‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un! Murtala? When? How?’
‘They shot him dead.’
They sat like ancient statues in a forgotten shrine while the Panasonic radio belched martial music. The news spread outside, casting a sullen mist that stretched across the country from the fringes of the Sahara to the shores of the Atlantic, and swallowed the noise in the compound. Children were called away to their rooms by anxious parents.
‘Zubairu! Zubairu!’ Their neighbour Nnamdi’s huge frame darkened the curtain fluttering in the open door. When Zubairu came out, he saw Nnamdi standing, head bowed, hands folded on his abdomen. He had closed his fabric shop at the market, as had other traders, as soon as the news broke.
‘Chei, e be like say na true say Murtala don die o!’
Zubairu leaned on the doorpost and looked down at a spot between his feet.
‘But na Murtala o. Murtala! That man no fit die like that.’ Nnamdi, too, had heard legends of General Murtala Mohammed’s invincibility during the civil war. He had been in Aba, having fled the North, when Murtala’s Second Division was devastating rebel lines in the Mid-west. From the stories he heard, Murtala walked through rains of bullets and swam across rivers of blood, emerging unscathed.
‘Na so I hear am.’ Zubairu’s pidgin, which he had picked up working at the railway corporation, was heavily accented.
‘Chei!’ Nnamdi shook as if rousing himself from an impossible dream. ‘So, wetin go happen now?’
Zubairu shrugged. He sighed because no one knew exactly what was happening, or what was going to happen thereafter.
Joseph Dindam strutted in at that moment. He too, like Nnamdi, towered over Zubairu. He was infamous for his drunken singing, which infuriated the neighbours, and for the racket he made beating up his wife and children, often well after midnight. He had been a policeman until a few months before when he suddenly stopped putting on his uniform. And the drunken brawls became a nightly occurrence.
‘Fellow Nigerians, we are all together!’ Those were the words the coup plotters had used to close their speech after the assassination. And Joseph Dindam delivered them with aplomb and a triumphant guffaw. ‘General Murtala Ramat Mohammed is gone!’
‘Cheiiii!’ Nnamdi shivered.
‘Very good!’ Joseph laughed again.
Zubairu eyed him.
‘You dey look me? No be good thing? No be him dismiss me from police, say I no competent. If to say I see am, I for shoot am to pieces myself.’
Zubairu reached up and struck him on the jaw. It happened so fast that Joseph was momentarily stunned. The brawl that ensued, loud and shocking since it involved grown men behaving like enraged dogs, was, however, short-lived. While Zubairu was striving to break Joseph Dindam’s jaw, at the cost of a bruised lip, Binta’s waters broke of their own accord. Startled by this, she hollered. Her wails reached the men and put an end to their scuffle. The other women came out, led by Mama Bola and Joseph’s battered and scrawny wife, Mama Bulus. It was they who, hours later, received Binta’s first son, covered in slime and shrieking like a furious imp.
Few people were surprised when, a week later, Zubairu named the boy Murtala. But because of kunya, the socially prescribed modesty his mother had to live with, she called him ‘Boy’ instead. And that was how Murtala Zubairu, born on the day a general died, came to be known as Yaro.
Binta finally made up her mind to be more adventurous after their second son, Munkaila, was born. They had been married three years then and that was enough for her regardless of what Dijen Tsamiya, the marriage counsellor of Kibiya, had told her on the day of her wedding.
‘When he’s done, always put your legs up so his seed will run into your womb.’
Binta, shocked, had looked at the woman’s rheumy eyes and shrunken jaw. She had wondered how many other young brides of Kibiya Dije had so pragmatically dispensed this knowledge to on their wedding eves.
When Dije smiled, her toothless mouth was like a cavern leading into her antiquated interior. No one, it seemed, remembered what Dijen Tsamiya’s married life had been like. Her husband had died many years ago and the last of her three children had passed on a decade before.
