It began with a blank page.
Tunde sat at the edge of the river just before dusk, his knees drawn up, a small brown notebook resting against his legs. The village behind him was alive with evening sounds—pots clanging, children laughing, the occasional beat of a drum somewhere deep in the market. But the river in front of him was silent. Deeply, purposefully silent.
He liked it that way.
In his right hand, he held a charcoal pencil. He'd used it before to label jars, to teach children how to spell the names of herbs, to sketch out the spiraling echo design Iyi once carved into a healing bowl. But tonight, he hesitated.
The first page stared back at him, untouched. Somehow, the hardest part was beginning.
He drew a breath and pressed the tip to the page.
"This is not a story about soap.
This is not a story about healing, either.
This is a story about remembering."
He paused, reading the lines slowly, then nodded and kept writing.
"When Iyi first came to our village, he had nothing. Not even a name people could trust. He carried silence in his hands, and a weight behind his eyes that none of us understood. He didn't wear power like a crown. He didn't announce his healing with fire or light.
But he changed everything.
He changed me."
Tunde closed his eyes briefly, allowing the memories to rise.
He remembered the first time Iyi handed him a sponge—not to use, but to hold. To feel. To honor. That moment had meant more than a thousand teachings. It wasn't the ritual that mattered; it was the reverence.
He flipped to the next page.
"I am not writing these pages for glory.
I am writing them so that when I am gone, a child will pick up this book and say, 'I know the path, because someone walked it before me.'"
At that, he looked up at the river, now glowing with the last touches of daylight. A cool breeze brushed against his face like the whisper of a spirit, and he smiled, letting the feeling guide him further.
"Iyi once said the sponge remembers.
And so must we."
He filled four more pages that evening—writing not only Iyi's journey but his own. The fear he had felt when Iyi first left. The trembling responsibility of stepping into a legacy not built with gold, but with water and silence. The first time a stranger called him healer. The first time a child cried in his arms and called him Baba.
Each entry was written slowly, with care. It wasn't meant to be a record of events—it was a record of heart.
As night crept in and stars began to blink above, Tunde lit a small lantern by his side. He dipped his fingers into the river and pressed a wet thumbprint onto the back of one page.
"This print is mine.
But the light belongs to all."
That evening, back in his hut, he placed the notebook beside the sponge bowl. He didn't lock it away or hide it under the floorboard. He left it in the open, just beside a small bowl of salt and a half-burnt stick of incense—symbols of offering, memory, and transformation.
The next morning, a girl from the baobab class peeked in. Her name was Ireti. Curious and sharp-tongued, she often asked questions before he was ready to answer them.
She pointed to the notebook. "What's that?"
"A story," he replied.
"Can I read it?"
He paused. "You may. But only if you promise to write in it when you're older."
"Why?"
"Because stories should not end. They should echo."
She didn't fully understand, but she sat beside it and read the first page slowly, mouthing each word as if it were a new fruit to be tasted.
Later that day, when the elders came for a healing salve, they noticed the book too.
"You're writing it down?" asked one.
"Yes," Tunde said, "because memory is fragile. Even spirit needs a scribe."
"And who will write when you're gone?" another asked.
Tunde didn't hesitate. "Whoever has ears to listen and hands that do not fear silence."
The elders said nothing more, but one of them returned the next day with an old quill and a pouch of dried ink, a gift from his late father's writing chest.
"This should be in your hands," he said, "not in the dust."
And so the notebook grew.
Each day, each page, another small piece of the river's whisper captured on paper.
Some entries were short:
"Today, a woman came with a bruise on her chest.
I gave her soap and silence.
She said it helped more than medicine."
Others were longer, more meditative:
"I have begun to notice that some people are healed not by touch, but by being seen. Truly seen.
We carry too many invisible wounds in this world.
Healing must first be a form of witnessing."
Children began to leave drawings between the pages—rough sketches of hands holding sponges, of eyes without faces, of rivers that glowed beneath the moon.
One boy wrote only two words in a corner:
"Thank you."
Another scribbled in crayon, "This soap made my mum stop crying."
Even adults began to contribute—traders, travelers, women who had lost husbands, men who had lost their way. The notebook became a living altar, its spine thick with testimony.
A man once came from a neighboring village, shoulders stiff with shame. His wife had passed, and grief had made him cruel. He sat on the stool beside Tunde's fire, weeping without words. When he left, he wrote only this:
"She used to say I was hard like unboiled yam.
Today, I softened."
Tunde began to fear he would run out of pages.
But then he remembered: memory has no edges. It grows if you let it.
So he began binding new paper into the book with thread and care, sometimes sewing by firelight well into the night. Ireti sat nearby some nights, handing him pieces of cloth or helping stitch corners together. She never said much, but her eyes soaked in everything.
One evening, she added a page of her own—just a poem:
"The sponge is not soft because it is weak,
But because it listens when the river speaks."
Some nights, travelers arrived and asked if they could see it.
A woman from Oyo, a midwife with tired hands, sat for an hour reading silently before placing a feather between the pages and whispering, "Your story reminds me I still have breath left."
A teacher from the city left behind a slip of paper:
"I'd forgotten how to teach with heart. Thank you for reminding me."
Even strangers began to know about it. Traders mentioned it in distant markets. Priests spoke of it in parables. They called it "The River Book."
Then one night, as he finished stitching a new section into the notebook, Tunde thought he saw someone sitting just outside the hut—beneath the moonlight, near the sponge bowl.
It was a tall figure, draped in a simple cloth, with eyes that shimmered like river stones.
Iyi.
Tunde didn't speak. He didn't move. He only smiled.
And the figure, whether spirit or memory, smiled back before fading into the wind.
That night, Tunde wrote one final entry before sleep claimed him:
"He was here.
Or maybe he never left.
Some names are not meant to be spoken.
Some names are meant to be carried."
And the notebook remained open.
By the door. Beside the sponge. Lit each night by a single flame.
Not locked in a glass case. Not hidden behind a shrine.
But there for any who needed to remember. Or to write. Or to be seen.
And in time, even Ireti—now older, her fingers steadier, her words braver—took a charcoal stick and scribbled on the last page left:
"The healer taught me how to listen.
Now, I will teach others how to echo."