Season of Crimson Blossoms (3 page)

Hadiza, too, turned over on her mattress. A house without a man would look like easy pickings for fence-jumping miscreants of the sort that had broken in. Or was it possible that her mother was just lonely? How had she endured a decade without a man?

‘What about the man who is courting her?'

‘That man?' Fa'iza scoffed. ‘That dirty old man, Mallam Haruna. He has two wives already,
wallahi
.'

‘Hajiya, too, is old, you know. Does she like him?'

‘Like him?
Haba
! How could she like him?'

Hadiza said nothing for a while. When Fa'iza started snoring softly, Hadiza called her name and asked her to switch off the light on her phone.

‘Me? No, I don't want to sleep in the dark.' Fa'iza mumbled and was soon snoring again.

Hadiza listened to the noises of the night. A cricket in a crevice somewhere struck up a solo. A cat, out in the dark, startled Hadiza with its meowing, which sounded like the cries of a human newborn. It kept on for a while and then there was silence. The hush was suddenly ripped by the racket two cats made fighting in the moonlight. Finally, staggered quietness ensued, punctuated by Fa'iza's mild snores, which in time grew into agitated moaning.

‘No … No!' Fa'iza thrashed about, arguing with the shadows
in her dreams, and kicked off the sheet. Hadiza, horrified, sat up, torn between bolting and waking the girl. Fa'iza now started whimpering like a beaten dog. Eventually, she curled up into a foetal position. Soon enough, she was almost quiet, her mild wheezing strumming the night like tender fingers on a guitar.

The first time Binta was woken by the ominous smell of roaches was in the harmattan of 1973. She was sixteen or seventeen. She could never be sure of her age because her mother, who had never attended school, kept dates by association, as did most people in Kibiya. Binta gathered, from conversations that did not involve her, that she was born the year the British Queen visited Nigeria.

She had woken up before sunrise that morning, all those years ago, and lit the hurricane lamp. She shook the mattress, drawing protests from her sleeping younger sister, Asabe, who grumbled. Binta picked up the lamp and searched the small confines of the hut, lifting the mats, probing the calabashes and the single
kwalla
containing their clothing. She found the crumbling moult of a spider in the first, and the remains of a long-horned beetle in the other. She gave up after prodding the major crevices on the wall with a broomstick and finding nothing of interest.

She went out, performed her ablutions and said the Subhi prayer. Then, as she had been doing for years, she joined her taciturn mother in the faint light of the awakening sun. Together they worked in silence sifting pap with a translucent piece of cloth. Her mother, who was Fulani, slim and dignified but bulging in the middle, hardly said a word to her. Binta was her first daughter
and, as was customary, she rarely acknowledged or called her by her name lest she be deemed immodest. But each time Binta sneaked a look into her mother's eyes, she glimpsed, before it was blinked away, a clandestine love she wished she could grasp and savour. She would have given anything to hear the sound of her name on her mother's lips. Anything.

When the sun was up, she balanced the tray of kamu on her head and went out, her yellow veil tied around her swaying waist, hawking the kamu around the neighbourhood. As soon as she had sold out, she hurried home, washed, ate a breakfast of kunun tsamiya and kosai and hurried off to school, her school bag – a cut out sack with a shoulder strap attached – swinging as she went.

She walked by Balaraba's house and met her friend waiting at the entrance. Together, they moved on to Hajjo's and then Saliha's. Saliha had not yet returned from hawking bean cakes so they moved on to Bintalo's.

School was no more than a couple of raffia mats spread out under the ancient tamarind, on which a black board leaned. Mallam Na'abba, the schoolteacher, had often told Binta that she was smart. That she could, if her father consented, continue schooling and perhaps some day become a health inspector. Each time he said that, she would smile and chew on her forefinger, turning her face away from him. It was a far-off dream. She knew that much then. But Mallam Na'abba was passionate about its possibility. It was he who convinced her reluctant father to let her pursue her education for a while longer. That she could benefit the whole of Kibiya with her knowledge. Her father, skeptical as always, had agreed, but carried ridges on his forehead for days afterwards.

