In a quiet village tucked between two heavy hills lives Papa Ikenna, a stubborn yam farmer
who whispers to his crops every morning. His calm wife, Mama Adaeze, is the famous cook of
three villages — known for her egusi soup and pounded yam that even the village chief asks
for during festivals.
Together they have four grown children, including their youngest son Obinna who shows up
every single morning at seven o’clock, walking straight to the kitchen to ask:
“Mama, what did you cook today?”
One Tuesday morning, Papa Ikenna walks into the kitchen and discovers his beloved
fifteen-litre black pot is missing. The pot was right there the night before — he had
even placed it himself. But now it is gone.
Instead of asking his wife — who was standing right there, busy hanging washed wrappers on
the line — he begins a five-day investigation that takes over the entire village.
He questions his son Obinna with the seriousness of a chief receiving bad news.
He accuses the wind of carrying it away.
He suspects the family cat, calmly licking its paw under the table.
He waits in the dark at one in the morning with a rope tied to his ankle so he would not
fall asleep.
The whole village is watching. The gossip travels faster than the yam harvest. Neighbours
sit under the cashew tree offering one ridiculous theory after another — rats reading
newspapers, tornadoes lifting pots from inside locked kitchens.
Then one night, a shadow appears. The shadow bends down. The shadow lifts a small pot.
Papa Ikenna jumps up shouting “Aha!” and grabs the shadow — only to discover it is his
own daughter Ada, who had quietly come back from her husband’s compound to fetch clean
water for her baby. The frog in the outside pot had scared her.
The next morning, Mama Adaeze finally speaks. She says the most powerful sentence of the
whole story:
“Papa Ikenna, your pot never left the compound.”
The truth? She had quietly moved it to the back store room weeks earlier to reorganize
the kitchen — and she never told him because she assumed he would notice, just as he
notices everything about his yams in the barn.
He had spent five days accusing his son, interrogating his best friend Mazi Okeke,
blaming the wind, doubting the cat, planning ambushes, and jumping at shadows in the
middle of the night — all because he never remembered to ask his wife the one simple
question: “Where is the pot?”
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