Amidst the clatter of utensils in the kitchen and the protest of potatoes or some unfortunate eggs being fried, Hureira’s voice would startle the habitual peace of breakfast time. ‘Ummi, eat up. You mustn’t be late for school.’
Ummi would look up at this mother she had not seen for half the months on the calendar, marvelling at the sheen of the honey and egg-white face mask she was wearing.
Fa’iza would look up from her breakfast or from the handheld mirror into which she was pouting. ‘Late? We are not going to be late, Aunty Hureira, haba!’
Hureira would look at her daughter. ‘Ummi, you are spilling crumbs on your uniform, for God’s sake!’
Ummi, stunned by the aggression in her mother’s voice, would brush away the crumbs and lift the mug to her mouth, looking over the rim at her mother now busy flipping an omelette in the pan.
After the children had gone off to school, Hureira would lie on the couch with slices of cucumber over her eyes, allowing her face to benefit from the wonders of whatever concoctions she had applied. She would say, ‘Hajiya, a dawo lafiya,’ when Binta breezed past on her way out to the madrasa. The older woman would only grunt and shut the door behind her.
After three days, they still had not had the talk.
Until Reza called Binta’s phone. She was at the madrasa, just after Ustaz Nura had left with his Fathul Majid, from which he had just read, under his arm. Mariya, one of the students, heaved up the bag from under her desk and placed it on the table. She proceeded to draw out baby wares, assorted flip-flops, printed Ankara wax cloths, heady incense from the Orient and exotic underwear from the Occident. Mariya had a piece from all corners of the world in her bag.
The women crowded around her. They fingered the fabrics, sniffed the incense and tried out the printed material against their complexions.
‘I am dark; I think this will go with my skin tone.’
‘Don’t you have a bigger size for this, Mariya?’
‘This bra won’t fit my boobs, don’t you have a bigger one?’
And in the middle, Mariya sat, handing out goods. ‘This will suit you just fine.’ Her voice was coated with the sweetness of a practised merchant.
Binta feigned interest in a pair of slippers whilst she cast sidelong glances at the booster pills and vaginal creams and ointments Mariya had displayed on the table. Women with husbands contemplated these, unscrewing the lids and sniffing the contents.
‘Try this, you can thank me tomorrow.’ Kandiya picked up a small jar and handed it to another woman.
Binta’s phone rang. She dropped the slippers and rummaged through her bag. She found the phone and looked around at the women. They, too, were looking at her as she said hello into the phone and hurried out of the class.
‘Hi.’ She stood under the zogale tree outside.
‘You’re still at the madrasa?’ Reza’s voice sounded hazy.
‘Yes. Did you go to the house?’
‘No. You asked me to wait until you called first. It has been two days since.’
‘I know,’ she whispered into the phone as some women from the madrasa walked past. ‘She’s still here.’
‘When is she leaving?’
‘I don’t know. She is waiting for her husband to come and do biko.’
‘Oh, runaway wife.’
‘Unfortunately. Do you want to see me?’
‘Yes.’
She cradled the phone closer to her ear and sighed. ‘Don’t worry. It’s just for a couple of days, I’m sure.’
‘OK.’
‘Have you been taking care of yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your prayers? Have you been praying?’
‘Yes.’
‘Try not to neglect your prayers.’
There was some hesitation. ‘I will try.’
‘I will see you soon then.’
‘OK.’
She hesitated. There was also a long pause at the other end. When the call had ended, she was not certain who pressed the button first.
Binta emerged from the bedroom with a plastic basket of hairdressing paraphernalia. ‘Come braid my hair.’
Hureira, who was lying on the couch flicking through an old magazine, sat up, collected the basket and placed it by her legs. Binta sat on the rug between Hureira’s thighs and took off her scarf. Hureira opened the jar of hair oil in the basket and massaged blobs of it into her mother’s thick, dense hair. She took a yellow plastic comb from the basket and proceeded to untangle Binta’s hair.
