News from Home

by Sefi Atta

  Fatima came to visit while Miriam was still with me. She brought me sour milk meal and mangoes. She hardly spoke when Miriam said to her, “I remember your lovely face.” And the way Fatima could not meet her eyes, I knew my daughter had found a love on which to base all others. She would love women, and her love would be unrequited. She told me her sisters were doing well, considering. She told me Our Husband was fasting and growing a beard for religious purposes.

  I told her, “Tell your father Allah has his reward.” Was he allowing her to continue her secondary education nevertheless?

  She said he was.

  “Make sure you get your education,” I said. “Make sure it’s in your hands, then you can frame it and hang it on the wall, and when you go to your husband’s house, carry it with you.”

  “I don’t think that’s what education is,” she said, “something to hang on a wall.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I know what I’m saying. What is in your head might not save you. Hang your education on the wall of your husband’s house, so that whatever happens you can say to yourself, ‘This is my education,’ and no one can take it away from you.”

  She left only after I ordered her. She wanted to stay, but I did not like her seeing me in custody. “Did you include me in your essay of Heaven?” I asked. She said no. I said, “Therefore don’t worry about me going there.”

  “Are you being sarcastic most times?” Miriam asked, after Fatima left.

  “Me?” I answered.

  “I notice,” she said. “The way you talk. You say one thing and mean the other. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s like I hardly know you.”

  She hardly didn’t.

  “Sometimes, I wonder if, forgive me, you are crazy.”

  I was thinking of Junior Wife. Could I be, if I saw madness in others?

  She rubbed her pretty lips. “You and I, I feel for you so strongly, as though you matter more than my mother. Can I be bold? There is nothing to lose. I want to show you something.”

  She unwrapped her scarf from her head. Underneath was a rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo—stripes all over. Her hidden hair.

  “It’s prettier in the sky,” I said.

  “My husband says it’s ugly. He says I’ve lost my head. He calls it my lost head, but he says it as a joke, mind you. I have two girls by him, you know. He loves them as boys. You will call me lucky to have such a man, but really, he should love them as girls. He also thinks he was my first. I married him when I was twenty-three, after I graduated from university. He was not my first. I lied that I was stretched by riding horses. I hope I’m not overwhelming you.”

  “A little.” The rich again. Why would she tell me now I was about to die? Would she tell me if I were not about to die?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  I was looking at her gold bangles.

  “Does your husband have a lot of money?” I asked.

  “No. We are what you call comfortable. A lot? Not at all. Do you consider me spoiled?”

  I thought hard about that. In our country, Sharia was a poor person’s law.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you scared to die?”

  “Yes.”

  She drew closer. “You’re carrying a child. That will give you time. They will not stone you until your child is born.”

  “It’s a nothing,” I said. “It is nothingness within me.”

  “Why didn’t you answer the questions you were asked in court?”

  “I just didn’t.”

  “What really happened to make you pregnant?”

  “What difference would it have made?”

  I didn’t have to think a moment about this. Sometimes I was confused, often afraid. To answer correctly was to give in most days. But so what if my reason was one or the other? I had a lover; a man who became invisible in court. There was no evidence against him, the Alkali said. I needed three independent witnesses to prove his guilt. Our Husband’s testimony, anyway, was greater than mine.

  Miriam was crying. “You shall not be forsaken.”

  When stones were hurled at me, they would be hailstones on my head; hailstones on Zamfara.

  “In the name of Allah,” I said, “the Beneficent, the Merciful.”

  SPOILS

  Lubna is waiting for me under the old acacia in town. We bet with pebbles over there. I always win. She is smarter in school because she has a longer memory. Allah, she can even remember what happened to her ten years ago when she was a baby, but she loses our pebble bets every time because I am much faster at thinking ahead.

  I stand in a gap between the shadows of the tree branches and shield my eyes from the sunlight. Anyone looking at me might think I’m crying.

  “There was a bus crash last night.”

  “Allah?” she says.

  “Allah.”

  “Where?”

  “By Gandu Biyu.”

  Gandu Biyu is Settlement Two. Our town is Settlement Five. We are small settlement towns in this part of Nigeria. The capital city is miles away.

  The ground is covered with flattened cardboard boxes on which the taxi drivers have taken naps in the shade. Now, the drivers are gathered around the community tap by the mosque on the other side of the street. They fill their plastic kettles to perform ablution and leave wet patches in the soil. Soon it will be time for afternoon prayers. Men can attend, and boys, too. Women have their own separate section to share with girls, but we are not allowed to participate in Friday prayers, not since our sarki barraki banned us.

  “Did you bring any kilishi?” Lubna asks.

  She is sitting on a hump of tree root. Her hair is covered with a scarf, as mine is. She wears a nose ring, but I don’t care for them because whenever I sneeze they get sticky with mucus.

  I raise my hand. “Are you listening? I said there was another crash on the expressway. A bus overturned, people perished, and all you can think of at a time like this is kilishi?”