Dije had slapped her playfully, her frail hand like a cow whisk on Binta’s shoulder. ‘See how you look into my eyeballs. Don’t look your husband in the eyes like that, especially when you are doing it. Don’t look at him down there. And don’t let him look at you there, either, if you don’t want to have impious offspring.’ She removed a piece of kola from the knotted end of her wrapper, threw it in her mouth and proceeded to crush it with her gums. Binta watched her jaw move from side to side as she knotted back her wrapper with trembling hands. ‘And don’t go throwing yourself at him. You wouldn’t want him thinking you are a wanton little devil now, would you?’
Binta had shaken her head, resisting the urge to cry. The prospect of being intimate with any man, particularly one she hardly knew, was far from comforting.
‘And don’t forget what I told you about searching the pockets, mhm. The loose change could amount to something if you are thrifty, kin ji ko? You could buy your mother something decent.’
When Binta gaped at her, Dijen Tsamiya clucked at the back of her throat. ‘Young people, they think they know everything.’
Three years, in her estimation, had surely earned her a licence to be licentious, with her own husband of all people. But then on the night she made up her mind, Zubairu returned home with a torn kaftan and another bruised lip. She was sifting garin tuwo in the courtyard when he had breezed in, anger radiating from his flaring nostrils. He sat down on the raffia mat in the corner of the room and turned on the radio. Binta went in after him and sat by his side.
‘What’s wrong?’ She wiped her hands on her wrapper, the white of the cornflour rubbing off on her Ankara fabric.
He shook his fist at her. When she leaned away, his fist came down on the mat with a thud that almost woke the little boy wrapped in a fluffy shawl on the bed. When the boy stopped wriggling and resumed his slumber, Zubairu sighed.
‘I lost my job.’
‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji un!’ Binta slapped her palms alternately. ‘Maigida, how come?’
‘I beat up my boss.’ The words tumbled out as if racing with each other. ‘He called me a goat and I hit him and broke his nose.’
‘But Maigida, you could have—’
‘I could have done what?! What?! Don’t you tell me what I could have done, you don’t know the first thing about this so just shut your mouth, you hear me! Wawiya kawai!’
Munkaila started wailing, kicking away the shawl with his tiny feet. Binta crossed the room and sat on the bed. She picked him up and shoved a nipple in his mouth. The boy turned his head this way and that, screaming. She put him on her shoulders and burped him. Then she positioned him and again tried to breastfeed him. He turned his head away but would not stop screaming.
‘What the hell are you doing? Do you want to kill him?!’
She wiped away the tears that streamed from her eyes and hoisted the boy onto her shoulder. His screams filled her ears. Zubairu hovered for a while and then stormed out of the room. Moments later, he stormed back in, his furious presence startling her. He went to his clothes hanging on a rack and changed his kaftan before heading out again.
Two nights later, when he was tossing and turning on the bed next to her, she knew he would nudge her with his knee and she would have to throw her legs open. He would lift her wrapper, spit into her crotch and mount her. His calloused fingers would dig into the mounds on her chest and he would bite his lower lip to prevent any moan escaping. She would count slowly under her breath, her eyes closed, of course. And somewhere between sixty and seventy – always between sixty and seventy – he would grunt, empty himself and roll off her until he was ready to go again. Zubairu was a practical man and fancied their intimacy as an exercise in conjugal frugality. It was something to be dispensed with promptly, without silly ceremonies.
>
She wanted it to be different. She had always wanted it to be different. And so when he nudged her that night, instead of rolling on to her back and throwing her legs apart, she rolled into him and reached for his groin. He instinctively moaned when she caressed his hardness and they both feared their first son, lying on a mattress across the room, would stir.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ The words, half-barked, half-whispered, struck her like a blow. He pinned her down and, without further rituals, lifted her wrapper. She turned her face to the wall and started counting. The tears slipped down the side of her closed eyes before she got to twenty.