‘You are going grey, Hajiya.’
‘I know.’
They fell silent as Hureira picked up the misilla from the basket and expertly ran the metal tip along Binta’s scalp, drawing intricate patterns in her mother’s hair. She dipped a finger in oil and briskly ran it along the swathe the misilla had made before she started weaving curving cornrows.
‘Wayyo! Not so hard, Hureira, you are not fighting with my hair.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Hureira’s grip on the hair slackened. ‘You are angry with me, Hajiya.’
‘No.’
‘You haven’t said anything to me since I came. Do you want me to leave?’
‘What mother would want her daughter to be a serial divorcée?’
‘I’m not a divorcée, Hajiya. Haba!’
‘What are you then? First marriage annulled, second one on the rocks.’ Binta felt a tug on her hair. ‘Don’t yank off my hair, you.’
Hureira’s first marriage had come loose after twenty months. The unravelling had started with one of those insignificant tiffs that characterise marriages. She had found Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Passport of Mallam Ilia amongst her husband’s things. The novel was a gift from a former girlfriend with the provocative inscription ‘With all my love’. Even though it had predated their wedding by two years, she had set the book ablaze and inadvertently burnt down her marriage. After that, the arguments had become more intense, more frequent, fuelled perhaps by her husband’s inability to hold down a steady job, which had been Binta’s major objection to the marriage in the first instance.
Hureira patted her mother’s hair and gingerly grabbed a handful. ‘The least you could do is to ask me what happened. But no, you just made assumptions.’
‘Only a fool asks why a man and his wife are quarrelling.’ Binta’s voice, at that point, was quiet, deep and confident. ‘I did not marry you off a child. I trained you well before you went and chose that good-for-nothing for a husband. You messed that up, as expected. Now Allah, in His infinite grace, has given you another opportunity and you are messing that up as well.’
Hureira picked up the comb and yanked. Binta felt her hair being tugged from the roots and winced. She could imagine the scowl on Hureira’s face, how she must be biting her lower lip, as her father Zubairu used to do.
‘It’s not my fault, Hajiya.’
Binta said nothing as Hureira parted her hair, applied oil and yanked again as she began to weave another cornrow.
‘You don’t expect me to sit down and allow him to trample over me. I’m not that kind of woman.’
Hureira kept parting and combing, yanking and weaving. And Binta endured. She flinched each time her daughter put down the comb to reach for her hair. She did not want to give Hureira the satisfaction of knowing that she was hurting her. Finally, she cleared her throat.
‘They say a patient man cooks a rock and drinks its broth. Your quarrel is with your husband, not with my hair.’
‘I’m not quarrelling with your hair.’
‘But you are quarrelling with your husband.’
Hureira said nothing.
‘You chose him from among your suitors, this husband of yours, as you chose the one before him.’ Binta massaged her forehead to ease the pain at her hairline. ‘I did not choose your father. We didn’t even have a courtship. Yes, we had our differences but we still lived together until he died. We raised four children, your father and I, and we never talked about love.’
‘T
hat was then.’
‘And what has changed? Husbands and wives still quarrel and make up, why can’t you? You compromise a little and you make peace. Stooping to a dwarf is not a shortcoming.’
Hureira finished the last row and put the comb and misilla back in the basket. She screwed the lid on the jar of hair oil and put it back in with the other things.
Binta trawled through the basket until she found the handheld mirror. She twisted her neck this way and that so she could examine Hureira’s handiwork. She nodded, barely. ‘It’s a bit taut.’
Hureira kicked away the basket, almost spilling the contents, and moved her legs away from her mother.
‘I pray your daughter doesn’t inherit this leper’s temper as you did from that father of yours.’
Snatching up her magazine, Hureira rose and as she stomped to Fa’iza’s room, her mother called.
‘Go and make peace with your husband and don’t be living here in shame, mara kunya kawai.’
The sound of the door slamming marked Hureira’s depature. But the shadow of her rage lingered in the living room like dark clouds in timid skies.
