and confident, with that elegance of Eastern African English.

I said hello and offered him my pen, and then felt shy and retreated behind my iPad.

I had never said hello first, never offered a pen to a stranger.

He asked if he could ask me my name, which amused me.

“Is it all right for me to ask your name?”

He pronounced perfectly.

“I have never met an African travel writer,”

he said warmly.

He didn’t know whether I was any good and already he was approving.

“We need African travel writers to write about Africa.

There are many terrible travel books about Kenya written by people who in this day and age still call Kenya ‘Kee-nya.’?”

Why didn’t I go to more African countries? I had visited only three.

I told him I loved Accra, that gentle city, and Dakar, for its understanding of beauty for beauty’s sake, and Abidjan’s poise, on an uprise, expanding and spreading, its roads pothole-free.

Soon the air radiated with our mutual interest in each other.

He said he was a businessman and he dabbled a bit in political affairs, and from the practiced modesty in his tone, I sensed he was famous.

A thin band glowed on his forefinger.

He talked about Africa, how we neglect the riches of our past and we don’t sell our glorious myths and we stunt our imaginations.

“We need regional currencies.

Imagine what would be unleashed if we had properly structured intracontinental trade and travel…”

His words shimmered.

They stirred me, and I resolved to visit as many African countries as I could, to do better by our continent.

He grew more attractive as he talked, the stately silhouette of his face in profile, his high forehead and high cheekbones.

“Gikuyu culture is very similar to Igbo culture, in so many ways,”

he said suggestively, and I welcomed all the possible suggestions in his words.

Yet when we landed at Dulles, I hurried out of the plane before him, and rushed down the taxi ramp, as I had not checked bags.

It was not long after Darnell, my mouth still rank from the aftertaste of him, and the Kenyan was an academic like Darnell, even though he did not brandish his knowledge, as Darnell did.

I should have waited to exchange numbers.

Because of him I went to see the ruins of Gede.

I would forgo a lighthearted take and do something weighty in Africa, and what better than a thriving African town from the twelfth century.

I planned to go to Robben Island after Gede and already I imagined an article about Mandela being a product of a rich cosmopolitan past.

The Kenyan, if he read it, would be impressed.

The Kenyan embassy had extra checks for Nigerian passports and by the time my visa was out, I couldn’t do South Africa too, as their process was even worse.

(Later, I decided it was silly to treat Africa differently by writing solemnly of only serious things, and on my next trip, to Zambia, I visited restaurants.)

At Gede, the tour guide, a skinny intense man from Mombasa, led us almost reluctantly through the faded ruins, mumbling and pointing.

Three Black Americans, one Jamaican, and one white Englishwoman.

The Jamaican was talking about his next trip, to Ethiopia.

“What did you say that was?”

the Englishwoman asked the tour guide, pointing at what seemed to me a stump.

He mumbled something and the woman asked, “Are you sure? What?”

“Toilet! Modern toilet!”

the tour guide barked, and I jumped.

“You think you invented the toilet? We did in Africa!”

From mumbling to ferocious rage in seconds and he didn’t care about our shock.

“We invented the toilet in Africa!”

he repeated, and turned to me, his African sister, with a look that said, “These people.”

I nodded in solidarity.

I dared not show my amusement.

I understood that his anger was for her question and for a thousand other sneers.

How long had he led tours in which sun-flushed foreigners wearing linen and sandals challenged what he said? Strangely, it was with the fleeting Kenyan man on the plane that I imagined sharing this story.

I would repeat, “We invented the toilet in Africa!”

And we would laugh, intimate, knowing laughter, the kind to be laughed only among Africans.

My clearest memory was the oldest, of the young Indian man in a video shop in Lagos.

His heavy lidded eyes, half-closed, as though he was eternally dreaming.

He was tall and brown and handsome, his head very full of very black hair, and he was looking at me; I turned each time and caught his eye.

Video shops have disappeared because videocassettes have disappeared, but the memory remains, of his eyes, and of the shelves stacked with tapes.

There is looking and there is looking; one objectifies and the other dignifies.

I looked at him and then hurriedly away, because I had a sudden intense urge to cry.

The longing in his eyes, so wistful and wasted.

Would he melt away from his friends and come to talk to me? Of course he wouldn’t.

Omelogor was done with the videotapes she wanted to borrow and said, “Chia! Let’s go!”

General Abacha’s government had just murdered Ken Saro-Wiwa and we were all sad, but Omelogor was behaving as if she had personally known him, snappy and sulky with everyone.

It was just before I left for my A levels in England.

Uncle Nwoye was on sabbatical at the University of Lagos and they lived in a small gated house in Ilupeju.

They called Ilupeju Little India; on the street corner hawkers sold unfamiliar squashes that only the Indians bought.

“Chia!”

Omelogor said.

I left with her, reluctantly, and I wanted to turn back and look at him but I didn’t.

I never forgot his eyes.

We went back to the video shop some days later and I lingered until Omelogor asked what was wrong with me.

Years later, in Delhi, the men startled me with their looking, and I thought of the guy with the half-closed eyes in the video shop in Ilupeju.

An online magazine refused to publish my piece on Delhi unless I removed the sentence The men stared at me in a way I have never been stared at before, a hard, barefaced staring, not with harmless admiration but with a darkness that frightened me.

I removed the sentence and they published it.