The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

by Lola Shoneyin

  The next morning, Iya Tope brought breakfast into my room. Her fingers touched the face of the plate as she placed it on the bedside table. There was no way I could eat it so for two days all I did was sleep and wake, wake and sleep, harboring unbearable hunger pangs. On the third day, I stood up from my slumber knowing I’d die if I didn’t eat. I found the kitchen and scrubbed every inch of it. The wives stepped around me in hushed curiosity. I finished at eight o’clock in the evening. Then I sat on the floor and finished a plate of yam. I cleaned and cooked the yam myself.

  That night, Baba Segi came to me. He sat on my bed and grabbed my breasts. I thought it was all quite amusing until he jumped between my legs and tried to force his penis into me. “I am still wearing my underwear,” I told him.

  He wasn’t like Tunde at all. There was no sucking, no licking, no nuzzling, no moistening. Baba Segi was heavy; everything about him was clumsy and awkward. He heaved and hoed, poured his water into me and collapsed onto my breasts. Tunde never did that; he always shook his water onto my belly. I looked forward to the day our paths would cross again at meet-roads. For months, I cleaned. I knew I would find Tunde when the time was right.

  One day, that fat frog Iya Segi asked if I’d noticed that Iya Tope had left all the housecleaning to me. The truth was that I didn’t want to share the washing and cleaning with Iya Tope. Sometimes I had to clench my fists to resist the urge to drag her to the backyard, brush her yellowing teeth, wipe her nose and scrub her from top to bottom. When I asked Iya Segi what she wanted me to do about the information she’d given me, she lifted both palms and insisted she was only telling me because she’d taken a liking to me. “Thank you,” I said, staring her dead in the eye.

  Let me tell you now, I don’t like people who think they can outsmart me. Grandma used to throw skirts into the laundry basket with money in the pockets, hoping I’d steal it so she could accuse me. I wasn’t that stupid! Then she’d leave her jewelry box open and leave one ring in it. One! As if I didn’t know she stored the rest of her jewelry in a vanity case in the wardrobe! The day I left their house, I took complete sets with me. I took a heavy cross too. If I was going to be a Christian, I would need a crucifix. The most stupid thing was what Grandma did about the underwear though. She’d creep up behind me and ask me to lift my skirt so she could see my underwear. She did this every time her daughters reported that their underwear was missing. Why would I wear stolen underwear? They were buried in the big sack of rice in the pantry! I hate it when people think they can outsmart me.

  The frog was relentless. She taught me tricks that helped me get the better of the goat. “Do this for Baba Segi,” she’d say. “It will make him love you more.”

  “More than he loves you?” I’d ask.

  Then she’d make that sound in her throat. Kruuk kruuk. Just like a frog.

  “I didn’t think so.” Although the idea of becoming the wife who could get anything she wanted from Baba Segi was attractive to me, the prize was less so. Baba Segi was like a flatulent pig. Grandma would have scolded him; she would have rubbed chili powder around his anus.

  Remember I said there was a road ahead for me and Tunde? Well, one day, I trailed him from Grandma’s house to his workplace. When he saw me running toward him, he burst into laughter. He laughed until tears fell from his eyes. “Bravo!” he kept shouting. He says many strange things that I don’t understand. He took me to a hotel not far from his workplace and said renting a room for two hours in the afternoon was called short time. It was good to have him back between my thighs, especially after two nights with Baba Segi, whose penis was so big that two men could share it and still be well endowed. Where he used his gbam-gbam-gbam like a hammer, Tunde used his like a forefinger; he bent and turned until it stroked all the right places. During one of our frequent short-time sessions, I told Tunde that I was married to Baba Segi. He didn’t seem surprised at all. He just smiled. “It can only make our time sweeter,” he said.