Hureira woke up the next morning with hangover rage. She banged the utensils while making breakfast. No one came to find out what the racket was about. She ate standing over the worktop and, having quelled the unrest in her stomach, retired to her room. Her honey and albumen masked face and cucumber-shaded eyes faced the ceiling in an icy glare as she lay down on the mattress.
Fa’iza crouched at one end of the other mattress, scribbling into her Secret Book. At the other end, Ummi sat looking from her mother to Fa’iza. Eventually she got up and left the room.
When Fa’iza’s hand started to tremble, she slammed the book shut and huddled against the wall. Her eyes jumped around, bouncing off the ceiling, to the mirror on the wall embellished with stickers of Ali Nuhu, to the ceiling fan languidly slicing the light. Then, she started whimpering.
Hureira carefully raised the cucumber from her eyes to see what was happening. She hissed, got up and walked out of the room. In the living room, she turned on the TV and flicked through the channels.
In her room, Binta sat on the bed reading Priscilla Cogan’s Compass of the Heart. Every now and then she looked up to see Ummi dressing up her stuffed doll, winding a piece of cloth around its head, laying it down or burping it. Binta would smile and return to the book.
When the noise of the TV from the living room reached Ummi, she picked up her doll and ran out. She stood and watched Hureira scowling at the TV and flipping channels.
‘Mommy, can we watch the cartoons?’
Hureira flicked back to the cartoon channel and flung the remote onto one of the seats. She watched Ummi sit down on the floor, not too far from her, her eyes trained on the TV. She saw her daughter’s dainty smile, the dimples on her cheeks, the excitement gleaming in her eyes. When Ummi chortled, Hureira felt her anger defrosting.
She remembered the first time she looked at this child of hers, wrapped in a fluffy shawl in the hospital, and understood what the joy of being a mother really meant. Even though Ummi looked like her father, a man Hureira now loathed, she felt the glow spreading inside, filling her up.
The screen went blank. Mother and daughter instinctively looked up at the light bulbs that were now dead. Yet another power cut.
Ummi whined. Hureira sighed and got up. She opened the door and went out to the generator shed. She saw the blackened side of the shed where the generator exhaust had been blasting since it was installed there. She saw the expanding blotch of machine oil that had trickled from the generator. But the machine wasn’t there. She looked behind the shed and then at the gate that was still latched shut. Then she looked around at the fence.
‘What do you mean the generator is gone?’ Binta rushed out of the room after Hureira had reported her find.
Hureira followed at some distance. ‘We need to call the police.’
Binta looked into the shed and behind it and satisfied herself that the machine was in fact gone. The only person she could think of calling was Reza. ‘Bring me my phone, Fa’iza.’
It was Ummi who found the footprint; evidence that a large-footed miscreant had scaled Binta’s fence, yet again.
13
One whose mother is by the stove will not lack soup in his bowl
At San Siro, Reza sat on a bench with a wad of notes in his hands. The young men presented themselves before him one at a time and he handed out a thousand naira note to each of them. He yawned, wearied by all the shouting and exuberant antics he had put on at the rally, as had most of the boys. He wiped away the dust in his eyes and continued to hand out the notes.
But soon the boys, whose scant sense of propriety had been melted by the punitive sun and were now animated by the prospect of getting paid, began to push and shove. Their outbursts and cursing rivalled the noise coming from the flea market by the corner. Reza stood up on the bench and held the notes high above his head. ‘You will keep quiet now and behave yourselves, or I’m not paying.’
One of the rented boys pumped his fist with revolutionary gusto. ‘No way, man! No way! After all this wahala! Allah ya sauwake!’
Reza glared at him. ‘You said something?’
The thug looked into Reza’s daring eyes, shook his head and withdrew into the crowd.
‘You understand, I don’t like this nonsense. That’s why I never handle this myself. If Gattuso were here, you would be dealing with him because I don’t like idiots shouting at me because of a little money. Everybody who was at the rally will get paid.’
