Back in the living room, he saw the boys huddled over the girl’s things scattered on the floor; her empty, expensive-looking purse lying close by. He checked to ensure that her Blackberry and iPhone were switched off. An elegant bottle of perfume caught Reza’s eyes. Caron Poivre. It had to have been expensive. He could perceive it subtly exuding from the girl. There also were exotic hand and face creams in little tubes, a wallet with money, some naira and pounds sterling. In her wallet Reza also found her ATM cards, a student ID and a driver’s licence from which he read her details: Leila Sarki, born March 16, 1988. He studied her face in the passport photograph. Even though she looked hassled in the photo, it was clear she was a very beautiful woman.
He threw the cards down amongst the scattered items on the floor. ‘Put her things together. We are letting her go.’
Dogo looked up. ‘What about the money?’
‘Did I not give you your advance?’ But then his eyes rested on the girl’s wallet. ‘Well, it doesn’t look like we are going to get any balance from this, we might as well take what we can.’
Reza counted out some naira notes and handed them to Gattuso and then Dogo. He threw the rest carelessly over Joe’s head. He shoved the pounds into his own pocket.
Gattuso knocked his knuckles together. ‘So, we are just going to let her go like that?’
‘Yes. The job has been bungled.’
‘But—’ He continued knocking his fists together until Reza prompted him. ‘She looks like she is the daughter of someone important; we could pull a deal over her.’
Dogo clicked his thumb and forefinger. ‘Yes! Thank you, brother; you just said what was on my mind. Ask her people to pay, or we kill her kawai!’
Reza thought for a while. ‘Then we would have to move her to San Siro. The boss provided this place for his job. Since it would no longer be his job then we’d have to move her.’
Joe looked up at the baroque designs on the high POP ceiling; the blossom at the centre, with a couple of naked wires sticking out of it, fascinated him the most. He imagined a chandelier would dangle from it when the work was completed and he could almost see the thousand lights dancing in his eyes. ‘What mamafucker built this house, mehn?’
‘Fucking cool, right?’ Dogo smiled and nodded. ‘I want to be a don someday and own a house like this, man. Imagine dying in a grand place like this.’
‘In your fucking dreams, man.’ Joe’s laughter was a staccato, guttural explosion. ‘You will die in a goddam chicken coop.’
Dogo, too, laughed up to the ceiling and sat on the floor. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and a lighter. ‘Goddam chicken coop, man.’ He lit up with unsteady hands and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. ‘Goddam chicken coop.’
Reza’s phone chimed amidst the contrived laughter of Dogo and Joe that resonated off the unpainted walls. He held up his hand for silence.
‘What have you done with the girl?’ It was Moses.
‘We let her go.’
‘Goddamn it, you idiot.’
Reza smiled. He really hated this Moses. ‘Wata rana zan ci ubanka, ka gane ko?’ And he knew he would enjoy plunging his dagger just beside that tie he always wore.
Moses chuckled mirthlessly. ‘Well, go and bring her back. Your new instruction is to hold on to her.’
‘Well, you asked me to let her go.’
‘Find her.’ The line went dead.
The cat with the white-tipped tail came late that night, long after Mallam Haruna had switched off his radio and finished his analysis of the day’s news. It sat on the fence, between the loops of the razor wire and watched the couple; the woman with a bored countenance, the man more unsure of himself than he had ever been.
Binta had noted Mallam Haruna’s unease right from when he offered to stand guard over her and wave away the midges tormenting her with the tail of his kaftan. He had backed down immediately when he saw the shocked expression on her face. Then he had spent five minutes trying to tell her how important it was for a man to protect the woman he loved from ‘all enemies’.
That was how he got talking about scorpions and how he had been stung three times in the past. He punctuated his gory tale of feverish nights fighting off the venom with little nervous chortles.
Then he had attempted to mount his cap on her head, right on top of her hijab. It was so unheralded that she had wanted to flee.