5
One who eats an old man should not complain when he vomits grey hair
Hadiza returned from her overnight stay at Munkaila’s to find Binta’s place suffused in the aromatic incense her mother had lit in the corners of the house. It was some time before she realised that there was a muted ambience that the incense complemented. But aside from Binta’s inexplicable coyness, something more befitting of Fa’iza than a woman well into her fifth decade, there was no sense of anything dramatic having happened.
Hadiza had returned with residual excitement from having seen Munkaila’s two daughters and presented her mother with the new glasses Munkaila had bought for her. She had met Binta lighting another stick of incense and tucking it into a corner where one had just burned out.
Binta bashfully accepted the proffered glasses in their exquisite casing and put them down by her side. When she said thank you, her voice had sounded off-key.
‘Aren’t you going to look at them?’
‘Oh. I will, later.’
Hadiza looked at her mother. Binta, sensing the probe, turned and flashed a smile at her daughter. She opened the case and put on the glasses. Just as suddenly she took them off and replaced them in the case.
‘They are nice.’ Binta glanced at her bathroom door. ‘I must take a bath now.’
‘You look so fresh I would have thought you had bathed. And your perfume is strong, Hajiya. How can you stand all that perfume and all this incense? One could choke on it all.’
Binta smiled and walked towards the bathroom.
Registering her mother’s discomfort, Hadiza excused herself and went in search of Fa’iza, who she found in her room, lying prone on the mattress. Fa’iza, smiling to herself, was lost in the novella she was reading.
‘Ke! Put that rubbish book away.’
‘Rubbish book?’
‘Why is Hajiya acting funny?’
‘Hajiya? I don’t know, wallahi. I just returned from school and met her like this.’
Hadiza leaned against the doorjamb. ‘I shall go back and ask her as soon as she is done bathing.’
‘Bathing? This should be like the third time she has had a bath in the last few hours.’
That was when Hadiza knew for certain that there must be something her mother was trying to enshroud in folds of fragrance, or wash away in her numerous baths.
She went out to the bed of petunias she had planted two days before to enliven her mother’s yard. There were dry patches emerging so she watered the plants rather generously and sat by them, imagining what they would look like when they grew.
Binta emerged from the house to find her daughter meditating by the damp flower bed. She did not want Hadiza to catch a whiff of the objectionable smell of fornication she was certain she exuded. From a distance, she asked if Hadiza was all right. But when Hadiza turned to her, Binta averted her eyes.
‘Are you still leaving tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Stay a few more days.’
Hadiza chuckled. There had been little conviction in her mother’s voice. ‘My husband called earlier to remind me I had agreed to return home tomorrow. The kids are missing me, I’m sure.’
‘Yes. The kids.’
‘He told me Kabir had a cut on his hand. I should go see how he is faring.’
Binta envied her this liberty she enjoyed, this luxury of calling her first child by its name and holding it and treating it like one’s beloved. Such affection she, Binta, had never experienced from her mother, nor dispensed to her late son Yaro.
‘Don’t you ever feel … strange calling him like that? By his name? Your first son?’
Hadiza turned to her mother and laughed. ‘Lallai kam, Hajiya, this is the twenty-first century. I shall not subject myself and my children to the shackles of the old ways like you did.’
Her eyes misty and her heart heavy, Binta leaned on the pillar and turned her eyes to a bulbul hopping on the fence. Her daughter’s response both pleased and saddened her. There were things she wished she had done differently. Such as showing Yaro some affection, protecting him as every mother should do her child. And here she was, fifteen years after his death, seeking him in the eyes of the miscreant who had scaled her fence. That felon she had shielded because she saw the shadow of Yaro in his eyes. The son she had loved, but to whom she had been forbidden to show love.
She had not meant for it to happen, the heady events of that afternoon. At least not exactly the way they had. It all seemed like a blur now. She remembered him looking at the fading scar on her neck and saying how sorry he was. The little spark of concupiscence deep within her had burst into a flame. She had seen its reflection in his eyes, the fire, blazing until he could no longer subdue it. Her heart had been racing. And when he had ventured to fondle her breasts, she had moaned and tried feebly to move away. He had put his arms around her, and she had found his lips.