  One night when Baba Segi was busy pummeling Iya Tope, Iya Segi came to my room and told me how children were born in Baba Segi’s household. She said it as if the solution wasn’t out of choice but necessity. When she left my room, I smiled to myself. I was already pregnant. Six months later, Baba Segi and I brought Femi home from the hospital. “He is very big for a child born three months early,” his first wife sneered. I told her the ways of God were mysterious and snatched my newborn son from her arms.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Baba Segi; on the contrary, I have several reasons to be thankful to him. He gave me a place of refuge when the wicked of the world were ready to swallow me whole. You see, when the world owes you as much as it owes me, you need a base from which you can call in your debts. In return for his kindness, I have worked tirelessly to make him happy. I cook his favorite meals the way Grandma taught me. The people in this household are easy to please: cook them a hearty meal and they worship you.

  In the years I lived in Baba Segi’s house, I never forgot the evil my uncle did to me. I was reminded of it every day. Every day the children come home from school and talk about science and math, my head is flooded with anger. They use words like “biology” and “geometry,” words I don’t understand. Words I would have understood if my uncle had sent me to school. If he’d remembered the kindness with which my parents dealt with him, he would have seen to it that I became a greater person than I am today. I would have been rich and powerful, not a third wife in an illiterate man’s home. My uncle deprived me of opportunities. And Grandma too. Thieves—that’s what they are! Filchers of fortune. I won’t rest until they are punished. In the Bible, God said, “Vengeance is mine.” If God can delight in vengeance, how much more a poor soul like me who has been misused by the world? I must have revenge. Only then will I accept that there was a reason for all my suffering.

  Last week, I returned to my village. If in your mind you are asking what for, then it means you haven’t been listening to my words. I returned to Oke’gbo; Tunde took me. He said he wanted to help me make my dreams come true. I have often told him how I came to work for his mother for fifteen years. My story moves him and he asks me if I mind that he sheds a tear or two. True enough, he sheds them, and they are never more than the two agreed on. He says my life is a beautiful tragedy, though I don’t know what that means.

  I waited in the barn they had built for their goats. Two she-goats. Ha! That was the extent of their livestock. The scent of the miserable creatures nearly killed me so I kicked them until they limped off my land. My uncle was the first to come out through the back door. He had a large cloth wound round his waist. Staring into the clouds, he brushed his teeth with a chewing stick and spat intermittently. He was already using a walking stick. That is what wickedness does: you age before your time. His wife wasn’t much better. When she came out to brush her teeth, she sat knees wide apart on a concrete block. Her eyes were open yet she sounded like she was snoring. Glutton!

  Their children began to wake up and came out to greet their parents before commencing their morning chores. One of them came to the barn to feed the goats. When he couldn’t find them, he scattered yam peel all over my yard. He looked like my father: tall and gangly, the back of his head pointed like the top half of an egg. His name was Maleek; he flinched when he heard his father’s voice thundering through the house. My uncle had developed a big voice in my absence.

  Seeing the young boy reminded me that I hadn’t come there to harm anyone, just to claim what was mine. What do you do when something that is yours is claimed by someone else? You destroy it! You take it apart so devastatingly that it can never be put together again. My fingers brushed the fifty-liter keg of kerosene. My palm itched to turn the lid but I waited. The longer you wait for revenge, the sweeter it is.

  Before long, the children marched out of the house in red stripes on khaki. So he let his own children go to school! The injustice! Tears came to my eyes but I blinked them back. Soon, my uncle too slapped the road with his slipper
s, an old hoe hooked over his shoulder. No doubt, he was going to my farmland. My heart thumped with anticipation as I crept out of my hiding place. There was no real need to crouch and hide as we still didn’t have neighbors. My father said he built our house away from the village so we would be shielded from the world’s envious eyes.

  Starting from the backyard, I poured kerosene along the walls. I poured some on the concrete bench my mother placed her baskets on. I poured some on the doormat we used to scrape mud from our feet. The paupers hadn’t bought anything or changed anything. Everything was as my father left it. I sprinkled kerosene over all I could see.

  My uncle’s wife didn’t recognize me when she opened the door. “Did you know the Bible says ‘Touch not my anointed’?” I asked.

  At first, she looked at me with interest, but when she saw my eyes burning, she retreated into the house. “We are Muslims in this household,” she replied.

  “I am telling you what the Bible says because you have done worse than touch; you have bruised God’s anointed!”