After school, the girls went home and met plump Saliha loitering under the moringa tree at the entrance to their house. When she was not hawking, Saliha had inexplicable bouts of headache, backache and a variety of fevers that conspired to keep her away from school most of the time. Her afflictions healed as soon as the prospects of attending class had been eroded. Since she did not seem to be suffering from any of those infirmities at that particular moment, the girls decided to play
gada
under the barren date tree.

They ran to the field laughing, piling their school bags at the foot of the tree. Because Bintalo was belligerent enough for the entire coterie, they started with her. They formed a semicircle and Bintalo leaned back into their waiting arms. They caught her each time and threw her on to her feet, singing and clapping. Saliha was next and then Binta, who felt the little buds on her chest jiggle each time they threw her, singing:

Karuwa to saci gyale

Ca ca mu cancare

Ta boye a hammata

Ca ca mu cancare

Ta ce kar mu bayyana

Ca ca mu cancare

Mu kuma 'yan bayyana ne

Ca ca mu cancare

Mallam Dauda, who had been standing at the edge of the field, stroking his greying beard and watching the little jiggles on Binta's chest, asked why they were behaving like tarts. Did they not have things to do at home?

The girls picked up their bags and went home, wondering what business it was of his that they were singing about a prostitute who hid a stolen veil under her arm and were jiggling their little buds. They agreed to meet later that night under the leaning papaya tree to play
tashe
in the moonlight.

Mallam Dauda went on to have a talk with Binta's father, Mallam Sani Mai Garma.

Her father returned from the farm that evening with the ridges on his forehead more pronounced than ever, and his limp, caused by his polio-sucked leg, even more obvious. Binta rose from washing the dishes to relieve him of the hoe slung over his shoulder. He brushed her aside and called her mother indoors.

Binta heard him thundering about how big his daughter had grown under his roof and how men now watched her jiggling her melons in public places, and how it was time for her to start a family of her own. He stormed out, kicking his food out of the way. Binta ran into the hut to weep at her mother's feet. The woman turned her face away to the wall, her hand poised uncertainly over her abdomen.

Two days later, Binta was married off to Zubairu, Mallam Dauda's son, who was away working with the railway in Jos.

This time, it was the sound of movement in the living room that woke her. She heard wood squeaking on the tiles like some oppressed animal and wondered what was happening. Then she heard Hadiza issuing directives to Fa'iza, who kept echoing each question.

‘Fa'iza, hold that end.'

‘Me? This end?'

‘Move it this way.'

‘This way?

‘
Haba
! Fa'iza, for God's sake, what are you doing?'

‘What am I doing? But, Aunty Hadiza, I was only doing what you asked.'

Hajiya Binta, who had gone back to sleep after her early morning prayers, listened to the noises from the living room. She imagined she could feel the weight of her liver, imagined that it felt a little heavier. As she lay in bed, she listened to an unfamiliar birdsong floating in through her window. It was sonorous and confident and if she had not felt weighed down by her body, she would have gone to the window to see the bird.

The sound filled her heart with tranquility and she closed her eyes to savour the sensation. Images of her late husband, Zubairu, the stranger she had spent most of her life with, flitted into her mind. Every time she thought of him, he seemed to be smiling, something he had not been famed for doing so often. Memories of his touch were shrouded in a decade of cobwebs. What she recalled, albeit vaguely, was the sensation of his hands pressing down on her shoulders, his lower lip clamped down by his teeth to suppress his grunts as his body hunched over hers. She remembered how he used to chew his fingers before he told a lie, and how he always slapped his pocket twice before pulling off his kaftan. These memories were vivid. A strong arm around her, crushing her bosom. A strong body behind her. A bulging crotch pressed hard against her rear. Warm, desperate breathing on the
back of her neck. A face, young, crowned with spiky hair. Binta realised then that her thighs had been pressed together, that she was moist, down there. Just a hint of it.

