Kareema was born first – by three days. But her mother, Aisha, was actually the second wife. Alhaji Babangida, their father, had married Zainab first. After a year without being blessed with a child, he married Aisha. The co-wives took the competition to heart and were soon racing each other to see who would first have a baby, seducing their husband each night and wearing him thin after his day’s exertion at work, until he started faking trips and spending nights in hotels by himself, recuperating from too much sex. After Kareema was born a girl, Zainab desperately willed the child in her womb to magically transform into a boy.
After the birth of Abida, there was a race to see who would deliver the first son. Zainab won at the third attempt. That race was succeeded by the competition to deliver the most children, a contest that resulted in the two having thirteen between them. As the children grew, the mothers limited their interactions to flashes of hostile glares, while Kareema and Abida would be out on the veranda playing with stuffed dolls, much to their mothers’ dismay. When the girls turned eight, and had refused to inherit their mothers’ caustic quarrels, as their younger siblings had, Aisha did something dramatic. In a misguided attempt to disabuse Zainab of an unfounded claim of potent witchery, Aisha smacked her with a broom. A huge fight broke out. Neighbours, attracted by the ruckus, rushed in to break up the fight and were baffled to find the indifferent girls before Aisha’s dressing table, painting their faces with the radiant colours of girlish dreams.
‘What are you doing, Amin?’ Abida caressed the lace fringes of her short hijab.
The Short Ones always called Fa’iza by her surname, which had originally been Aminu before Fa’iza decided to streamline it. Fa’iza Amin sounded slicker. Of course, she wished she could be more avant-garde without desecrating her family name. And the hallowed memory of her beloved father.
‘Me? I was trying to get some sleep until I heard your voices. Let’s go to my room.’
‘What about Hajiya?’ Kareema flipped her scarf over her shoulder.
‘Hajiya? She’s inside.’
Announcing their intentions to greet Hajiya Binta, the girls started making their way to her room.
‘Ah, ah, Kareema, Abida.’ Binta, who had no intention of letting them into the room where her indiscretions had manifested, filled the doorway in her saffron-coloured hijab.
The girls knelt to greet her and answered in the affirmative when asked about their mothers’ wellbeing. But all through the exchange, Binta’s eyes were on the soyayya novellas rolled up in Abida’s hand.
‘Don’t you girls tire of reading these books? What value do they add to your lives anyway?’
‘I asked them to bring them, Hajiya.’ Fa’iza, quite conversant with Binta’s mistrust of the Short Ones and their corrupting influence, stood behind her friends.
‘They are the only things Fa’iza reads and now she even dreams of writing them someday.’ Binta’s eyes danced over the tops of the girls’ bowed heads. ‘And she had wanted to be a doctor, you know.’
When the girls said nothing, Binta asked after little Ummi and seemed satisfied when she was told that the girl had gone to the neighbour’s house to play. Kareema and Abida rose and stiffly walked off to Fa’iza’s room, carefully placing one foot directly in front of the other and resolutely keeping their hips from swaying.
‘Let me see them.’ Fa’iza shut the door and hurried over to the girls standing in the middle of the room.
Abida was amused by the desperate look in Fa’iza’s eyes as she held out the books to her. Fa’iza shuffled through the titles: So ko Kiyayya? Me Ne Ne Aibi Na? and Bilkisu Mai Gadon Zinari. Fa’iza’s shoulders slouched and she pouted. ‘I’ve read all these, apart from the part two of Mai Gadon Zinari.’
‘Oh, well, you are in luck.’ Kareema sat down on the mattress. ‘That woman who rented the second part has just brought it back. I will send one of my sisters with it later.’
From their bedrooms, the sisters ran a lucrative lending library of soyayya novellas, stacks of which they had accumulated over the last two years, renting a book out for the price of a box of matches per day. But with Fa’iza, they were generous and let her borrow whatever titles she wanted for free.
‘Have you finished the others you borrowed?’ Abida took her place on the mattress beside her sister.
