It was a different kind of migration when our parents moved to Lagos; Dad, a young accountant, had got a job at the federal secretariat, and Mum, a teacher, lugging three boys aged one, three, and five, transferred later from her state civil service job to the Federal School of Arts and Sciences on the island. My fondest childhood memories are of school holidays when our parents, having gone to work, left us to be babysat by our family’s personal god, Imole-Ayo, an Irunmole that had traveled from Ondo to Lagos, in the confines of our parents’ luggage. Imole-Ayo was a horned deity, a happiness god the size of two adult fists together, a miniature old woman the size of a comb.

Imole-Ayo would tell us stories of the primordial era when the supreme God, Eledumare, released the Irunmole from the earth, one thousand deities made from soil and bursting with Odu, the eternal energies. She had belonged to my grandmother and was passed on to my mother on the eve of our move to Lagos to “teach the children never to forget who they are—their culture, language, and history.”

Presently, drifting off to sleep and tired from waiting for my parents stuck in Lagos traffic, I asked Imole-Ayo about her life before she joined our family. Her yellow eyes shimmered in the light of the dying candle. I did not think a god could cry, but it seemed she was remembering a time when she was unfettered and free.

“I had a lot of brothers and sisters; some were gods of wealth, health, disease. I don’t see much of them anymore.”

“You are a god of happiness. Is that why we are always laughing like hyaenas in this house?”

It was true; no matter how stressful my parents’ days were, hustling in the concrete jungle of early 1990s Lagos under military dictatorship, they came home to a place of laughter over communal dinner and coy smiles stolen when no one was looking.

“Yes,” Imole-Ayo replied. “Your happiness is my gift to you and your family; for upholding our traditions and not forgetting.”

“What happens to Grandma now that she has given you to us?”

Imole-Ayo was silent, her chin resting on her chest. The candle fire went off in a puff of smoke, filling the room with the smell of paraffin. Three weeks later, a messenger arrived from the village; it was about Grandma. Even with a happiness god in the house, my mother’s shrieks of grief could be heard three houses away.

• • • •

Years later, I was moving as my parents had done in the 90s, but I was going farther this time—not just to a neighboring state but to a different country. I refused Imole-Ayo when my mother offered.

“Our gods cannot survive overseas,” I said.

“Our gods can survive anywhere,” she replied fiercely.

I was adamant. I didn’t want to take away her happiness. It was enough that I was leaving. But when I opened my luggage in the hotel room after the six-hour flight, our family’s god climbed out of it and sat on the hotel bed.

“She insisted,” Imole-Ayo said, stretching her legs and looking warily around the small room. “For the children you will have in this strange place. So they can learn to speak our language and know where you come from.”

The country was frigid, and our personal god sneezed.

• • • •

To receive the biometric residence permit, the consulate officer, a man in a ceremonious tuxedo, asked:

“What would you trade for it?”

“What do others trade?” I asked.

“Some trade their language. We have a catalog of foreign languages; a new language is always welcome. It says here you speak a rare dialect of Yoruba. We can take your language and give you a year of residency.”

“Would I still be able to speak it when you take it?”

“No,” he said firmly, adjusting his suit. “Once we take it, it belongs to us—to our catalog.”

I remembered all the days Imole-Ayo had spent teaching us the ancient tongue. We were children then, and it was easy to learn. Perhaps she could teach it again, but I doubted I could relearn it from scratch.

Seeing my hesitation, the consulate officer quickly added: “Others trade their memories. How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“Good. You can trade your earlier years. You don’t really use them, but they are valuable to us. I can give you six months for a decade of your memories.”

We haggle. I read online that there are no fixed guidelines. It is a marketplace, and I trade two decades of memories for a two-year biometric permit.

Under the machine, the chosen memories are vivid: my first cry, the pain of being squeezed through my mother’s birth canal, my first glimpse of my mother’s face, her first touch, the sweet smell of her breast milk . . . They explode brightly for a second, like the nebula of a dying star, and then they’re gone, sucked away into the machine that takes memories and ferrets them into a huge database. Leaving the consulate, the stamped residence permit in my hand, I could no longer remember the name of my primary school. Its absence was like staring into an abyss.

• • • •

The two years went fast, and I agreed to give up my humor on my next visit to the consulate. It was a funny thing to give up. I had been unable to use my special brand of humor in the past two years anyway; no one understood Nigerian humor, especially since no one understood pidgin. All jokes are better in pidgin. Transliterating a joke in my head into straight-jacketed English had only earned me cold stares.

“I didn’t know you could take something as abstract as humor,” I asked as the familiar headgear fit snuggly over my head and eyes.

“Humor is a way of seeing things—a perspective.”

“What would change for me?”

“Well, your ability to craft jokes in a way that is unique to you will be gone. You will still find things funny, but you will never make anyone laugh, not again. Of course, you can always learn new ways to tell jokes, our ways.”

“Hmm.”

“What’s there to laugh about anyway,” he said reassuringly, “with the cost-of-living crisis, eh?”

• • • •

“For Indefinite Leave to Remain, what do you have to trade?” The man asked. He had not aged in ten years and wore the same tuxedo. I wondered if he was human. In my many visits, I had traded my memories to the hilt. I could no longer remember my last night in Lagos—it was a yawning hole that Imole-Ayo tried to fill with her joy-bringing stories of primordial earth. I could no longer remember the smell of my mother’s kitchen or the ambient sounds of the city of my childhood. I had also given my language—all of it. At every visit, it had been easier to give more and more of the past while embracing this new world.

“I have given you everything,” I said.

The consulate officer looked at me sadly. He said, “Sometimes, people give their gods.”

I stiffened.

“The Museum of African Gods is a hit,” he said, scratching behind his ear. “I’ve been there. It has beautiful artifacts: Sango, Oya, Obatala—they’re all there.”

He pronounced their names wrong. These were pantheon gods. How did they get there? They were not little Irunmoles like Imole-Ayo, who could be squeezed into a luggage bag.

“Whoever brings Olodumare will get an instant Tier-1 visa,” he said wistfully. “But it’s hard to get a hold of your supreme God.”

“I cannot give her,” I said, tears in my eyes.

“ILR,” he said. “No more visas. You will never have to see me again. You will never have to trade anything else.”

The next day, I watched the man in the tuxedo receive the miniature old woman from my trembling hands. She did not resist. Irunmoles like Djinn do what they’re told.

“Oh, she is beautiful,” the consulate officer said. “Such elaborate detail and craftsmanship. I never know how your people are able to animate them to move and speak. Almost as if they are alive.”

Imole-Ayo crossed her arms and turned her back to me, her shoulders rounded with my betrayal. He stamped the passport quickly before I could change my mind and pushed our deity into what looked like a microwave oven.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I have to petrify it. We can’t have these . . . gods running around in the museum, can we?”

He pressed a button, and there was a short gasp from the microwave. When he brought out the god, she had become a stone effigy, dead.

“Perfect,” he said, sealing her into a cellophane bag and tossing her into a heap of petrified gods behind the counter. “Next!”

Outside, I sat on the pavement, empty as a cask, and watched the dry, leafless trees of winter.