The chaos dampened by Reza’s temper, payment went on without a hitch. Having dispensed the task, Reza retreated to his room. He flopped on the mattress, looking indolently at the giant poster of the AC Milan squad. Eighteen months on the wall – masking the emptiness of the room – had taken some of the gloss off the poster. He turned away from it and faced the door, just as Sani Scholar and Joe came in.
Sani held up the curtain. ‘The bus drivers are here to see you.’
Reza rose and walked past the duo. The two bus drivers were standing by the door, arms hanging by their sides. One was Yoruba and the other Kanuri, but Reza thought they looked alike; the same worn faces, the same sweat-stained jumpers and the same strained eyes. Occupational siblings.
The Kanuri man cleared his throat and spat on the floor. ‘We came for the balance.’
Reza reached into his jeans and counted out some notes. He handed it to him and counted some more for the Yoruba man.
The first man collected the notes and then said in his thickly accented Hausa, ‘Ah, brother Reza, you didn’t add the something for the flat tyre.’
‘What flat tyre?’
‘We had a flat tyre on the way back.’
‘So, how is that my fault?’
‘It’s your people I was carrying and you know we carried more than the recommended.’
‘Lasisi, it’s like you don’t want me doing business with you.’ Reza was growing irritated.
‘Ah, no. It’s not like that.’
The Kanuri man again cleared his throat, but this time, he didn’t spit. ‘Maigida Reza, you and Lasisi have been together long. This is a small matter.’
Reza whipped out a two hundred naira note and handed it to the man. Lasisi took it and said his thanks. Reza could not help noticing the identical shuffle of their worn slippers on the concrete as they headed back to their buses, back to the sun-beaten blacktop where they fetched their bread, where someday, their bones would be scraped off and their stories would be forgotten, trampled into the road, like countless others, by the whizzing wheels of time. He shook his head and headed back to the room.
Joe and Sani followed him. They stood by the door. Joe’s face bore the weightiness of one about to broach a heavy subject.
‘What about the guys?’ Joe stepped forward.
Reza slumped on the mattress and said nothing.
Sani shifted on his feet. ‘They have spent the
night in a cell, they must have learnt their lesson.’
‘Is the cell your father’s house?’
The two men looked at each other, stunned by the anger in Reza’s voice. But the confused expression on each of their faces, despite the circumstances, amused them. Joe started laughing. Sani, too, joined him. They fell to their knees and laughed long and hard until they broke the tension and Reza, tickled by their hysterics, smiled.
‘You understand, I told everyone that this policeman is looking for ways to make trouble for us but Gattuso and Dogo, stupid as they are, went and started a fight.’
Joe stopped laughing. ‘It has already happened, Reza. Ka yi hakuri mana.’
‘If they wanted to fight they could have taken it elsewhere, not here in San Siro, you understand. Making all that noise and drawing the police here like that.’ Reza shook his head. ‘How could they be so stupid?’
Sani sat down and stretched his legs on the floor. ‘It will not happen again, insha Allah.’
Reza made a face showing the extent of his disgust. ‘You don’t understand. I don’t like going to the police for anything. Anything! Now if I go to bail them, this OC will think he is doing me a favour.’
Joe bowed his head. ‘It will not happen again.’
Reza sighed and rose. He walked out of the door and headed for the gate.
Outside the police post, ASP Dauda Baleri sat on a bench, flanked by some of his men. He was tending to the irritations of the shaving bumps that plagued his neck and sullied his mood. He saw Reza approaching, looked the other way and caressed his jaw, scratching and grimacing. When Reza stood before them and offered a greeting, Baleri grunted in reply.
‘OC, I came to see you.’
Baleri took his time rising and Reza followed him into his austere office. The smell of fresh paint that had filled the air when Reza last visited had been replaced by the smell of mosquito coil and stinking shoes. From outside, the stale stench of urine from the corner where the officers peed wafted in with the occasional breeze.
Season of Crimson Blossoms Page 12