‘
Subhanalla
!' She shook her head and saw the images dissipate like a reflection on disturbed water. Sitting up, she reached for the Qur'an Hadiza had placed on the nightstand the previous evening. She found that her cracked reading glasses were useless so she put them down. Undeterred, she flipped open the Qur'an and tried to read. The elegant curlicues of the Arabic letters blended into an indiscernible pattern before her eyes. Binta sighed, kissed the Qur'an, replaced it on the nightstand and went out to inspect the commotion in the living room.

Hadiza and Fa'iza were contemplating where best to place the framed painting of a waterfall ornamented with red blossoms that had been on the adjacent wall. Fa'iza held up the frame, while Hadiza, having made up her mind, hammered a nail into the tan-coloured wall.

Ummi stood beside Hadiza with a cardboard box of nails in her hand and a hopeful look in her eyes. ‘Aunty Hadiza, will you bring back our decoder?'

Hadiza, biting down her lower lip, continued to hammer in the nail. Ummi repeated her question and, when nobody said anything, she shook the box of nails. ‘It's Saturday. I want to watch Cartoon Network.'

Binta stood by the door and observed the transformation of her living room. She thought of it as a minor calamity of sorts. Chairs had been rearranged, the TV stand had been snuggled into a corner and the cornflower-blue vase that had been by its side was now atop the TV. The sewing machine had been moved up against the wall in the dining alcove.

Her greeting, when it eventually came, was mumbled. ‘
Sannun ku da aiki
.'

They turned to her.

Hadiza contemplated her mother with a scrutiny that bothered the older woman. ‘Hajiya,
lafiya ko
?'

‘Yes, I'm fine. Why?'

‘You just look … strange, that's all. Anyway, I didn't want to
wake you. But now that you are awake, I'm going to rearrange your bedroom as soon as I'm through here.'

‘No!' Binta had not meant to snap. What on earth was wrong with her? She took a deep breath and added in a much softer tone, ‘No rearrangements, please. Just cleaning will do, thank you.'

Realising she was being grouchy, Binta sighed. The images she had woken up with had excited and vexed her more than she would admit. And to think that this moistening of her long-abandoned womanhood had apparently been provoked by someone who reminded her of Yaro was an added irritation.

Hadiza stood, hammer in hand. Ummi picked up a crooked nail from the box and stuck it in her mouth.

Binta made an impatient gesture with her hand. ‘Fa'iza, get me some water. I need to bathe.'

‘Me? Hot water?'

‘Yes, you, God damn it!'

The nail in Ummi's mouth fell on the tiles and clicked-clicked several times, rattling the sudden silence. Binta turned and went back to her bedroom.

Before Hadiza and the girls could recover from the eruption of Binta's temper, there was a sound at the gate, succeeded by urgent footsteps crossing the yard. A woman salaamed at the front door and admitted herself.

Fa'iza beamed. ‘Good morning, Kandiya.'

‘Where's Hajiya?' The woman's puffy cheeks quivered. The edge of the khaki green hijab encircling her face was damp with perspiration. It formed a jagged-edged halo around her pudgy face.

Hadiza considered her with interest. ‘Is there a problem?'

Kandiya ranted about how Hajiya had promised to have her dress ready four days before and how nothing had been done about it. She breezed across the room and picked up the dress on the sewing machine. She held up an unattached sleeve between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand.

‘My dress has remained in this state for four days and I've paid her in full. I'm supposed to be at a wedding right now wearing it. And because she couldn't fulfil her promise, she has been avoiding me.' She observed the dress with considerable disdain and hissed.
‘
Iskanci
.' She let the dress, and the unattached sleeve, fall to the ground. Then she stomped out, brushing Fa'iza aside as she went.

When Hadiza went to ask her mother about Kandiya's dress, she met her huddled on the edge of the bed, her hijab gathered around her, her eyes, before she turned them away to the wall, dark and unfocused.

By the time her son Munkaila arrived, Binta's mood had improved. She sat in the alcove oiling the Butterfly sewing machine and asked why he had not brought her grandchildren with him.