‘Is there something wrong with you this evening?’
‘Oh no, not at all. Just wondering what you would look like with my cap on you.’
She gaped at him, as if she had somehow contrived to see through his skull and discovered that his cranium was packed full of semi-deflated balloons.
He seemed oblivious to her stare. ‘You know I am the best cap washerman in this corner of the world, wallahi.’
He went into a fractured narrative about how he had learned how to wash caps in Maiduguri when he had been an almajiri and how he had married his first wife as ladan noma.
Binta’s mind drifted. She wondered what she could do to get rid of Hureira since her husband had refused to come for her. She contemplated several possibilities, none of them practical, and concluded that other than escorting Hureira back to her own house, she had no choice but to accept that her daughter might end up permanently stationed in Fa’iza’s room, while her matrimonial home in Jos collected the harmattan dust.
When her mind wandered back, Mallam Haruna was talking about his third or fourth son making a living driving a white man around Port Harcourt, and how he had been in an accident and now limped like a three-legged dog.
She felt his hand on her shoulder, a light slap at first and then the hand slid down just a bit.
‘Mosquito,’ he grinned.
The cat meowed, almost half-heartedly. It used its front paw to wipe its head, took several steps and then bounded off the fence, into Mama Efe’s side of the wall.
Mallam Haruna launched into yet another disjointed narrative on how best to deal with the pestilence of mosquitoes using dried orange rinds sprinkled on embers. Then he reached out and slapped another mosquito on her back and yet again, his hand tarried.
She regarded him with a frown. ‘Mallam Haruna, yaya dai?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ he laughed, uneasily. ‘Perhaps we could meet somewhere else.’
‘What for?’
‘Well,’ he lowered his voice, ‘well, we could just go somewhere else, you know, just get to know each other better.’
‘What do you mean?’
He was unsettled by the bluntness of her tone. ‘Well, you know, I was just saying we could go somewhere private, you know—’
‘What for?’
He turned on his radio and fiddled with the knob, sweeping past stations.
She said nothing, only watched him search for a discernible voice in the sea of static. He switched the radio off just as suddenly as he had turned it on.
‘So, what do you say?’
‘To what?’
‘You know, what I said, about going somewhere.’
‘What do you have to say that you can’t say here?’
‘Well, we could go to Mr Biggs, or Mama Cass or La Crème, one of these fancy places, you know.’
‘I am not hungry.’
‘Well, I don’t mean now, of course, silly. Perhaps tomorrow.’
‘I have a kitchen and a store full of food. If I’m hungry, I know how to cook.’
He laughed, ‘Binta ke nan. Why are you being difficult?’ It came out as a statement.
‘Mallam, I am not going anywhere with you. I am not a young girl to be gallivanting about.’
He lowered his head and sighed. He switched on the radio again and began fiddling with the knob.
‘Switch it off, dan Allah.’
He put the radio by his side and then picked it up again. Then he removed his cap and scratched his scalp. Finally, he said he was leaving and they stood up.
She shook her hijab. ‘Sai da safe.’
The crickets chirped, the midges buzzed. The night breathed. Finally, she hissed, a long, drawn-out sound of contempt. ‘What the hell do you take me for?’ She flapped her hijab as if to shake off his words and went into the house.
He stood alone, next to the bed of petunias Hadiza had planted, listening to the chaotic rhythm of his heart and the subtle, subtle breathing of the night.
Ustaz Nura, the teacher, polished the dirt off his sandals with a damp piece of cloth. He was diligent, scrubbing out the caked mud clinging to the clefts.
Behind him, his wife Murja bristled. ‘So, which one of them is it going to be today?’
He shook his head. That action set his headache off again. It always happened when he had a bad night, as the one before. He had been looking forward to morning so he could escape his house and Murja’s nagging.
As the years of their childless marriage lengthened, past the fifth and into the sixth, she had grown more insecure, more suspicious, eager to leap to incendiary conclusions. She was always plucking conspiracies of an impending invasion by a co-wife from Ustaz Nura’s cheeky but innocent comments.