  I barged past her and locked us both in. I put the key in my bra and poured kerosene on the clothes in the wardrobes, the baskets of food. I emptied the keg onto the over-worn shoes stacked in a corner. I even upturned the kerosene stoves for good measure. It took a lot for me to swallow my laughter when she started banging on the door, shouting, “Don’t kill me!” Don-key me, more like. That would have been closer to the truth!

  How quickly fire eats! I ran outside and could see that the insides of the house were half-consumed. Flames burst through the windows and the bungalow looked like a blackened shell. You thought I killed her, didn’t you? I went seeking revenge, not death. I let her out of the front door, yelling and tearing at her scarf. She didn’t know whether to summon her husband or brave the flames. I prayed that her most precious possessions were aflame, forever beyond reach, destroyed before her very eyes. A few villagers were running toward the furnace. They ran right past me without even glancing in my direction. When I reached the end of the road, Tunde was waiting in his air-conditioned car. He was bent over the steering wheel, laughing. “Bravo,” he spluttered, when he caught his breath.

  TUNDE ISN’T LIKE MOST MEN; he calls himself a hedonist. He says he lives for worldly pleasures. Who wouldn’t like to live for pleasure? Only some were denied them for fifteen years. Tunde’s lips are constantly wrapped around a cigarette and he drinks beer until he is blind. He says he wants to die both under and inside a woman who is not his wife. He says the years with his mother have made me weak, and that if I had any guts, I would live freely like he does. He is wrong; I am not weak at all. It’s just that my journey with him isn’t complete yet. And only when it is will I be truly free. But I can’t tell him that.

  I am waiting for the day when my sons will be grown up, the day they can stand tall and walk proud. I don’t treat my children the way the other wives treat theirs. I don’t beat them or scold them. My babies won’t suffer like their mother did; they will have pain-free lives. They will eat what they want and wash their hands when they want. The family knows that the quickest way to see the red of my eyes is to let me come home and find one of my children weeping. They understand that my children aren’t like the other children in Baba Segi’s household. They weren’t sired by some riffraff. I made sure of that. Their father lives in a house with a garden and a gas cooker. Their father’s mother is wealthy and respected. She doesn’t have paupers as friends. She wears the best gold and the most elaborately embroidered lace. She would do everything to ensure her only son marries well and that his children are of good stock. Nothing makes me praise the Lord more than this: one day, I will walk into her house with her grandsons. I will look her in the eye and tell her that they are Tunde’s children. Then I’ll see what Grandma will do.

  Things are different in this house now. For five years, Baba Segi loved me the most. I was better than his other wives and he didn’t hide this in the way he behaved toward me. He would pretend he had an evening fever so he wouldn’t have to endure Iya Segi’s bed. Then he would sneak into mine at night so he could be with me. He took me out to visit his friends. He liked the way I dressed so I alone accompanied him to parties. He loved the way I cooked, the way I looked. Who wouldn’t? I may be thirty but my limbs are quicker than a child’s. My stomach bears no signs of labor; my breasts are full. I can’t walk down the street without people wanting me. I couldn’t even walk across the sitting room without Baba Segi salivating, but everything changed the day the monkey stepped into this house.

  Baba Segi found a monkey whose teeth had been cut on sorrow and he forgot about me. I cannot accept it. I will not accept it! How can anyone accept being pushed aside for a woman who stores blemished bowls? Let me tell you what makes me laugh the most: the day we planted the ogun in her room, she declared to the world she would give her husband a son! What a fool! The biggest thing that will come out of her is a good, hefty shit. The toad hates her so she won’t tell her the secret. The pygmy goat fears us so she won’t tell. And she won’t hear anything from me. I want her gone. I want my place back and I will get it.

  THREE DAYS AFTER IYA SEGI and I decided what we were going to do, the toad came to the kitchen. At first, I thought she had just come to beg for food. It was Kole’s fourth birthday and I was preparing a feast. All the children were buzzing with anticipation and wondering what dish I would dazzle them with that year. Even the other wives know what these days mean to me so they leave the kitchen and hover around for the meal.