Reluctantly, Fa’iza handed over the books and sat on the floor opposite the Short Ones. ‘The others? Finished three. Will finish the rest soon. Don’t you have anything else by Anty Balki Funtua?’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Sure, she’s good.’ Kareema nodded. ‘But sometimes she can be – a bit far-fetched.’
‘Sure, what with the glass floors and all.’ Abida agreed.
‘I like her stories anyway.’ Fa’iza smiled. ‘Get me some of her latest.’
‘Sure thing.’
‘Sure, why not? But you have to give these ones back. Other people have been lining up for them.’
‘Sure, and we need the money, you know. My aunt in Kano will be sending new books and we need to pay up.’
‘Kwarai, kwarai.’ Kareema was looking at her henna-dyed fingernails.
Fa’iza kept shifting her eyes from one sister to the other to keep up with their sure-sure. She wondered why two people would want to be so similar. Yet she admired them for it, as she envied them their army of siblings and their living parents. The thought made her lonely.
‘What?’ Abida looked into Fa’iza’a face.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘She’s missing her boyfriend,’ Kareema laughed.
Fa’iza gaped. ‘Of course not.’
‘Sure.’
‘Yeah, sure. She still doesn’t have a boyfriend.’
‘Sure she does.’
‘Sure. Bala Mahmud.’
Bala Mahmud was the adorable boy in her class who always seemed desperate to help Fa’iza with her assignments and was eager to lend her his notes if she fell behind with schoolwork.
Fa’iza shrank at the suggestion. She had never thought of him in that light, really. Thoughts of Ali Nuhu had not left room in her heart for the likes of the boy who could barely express himself when in her presence. Not that he was much of a talker to begin with. ‘Bala Mahmud? He’s just a nice boy.’
‘Sure. As if we are kids.’ Kareema smirked and waved her hand dismissively.
‘Sure.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘Sure, all right.’
‘She’s in love with Ali Nuhu,’ Abida laughed. Kareema joined her and the sisters high-fived. Fa’iza laughed shyly and denied her infatuation with the actor.
‘Sure. That’s why his face is all over your room.’
‘My room? Well—’
‘Well, what?’
Fa’iza smiled coyly.
‘It’s cool, I think he’s cute.’ Abida, as she sometimes did, switched to English.
‘He’s not.’ Kareema sounded unnecessarily belligerent.
Fa’iza’s eyes popped. It was the first time, in the eventful seven months she had known the sisters, that she had heard the Short Ones disagree on anything. Overwhelmed by this insignificant bit of history, she opened her mouth to speak but could not say anything.
Abida spoke instead. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Blubbery lips.’
‘His lips are fine.’ Fa’iza was shocked by her own voice. By its high-pitched ring of desperation, which she hoped would shut Kareema up.
‘Sure they are.’ Abida smiled and the undressed sincerity of it pleased Fa’iza.
‘And he’s arrogant too.’ Kareema was not quite done with her offensive.
‘Arrogant? He’s not.’
‘Sure he is.’
‘Sure he’s not!’
The sisters had a stare-down that, in reality, lasted all of three seconds. But in Fa’iza’s baffled mind, it must have lasted an entire hour. Kareema rolled away from her sister, picked up one of the novellas they had brought and started flipping through t
he pages. Abida got up and went to look in the mirror hanging on the wall, the one embellished with stickers of Ali Nuhu’s face. Fa’iza picked up the book she had been reading before the Short Ones arrived and took up from where she had left off.
Abida patted down her nose with her palms and, satisfied with her looks, sought something else to engage her attention. Her eyes fell on a notebook at the other end of Fa’iza’s mattress. She would not have thought much of it but for the words scribbled on the cover: Fa’iza Amin’s Secret Book. She went and sat down on the mattress, her back turned to the other girls. She picked up the book and opened it. There were sketches of figures wielding clubs standing over a person on the ground. The felled figure was a little more elaborate, with a distinct beard.
She turned over the page and started reading what Fa’iza had written each time she had been hounded out of her tenuous sleep by the roaring shadows that prowled her dreams, and which were now manifesting in her wakefulness as well.