Her suspicions were not without reason. Her husband was often busy instructing the faithful, mostly women, on matters of deen, and also applied his services as a counsellor. He helped young women navigate the berged terrain of courtship and marriage. That was how she had fallen in love with him when she had been nineteen and he was a twenty-seven-year-old aalim with a dark, glistening beard, a kind voice garnished with a cultured Arab accent, and trousers that dangled inches above his ankles. He had impressed her with his informed discourse of Al Ghazali and Ibn Sina, of Freud and Dewey, for he had gone off to university and attained a diploma in psychology as well. But those days seemed so far gone, a distant memory dulled by years of aborted hopes.
And the previous night, when he had returned late from trying to exorcise a vexed djinn that had possessed Laminde, Alhaji Momoh’s svelte daughter, and was obsessed with stripping her naked in the most public of places, Murja’s restless mind brimmed with other notions.
When she asked him where he had been, tired and bleary-eyed, he had said, ‘There was this girl who—’
That was as much she had let him say before she had unleashed her torrent. And the night that had already been stretched for him got longer.
That morning, as he was trying to extricate himself from the stifling cocoon of her jealousy, a boy came in to announce that the Ustaz was wanted outside.
‘Who? Who wants to see him?’ she glowered at the boy.
‘It’s Mallam Haruna.’
‘Mhmmm.’ She set herself on the settee, scowling at the wall.
Ustaz Nura put some money on the table and carried his Qassasul Anbiya, from which he would later regale his students with the miraculous deeds of the prophets. He took an uncertain glance at his wife before hurrying out.
Because of Mallam Haruna’s reputation as a vibrant proponent of plural marriage, Murja was certain he had come to bring her husband news of some fresh divorcee or widow waiting to be proposed to. So she went out to the vestibule and leaned on the doorjamb, to listen in on the men seated on the dakali.
‘I am telling you this, so you can preach to her, Ustaz,’ Mallam Haruna was saying. ‘She is your student, you need to preach to her, not so?’
Murja listened to her husband muttering subhanallahi as he learned of the impious rendezvous of the widow Hajiya Binta and the Lord of San Siro, that insufferable dan iska with short, spiky hair and lips darkened by ganja fumes.
22
Only a wise man can make out the greying hair on a sheep
She lingered more and more in her tinted dreams and was astonished by the splash of red each time it came, leaving her gasping and panting in the night. Sometimes Fa’iza fled from the shadows in her dreams. Other times, she dared to chase them, quietly at first.
It was Hureira who first noticed, long before Fa’iza started screaming. She had woken up to see the zombified girl walking in the dark, arms stretched out before her, going back and forth across the room. Frightened, Hureira had readied to flee as soon as Fa’iza moved away from the door. Crossing the room, she had hoisted Ummi unto her shoulder, muttering a verse from the Qur’an, the one that she had heard as a child would scare evil djinns away: ‘Innahu min Sulaimana, wa innahu bismillahir rahmanir rahim.’
She had felt Fa’iza’s hands on her and had frozen, right on the word Sulaimana. Quickly, she clamped her thighs together to prevent her bladder from disgorging and had felt how violent her heartbeat sounded. And all the time, Fa’iza’s hands were tentatively running over her.
Eventually, the girl had reached for the ground and laid down on the rug, curling into a foetal position. She had snuffled, mumbled and then fallen silent, her breathing blending into the noises of the night.
Hureira had carried Ummi to her mattress and laid her down. Sitting beside her, she muttered whatever supplication she could pluck from the darkness, from her jumbled and inadequate memorisation, her whispered voice rivalling the desperate thuds of her heart.
The next morning, they took the bus to town, all four of them, to visit Munkaila in his Maitama apartment. Hureira complained about the heat and cursed the slow pace at which the long, seemingly endless lines of cars crawled forward.