Shame had come much later, after they were done and lay side by side trying to catch their breath. She got up and pulled down her dress. When he had come to leave, he had halted before her as she stood by the door, eyes averted. Uncertainly, they had stood like that, until he parted the curtains and went out. And when she sensed him gone, because she did not hear his footfalls, she had exhaled. She knew then that her search for Yaro in the eyes of a stranger had unshackled her long-suppressed desires and left the objectionable stench of fornication clinging to her.
‘Mother, you have not said anything.’
Binta sighed. ‘You girls are so lucky.’
‘Really?’
‘In my time, such things as a woman calling her first child by its name were frowned at. Some women didn’t even acknowledge their second or third child.’
‘This is not your time as such, Hajiya.’
‘Well, make the best of it.’ And this Binta said with such sincerity that Hadiza turned to look at her. But Binta had her face nestled against the side of the pillar, staring at the fence where the bird had been.
The evening breeze ferried a sweet fragrance to Hadiza. She savoured it for a while before deciding it had been applied rather too lavishly. ‘Your perfume smells nice, Hajiya.’
Binta was silent for a while. ‘Thank you.’
‘You have suddenly grown fond of perfumes and incense.’
‘Hmm. I have always been fond of perfumes and incense.’
‘Yes. But you have been burning incense non-stop since I returned.’ She stopped short of mentioning the three baths.
Binta’s silence stretched almost into disregard. Finally, she drew her hijab tightly around her. ‘You should talk to your sister Hureira. I fear she might end up ruining her second marriage just as she did with the first one.’
Their talk strayed from Binta’s sudden infatuation with sweet-smelling things to Hureira’s startling eccentricities. Until the gathering dusk ushered them in to make plans for dinner.
6
A snake can shed its skin, but it will still remain a serpent
When Reza slipped his hand under her wrapper, he discovered, much to his surprise, that the clump of ancient hair he had encountered the first time was gone. She was amused by his startled expression and offered only the faintest resistance when he undid the wrapper and looked at her. She allowed him to sit her on the cushioned stool before the dressing table. When he knelt before her, she turned her face away a
nd pressed her thighs together. But once he prised them apart, gently, and took his tongue to her, she held his head of minuscule anthills and quaked. And because they were alone in the house, because she had always wanted to, because she could not stop herself, she moaned. With his tongue, he unlocked something deep within her. She soared with tears streaming down her face.
When they were lying on the bed, still unable to look each other in the eye, Binta, her back to him already, moved further away. ‘I am not a ’yar iska.’
Reza frowned. ‘Well, I never said you were. I think very highly of you, you understand?’
‘I don’t want you making assumptions about me because of what happened. I am a decent, respectable woman, you know. I have never been with any man other than my husband, God rest his soul.’
‘I understand that, trust me. I would never think of you in such a light.’ He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. ‘I don’t understand how this thing happened.’
She sighed. ‘Since the last time you came and … I have been thinking people could look at me and see fornication written across my forehead. Or perceive its smell on me.’
He chuckled. ‘You smell nice. And there is nothing written on your forehead.’
‘No, you don’t understand. You may be used to such things. I am not. The first few days, I was overcome by guilt and shame. I couldn’t attend classes at the madrasa for fear people would know what had happened. And when you didn’t come back I thought you despised me for what had happened, what I let happen. And then a week passed and I thought oh, well perhaps I wasn’t even good enough for him. What could he possibly do with a hag like me?’
‘No, no, you are not a hag, stop saying that.’ He reached across the bed and put an arm around her. ‘And I don’t despise you. I thought you despised me for taking advantage of you and I had no idea what to expect if I came back. I didn’t plan for any of this to happen, you understand.’
Season of Crimson Blossoms Page 5