When the silence in the room grew uncomfortable, Fa’iza looked up and saw Abida hunched over on the far end of the mattress.
‘Abida, please.’
Abida looked up at Fa’iza’s troubled face and closed the book. She tucked it under the mattress. They looked into each others’ eyes – Fa’iza seeing the glint of understanding in Abida’s and Abida, moved, in no small measure by the glimpse of Fa’iza’s secret struggles with something she could not name, saw her friend in a new light. It was a significant interlude in which trust and understanding were forged and Fa’iza felt closer to anyone than she had in years.
Kareema scrutinised her dyed nails once more and frowned. ‘I need a razor.’
Fa’iza rose and searched in her make-up basket. She offered the sheathed blade to Kareema and went back to her book.
Abida lay back on the mattress, scowling at the ceiling. ‘So, you want to write?’
‘Me? Maybe.’ Fa’iza was still embarrassed that Abida had actually read the repository of her most private fears and terror-laden dreams.
‘Why?’
‘Why? I don’t know.’
Abida looked at her sister expertly cutting her nails, collecting bits of henna-dyed fingernails into a little pile on the handkerchief spread out before her. She turned to Fa’iza and asked: ‘What are you going to write about then?’
Fa’iza sighed. ‘Me? Maybe I want to write about other things and other places and other people, about love and people being happy and not—’ she was staring past the cream-coloured walls and the meadows beyond into a distant space illuminated only by the light of her imagination. ‘I want to write about beautiful things.’
Kareema smiled with a hint of mischief. ‘Speaking about beautiful things, I know a cute boy.’
‘Who?’ Abida sounded eager.
‘Reza.’ Kareema’s smile took on roguish proportions.
‘Reza?’
‘Sure, he’s cute.’
‘Oh! Shit!’ Kareema exclaimed.
When the girls looked at her, she was holding up a cut index finger, watching the blood trickle down it with a small smile on her face. Fa’iza’s eyes widened and curiously her lips started trembling. And then her entire body, as if determined not to be outdone, caught on. Her little hurt-kitten whimpers terrified the Short Ones, who involuntarily drew together.
‘What happened to her?’ Kareema’s voice quavered.
‘I don’t know.’
When little beads of perspiration started sprouting on Fa’iza’s forehead and above her upper lip, Abida reached out to touch her. Fa’iza screamed like a vexed djinn in the profundity of night.
Jos: November 28th, 2008
Her father knocked softly on the door of the room she shared with her ten-year-old sister, Amina. ‘Mommy, wake up, dear. Time for prayers.’
He also knocked on her brother’s door and walked out into the predawn light to the mosque from which Manshawi’s emotive recitation of Sura An Nisa from the Glorious Qur’an reached her.
Fa’iza had been close to her father, Mu’azu Aminu. Sometimes she thought it was because of the long wait he and her mother had endured before their first son, Jamilu, came, as she had been told, one dawn when the rain washed the silent hills clean. That was what her mother Asabe always said when trying to appease Jamilu – which was quite often. Everyone knew Jamilu was Asabe’s favourite. Fa’iza was not quite sure about the rain because her mother herself was not sure about a lot of things. But it made sense when one considered that Jamilu had washed away the doubts about her fertility that had lingered for all of twelve years.
Two years later, Fa’iza was born and placed in her father’s tender hands.
He looked at her, at her button nose and beady eyes, and his own eyes welled up with tears. ‘She has my mother’s eyes.’
So she was named after his mother, who had died after years of waiting in vain to welcome her grandchildren. When Fa’iza was still a child, her father would hoist her onto his shoulders and walk round the neighbourhood, introducing her as his mother to everyone they met. When she got older, she would sit on the dakali at the front of the house, looking in the direction of the setting sun. Her father, framed by the light of dusk, would hurry home from the Jos Main Market after he had closed his babyware shop. On the occasions he travelled to Lagos to stock up, she would sit with the stuffed doll he had bought her and look longingly into the evening light. Then she would go inside to her mother, always busy cooking, while her younger sister Amina would be strapped to her mother’s back, shrieking like an enraged wild thing.