Hajiya Binta turned to her. ‘You could always go back to your husband, you know. The traffic isn’t so bad in Jos.’
Hureira frowned.
Fa’iza had her face pressed into the window, looking out at the boys hawking chilled drinks and yoghurt, the girls with loaded trays of plantain chips, young men peddling wall clocks, mops, towel rails and just about everything else. She watched a boy, no more than thirteen, run after a bus, balancing a plastic bucket half-filled with sachet water on his head. She saw a bank note fly out of the window of the bus and the boy bend to pick it. Losing interest, she leaned back on the seat and closed her eyes. But Ummi kept pointing out things: two hawking girls racing each other to a customer in a sedan, a motorcycle narrowly missing a youth vending phone cards, a lovely dainty black dress with yellow trimming hanging outside a boutique. No one paid her any heed.
When they got to Bulet Junction, they took a cab to Maitama.
The courtyard, when they arrived, was strewn with the red blossoms of the lone flame tree, whose boughs stretched across the compound like probing fingers searching the sunlight. Under the tree, little Zahra was gathering the blossoms into a glass cup half filled with water, an unlit candle peeking over the top.
Munkaila was leaning against his car parked in front of the house, speaking into the phone. He shoved the phone in his pocket as he walked to meet them and stooped to greet his mother, the tail of his golden-brown kaftan splaying out around him. He put out two of his fingers on the ground to support his weight.
The exchange of greetings drew Zahra’s attention and she came running with her glass of crimson blossoms. Binta wanted to hoist the girl in the air but Zahra was protective of her collection. She hugged her grandma’s legs instead.
Hureira motioned to the cup. ‘What’s that?’
‘My flowers,’ Zahra looked up at her aunt.
‘Zahra does this often,’ Munkaila placed a hand on his daughter’s head. ‘When the flame tree is in bloom, she collects the blossoms in a glass and lights a candle.’
‘Season of crimson blossoms.’ There was something melancholic about the way Fa’iza said it. Her eyes were focused on the glass.
Zahra beamed proudly. ‘I keep it in my room. All day. The candle goes off when it burns to the water level.’
‘Blood.’
They all turned to look at Fa’iza. This time, she was staring into the distance that had opened up before her eyes, stretching beyond the foggy precipice of imaginings. She started when Binta mentioned her name and seemed baffled that they were all looking at her.
Binta’s face glowed as she sat on the couch, holding the sleeping Khalida in her arms. Khalida was a pretty girl, unlike Zahra, and this prettiness – the dark eyes, the pointed nose, the demure smile – reminded Binta more of her dead son Yaro, than the child’s mother Sadiya, who was busy in the kitchen making lunch.
Munkaila finished taking yet another call and put the phone on the footstool close to him. ‘It’s time for politics. All these politicians are busy collecting as much money as they can find wallahi.’
Hureira giggled. ‘I thought that meant more money for you, so why are you complaining?’
‘True, true. They are asking for dollars, and dollars have been scarce since yesterday.’
‘How come?’
‘It happens like that sometimes when the demand is too much.’
‘And who are you for?’ Binta held him with her eyes.
‘Who am I for? Well, I don’t know, Hajiya. I am not too keen on these elections.’
‘Buhari will win, you will see.’ There was an unnecessary passion in Binta’s voice such that Munkaila only laughed. ‘Hajiya kenan!’.
‘What happened to this girl?’ Hureira asked.
They turned to the TV where there was a headshot of a young woman dominating the screen.
‘Oh, there was a kidnap last night,’ Munkaila informed. ‘They tried to kidnap the son of Alhaji Shehu Bakori but the boy got away and they made off with his cousin instead.’
Binta slapped her palms together. ‘Oh, such a pretty girl. Allah sarki!’
Hureira shifted on her seat. ‘Who is this Alhaji Bakori? His name sounds familiar?’
Season of Crimson Blossoms Page 19