  Iya Segi tiptoed into the kitchen. “What are you making, Iya Femi? The ghost has left the house,” she whispered.

  “Jollof rice and chicken. Baba Segi came to my room last night but he didn’t touch me. Before I could give him the eja kika I had prepared for him, he was fast asleep, or so he wanted me to think. For a man who cannot sleep without snoring,” I said, “I didn’t hear a sound from his mouth. That witch has cast a spell on him. If we are not careful, he won’t sleep with us unless he asks her first.”

  “The gods forbid it! We forbid it! We will not let it happen. Look what I have brought you.” Iya Segi slipped me a small plastic bag bound several times over with a rubber band.

  “Iya Segi, you have the heart of a lion and the wisdom of a tortoise. What better day to bring that rat to justice!”

  “Keep your voice down.” Iya Segi peered out of the back door. “Iya Tope must not hear of this. Who knows where her weakness is leading her?”

  “Yes, it is between us. We must settle this matter. And God will help us.”

  “Listen to me. Place Bolanle’s portion outside her bedroom door like we normally do when she doesn’t join us. When she returns this evening, we will greet her as if all is well so she does not suspect anything.”

  “How quickly does it work? Will we have cause to rejoice by tomorrow morning?”

  “Mr. Taju said the medicine man who sold it to him promised immediate results. He said it was collected from the fangs of a cobra. Taju lied that it was for easing life out of an ailing dog. When the poison turns her belly, Baba Segi will be forced to take her to her father’s house.”

  “You can count on me, Iya Segi. Evildoers should get what they deserve. The Bible says so.”

  As soon as Iya Segi left the kitchen, I tore at the bundle impatiently. The Lord is going to use me to conquer my enemy. The mantle of justice has fallen on me. Ha! I am blessed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HOMEWARD

  I KNEW IT WAS Kole’s birthday when I woke up this morning but rather than congratulate mother and son, I slipped out of the house and headed to the diagnostic clinic to collect the results of my blood tests. On the way there, I bought Kole a remote-control car. Boxed and gift-wrapped, the toy was heavier than I thought it would be so I changed hands every time my wrist ached. I didn’t want to return to Baba Segi’s house yet. I was perturbed by the rathead episode and I felt an unmistakable homeward draw. I decided to go to my parents’ house.

&n
bsp; If I wasn’t so embarrassed, I would have visited my friends, if only to apologize. I’d hidden in my bedroom when Baba Segi told them that their foolishness was not welcome in our home.

  “Is it not obvious to you that Bolanle has decided to choose the more virtuous path in life? You should both take her example,” Baba Segi said. “What woman wants to be known as a harlot?” Yemisi gasped in disbelief. As she left, she stopped by the corridor mouth and shouted, “Let Bolanle know that people are like water. And the same waters that the streams divide meet again in the great ocean. Bolanle! You hear me?” I wept with shame.

  I also wanted to go home because rumors had a way of growing feet. I reasoned that it was probably best that I tell my mother about the mysterious goings-on in my home with my own mouth. The last thing I wanted was for her to blame the decline in my morals on my father’s genes. I could practically hear her: “She has become a medicine man’s whore like your sister,” or, “She has developed a hunger for blood like your mother did, before God clutched her to His bosom to give me rest.”

  I’d bumped into Segun’s guard in Dugbe market a few days before and he’d mentioned that my mother complained of an unbearable throbbing in her temples. I hadn’t been too bothered by this; Mama emptied sachets of Alabukun into her mouth so often when I was a child that Lara and I thought that was what all mothers did.

  Anyway, today was a weekday so unless Mama was taking the day off work, I was certain I’d have to leave a get-well-soon note. That way, I could avoid the update on the progress my university friends were making in their high-flying jobs as bankers, businesswomen and lecturers, the life I should have had if I hadn’t married Baba Segi. Well, none of my friends had been horribly defiled so it didn’t bother me. Today, I didn’t think I could stomach any lectures. I wasn’t in the mood to have my failures dangled before my eyes; I was already ashamed of them, more so in the last few weeks.