Even when she was thirteen, her father still offered her choice pieces of meat from his soup while Jamilu fumed. And then they would sit and talk about school and his business while her mother, sitting in the corner, told Amina stories about the clever spider and the dubious tortoise.
So that November morning, she knew she wanted to be by his side when the news reached them. He had returned from the dawn prayers and was hoping to catch the results of the previous day’s council elections on the BBC Hausa Service. He had just turned on his shortwave radio when a neighbour, Umaru Sanda, barged in.
‘What are you still doing here when the whole town has gone gaga?’
But because not even Umaru Sanda’s dimwit wife paid much attention to Umaru Sanda, her father hadn’t taken any notice. How could there be another riot when so many policemen had been deployed for the elections? But the sounds of gunshots drawing ever closer vindicated Sanda, who had since left to evacuate his family. Because they had lived through riots in 2001, 2002 and 2004 they knew their neighbourhood would not be safe. Their likes were far outnumbered. So Mua’zu started packing up valuables and Jamilu tried to roll the mattress off the bed. Amina clung to her mother’s wrapper, both were crying.
Gunshots thundered close by. Then the banshee screams of Umaru Sanda’s wife leapt at them from across the fence and shredded, with decided finality, any hope they had of the unfolding nightmare ending before it fully manifested.
‘Where is he?! Where is he?!’ There was a heavy bang on the door.
Amidst so much screaming and so many enraged voices, no one could be certain what was happening.
Mu’azu snapped out of his stupor first. ‘The bathroom, quick!’
It was the sound of desperation in her father’s voice that struck Fa’iza. And when she tried to look into his eyes for some reassurance, he turned his face away. They crammed into the bathroom, all five of them, and locked the door. In the small space, they waited, like the cows Fa’iza had seen packed into open trucks at the Yan Awaki market on their way to the slaughterhouse. The smell of overnight piss, still waiting to be flushed in the toilet bowl, swelled. But above it, the raw stench of fear made Fa’iza’s head turn. She wanted to bend down but bumped into Jamilu.
‘Watch it.’ It was a whisper.
‘Shush!’ Even in that whispered word, there was anxiety in her father’s voice.
Amina began whimpering and would have started wailing but for A
sabe, who hugged her tightly, hushing her and suppressing her own cries.
‘Keep her quiet.’ Now there was anger in Mu’azu’s voice.
Asabe held the girl and clasped a hand over her mouth. Then she herself started whimpering, her steady drone filling the silence.
Jamilu wriggled his way to the top of the toilet bowl and squatted, resting his weight on his legs. Fa’iza heaved and wriggled into the little space her brother had vacated.
When they heard the front door being bashed in, Asabe’s stomach rumbled like a disgruntled volcano. ‘I want to use the toilet.’
Jamilu’s foot slipped and he hurtled into his father’s back. They crashed into the door. The commotion outside blanketed the noise and they waited, holding their breath.
‘Ayatul Qursiy,’ Mu’azu ordered. Fa’iza mechanically started reciting the verse from memory.
‘In the toilet?!’ Jamilu was incredulous.
‘In your hearts.’
But they froze as they heard the doors being broken down and furniture overturned; the crash of the TV and the splintering of glass. Some maniac hacked at the wall with a machete, the angry sound of metal on concrete and his hate-filled scream jarring Fa’iza’s nerves. The warm smell of shit bloated and filled the room. Fa’iza turned to her mother and saw her mouth moving mindlessly, her face, in the dim light, glistening with tears and sweat.
Fa’iza felt a hand searching for hers and knew it was her father. He squeezed it and quickly let go. But she still sensed the trembling.
When they broke down the bathroom door, her father went first, hands raised above his head. Fa’iza felt a warm liquid run down her thighs and pool around her feet.
‘Spare my children, please.’ Mu’azu knelt down before the armed mob that had invaded the house.
Season of Crimson Blossoms Page 7