  Sometimes I have to wonder. This is precisely why she always needs to take rests, and why she uses double the cloth I use when our tailor sews her up-and-downs. Lubna eats too much. Kilishi is delicious with Coca-Cola. Chewy. The strips burn your tongue, work your back gums and scrape off your inner cheeks.

  “I’m just asking,” she says.

  “You, you’re never satisfied.”

  “I can’t help feeling hungry.”

  “Well, food is not always the answer.”

  “Was anyone in our town on the bus?”

  “No.”

  Not one. Still, it is her lack of respect for the dead that I cannot tolerate. She ought to know. We are not that young. Last year, my husband was killed on the expressway. He and I had been betrothed for several years. He was forty-two and prosperous with older wives. Mama was bereft. His surviving brother was a drunk. I should have been passed on to him as part of my husband’s inheritance, but Baba refused. “That useless one with his breath always stinking of burukutu?” he said. “I would rather give my daughter away to a goat.”

  “They say the driver’s head rolled into a ditch,” I explain to Lubna. “They say he wasn’t properly secured. They say he will be buried tomorrow, and once he is wrapped up in cloth, no one will know the difference.”

  I overheard that from Mama. She sent me out to play. She thought I would be too scared to listen. I wasn’t scared. This is not the first crash we have had on the expressway to the capital. We call it the Death Road around here, and anyway, there was the Christian woman who was burned this year. She refused to step aside for a group of men walking into the mosque for Friday prayers. They asked her nicely and she made the sign of the cross. That wasn’t necessary, but I agree with Mama that the men went too far. They needn’t have set her on fire. They could simply have beaten her up. Baba said she was being unreasonable. She should have stepped aside.

  “Remember the Christian woman?” I ask Lubna.

  She nods. Everyone remembers the Christian
woman, even though we’d rather not talk about her.

  “Binta’s seen a body burned before,” she says. “Her math teacher at Government College. He was an Indian man from Calcutta, and when he died, his family burned him to ashes on the school grounds and the senior prefects were allowed to watch.”

  “Allah?”

  “Allah.”

  I doubt that. Binta is her elder sister by her father’s junior wife, major trouble if you ask me. She was supposed to be betrothed to my brother Hassan, the firstborn of my father’s senior wife. Our families agreed to the union but Binta refused. She said Hassan’s head was shaped like a cashew nut. She was about our age when she ran off to Sokoto and stayed with a guardian there. After her secondary education at Government College, she escaped to a teachers’ training college in Zaria. Did Binta end up teaching? No, she got a job with a non-governmental in the capital that stops girls from marrying and gives them scholarships. A woman like her from a respectable family. It was a scandal.

  “Here,” Lubna says. “She’s sent me another newspaper cutting.”

  “Give me that,” I say, snatching it from her. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  Allah, whenever Binta sends her newspaper cuttings I could screw them up and throw them as far away as possible, but my curiosity always gets the better of me. They are always about one so-called heroic Hausa girl or another. This one is about a girl with polio who walked eight miles to Binta’s non-governmental to escape from her husband. She almost collapsed from thirst along the way. Now she is posing for a photograph, standing there with her little leg and holding up a certificate. She has such huge teeth. I have to smile at the sight of her. Twit, I think. Why did she have to walk all that way? Why couldn’t she just hitch a ride?

  “They gave this one a scholarship?” I ask, handing the newspaper cutting back to Lubna.

  “She will be going to secondary school next year.”

  “Well, I am disgusted.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s not right.”

  Doesn’t she know? What further education does a woman need? Can education push a baby out? When Binta is crying out from labor pains, how perfect will her English be?

  The muezzin begins to call men and boys to afternoon prayers. They are like a herd of cattle walking into the mosque. Their heads are bowed and their feet scrape the ground. Lubna slaps sandflies away from her legs. They always suck on her blood because hers is sweet. They keep well away from mine because I have a bad temper and my blood is sour.

  “Binta’s going to arrange for them to give me a scholarship,” she says.

  What is she talking about? She is not even betrothed yet. She won’t be until she sees her period. How can she qualify for a scholarship?

  “On what basis?”

  “My schoolwork. Binta says they will take that into consideration.”

  I sniff. “I’m sure they will, since they can give a scholarship to a girl who ran away from her husband.”

  I am not jealous. The standards of Binta’s non-governmental are well beneath me, and their patron is a wrinkled old white woman with two big balloons in her breasts. She lives in Hollywood, she and her dog.

  “I want to apply,” Lubna says. “I want to move to the capital.”

  I stamp my foot. “What is wrong with our town?”

  “It’s boring over here.”

  “But there is so much to do!”

  “Like what?”

  “Spending time with Farouk.”

  “Farouk? All we ever do is spend time with Farouk.”

  Farouk is a street hawker. We help him to sell his wares. His mother raised him as a yan dauda: he speaks in a high voice like a woman. He wears headscarves, paints henna on his hands and pencils his eyes with kohl. Our tailor sews him the loveliest up-and-downs. Farouk is a lot of fun.

  “Come,” I say. “Let’s go and help Farouk.”

  Lubna shakes her head. “I’m tired of helping Farouk.”

  “He’ll give you a Bazooka Joe.”

  “OK,” she says, stretching her hand upwards so that I can pull her up.

  She will do anything for food this girl, or perhaps it’s the story about the other girl who walked eight miles that I find upsetting. I don’t know what comes over me.

  “No,” I say, backing away. “You’re a lefty. I don’t touch lefties.”

  “But I never use my left hand to go,” she says.

  I cross my arms. “I can’t hold hands with a lefty. I don’t know where that hand of yours has been.”

  I shouldn’t have said that, but she squeezes up her face and begins to yell as if she’s possessed or something: “Go! Go wherever you want! You’re bossy! You’ve always been bossy and you have a bad mouth to boot! I’ll be glad when I’m finally rid of you!”

  My best friend I have known all my life. I leave her under the acacia tree to think about what she has done.

  Afternoon prayers have begun. The men and boys are already in the mosque. I can recite some of the suwar by heart: Al-Fatiha, Al-Lahab and An-Nas. I cross the exact spot where the Christian woman was burned, pass the shed where boys write Arabic alphabets on their allo boards, run past the hut where the lailai woman paints henna patterns for brides on their wedding eves. The ground is too hot to meander and I have to hold on to my scarf to make sure it doesn’t slip off. Farouk is where he always is, on the corner of the road by the millet farm.

  “Hajiya,” he says, lifting his cigarette.

  He addresses me as a married woman because he knows I’m mature for my age, unlike some I no longer care to mention. Farouk is pretty for a man. He has pointed cheeks and his eyes slant upwards. He is seated behind his stall with his legs crossed.

  “Good day to you,” I say.

  “And to you, too,” he says. “Where is your friend, Lubna?”

  “Please don’t talk to me about that girl.”

  He laughs. “What happened?”

  I, too, start to yell: “It’s her elder sister! She leads Lubna astray! She’s planning to sneak her off to the capital to further her education and Lubna won’t listen to me!”

  “Allah sarki?” Farouk says.

  “Allah, and look at their father, a man of such a high standing in society, he cannot even hold his head up in this town again.”

  “Now where did you hear that?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  That was Binta’s doing. She was like a sandstorm flattening everything in her path when she got her education. She once opened her mouth to say that women should be permitted to lead prayers. She blasphemes regularly like that. Now she’s making my voice hoarse. I cough hard.

  “Hassan... says she needs a husband to manhandle her...”

  Farouk beckons me to sit. His feet are clean in his flip-flops. Mine are covered in soil. Whenever a car takes the corner too fast over here it raises a cloud of dust. Farouk covers his stall with a cloth until the cloud subsides. He is finicky about tidiness. We have that in common.

  “Bismillah,” he says, rubbing my shoulder. “No woman needs to be manhandled and that is good news about your friend. I hear you too have good news in your family. Hassan’s wife had a baby boy?”

  “Last week.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Osama.”

  “Hm. Every baby boy in this town is called Osama.” “

  “What’s wrong with Osama?”

  “Nothing, but you would think the man is our sarki barraki the way we carry on.”

  He smokes his cigarette. People name their boys Osama to make sure they will grow up fearless. The real Osama is more revered than our sarki barraki. He is so popular here you can’t find an Osama poster to buy anymore. They’re sold out. What did know-it-all Binta have to say about that? That a thousand Osama posters cannot beautify our mud walls.

  Farouk arranges his wares with his free hand. His henna patterns are dark against his fair
skin. He sells cigarettes, Bazooka Joe chewing gum, kola nuts and aspirin. He always smells fresh, no matter how hot it gets. In the mornings, he dabs a little perfumed oil behind his ears. He keeps himself cool with a raffia fan. It’s funny about him; he has no hairs on his chin or his chest. I have heard that his mother was a witch because she stank of urine. She is dead now and Mama said she stank of urine only because she had an ailment from giving birth to Farouk too young.

  The millet farm seems to be whispering to us. We are lucky in these parts. Our crops are safe from desert locusts. They swarm farms further up north and eat up their crops.

  A car horn interrupts our silence; it’s a white Peugeot creeping around the corner. The passenger door is dented and a rope keeps it from swinging open. The driver calls out from his window, “Farouk, you’re an abomination for a man!”

  Farouk spreads his fingers. “Me? Curses on you, worthless thief bastard!”

  I have never heard him sound so shrill. The Peugeot leaves fumes in the air.

  “Why did he say that?” I ask.

  Farouk hisses. “Don’t mind him. He’s a lout. He has no job. He’s just come from the Death Road. He heard of the bus crash and rushed over there to look for spoils.”

  I recognized the driver. He was one of those who burned the body of the Christian woman. I thought they were devout. So he is a looter? He is not originally from here. He has the facial marks of the Kanuri people. But why call Farouk an abomination? Everyone knows about Farouk. We love Farouk as he is and trust him. Apart from the men in my family, he is the only man I am allowed to be with unaccompanied.

  “Here,” he says, handing me a Bazooka Joe. “Now what happened between you and your friend?”

  I tear the wrapper open and put the gum into my mouth. I don’t bother with the cartoon inside. It is hard enough to chew and look angry at the same time.