Season of Crimson Blossoms (8 page)

Jos: November 28
^th
, 2008

Her father knocked softly on the door of the room she shared with her ten-year-old sister, Amina. ‘Mommy, wake up, dear. Time for prayers.'

He also knocked on her brother's door and walked out into the
predawn light to the mosque from which Manshawi's emotive recitation of
Sura An Nisa
from the Glorious Qur'an reached her.

Fa'iza had been close to her father, Mu'azu Aminu. Sometimes she thought it was because of the long wait he and her mother had endured before their first son, Jamilu, came, as she had been told, one dawn when the rain washed the silent hills clean. That was what her mother Asabe always said when trying to appease Jamilu – which was quite often. Everyone knew Jamilu was Asabe's favourite. Fa'iza was not quite sure about the rain because her mother herself was not sure about a lot of things. But it made sense when one considered that Jamilu had washed away the doubts about her fertility that had lingered for all of twelve years.

Two years later, Fa'iza was born and placed in her father's tender hands.

He looked at her, at her button nose and beady eyes, and his own eyes welled up with tears. ‘She has my mother's eyes.'

So she was named after his mother, who had died after years of waiting in vain to welcome her grandchildren. When Fa'iza was still a child, her father would hoist her onto his shoulders and walk round the neighbourhood, introducing her as his mother to everyone they met. When she got older, she would sit on the
dakali
at the front of the house, looking in the direction of the setting sun. Her father, framed by the light of dusk, would hurry home from the Jos Main Market after he had closed his babyware shop. On the occasions he travelled to Lagos to stock up, she would sit with the stuffed doll he had bought her and look longingly into the evening light. Then she would go inside to her mother, always busy cooking, while her younger sister Amina would be strapped to her mother's back, shrieking like an enraged wild thing.

Even when she was thirteen, her father still offered her choice pieces of meat from his soup while Jamilu fumed. And then they would sit and talk about school and his business while her mother, sitting in the corner, told Amina stories about the clever spider and the dubious tortoise.

So that November morning, she knew she wanted to be by his side when the news reached them. He had returned from the dawn prayers and was hoping to catch the results of the previous day's council elections on the BBC Hausa Service. He had just
turned on his shortwave radio when a neighbour, Umaru Sanda, barged in.

‘What are you still doing here when the whole town has gone gaga?'

But because not even Umaru Sanda's dimwit wife paid much attention to Umaru Sanda, her father hadn't taken any notice. How could there be another riot when so many policemen had been deployed for the elections? But the sounds of gunshots drawing ever closer vindicated Sanda, who had since left to evacuate his family. Because they had lived through riots in 2001, 2002 and 2004 they knew their neighbourhood would not be safe. Their likes were far outnumbered. So Mua'zu started packing up valuables and Jamilu tried to roll the mattress off the bed. Amina clung to her mother's wrapper, both were crying.

Gunshots thundered close by. Then the banshee screams of Umaru Sanda's wife leapt at them from across the fence and shredded, with decided finality, any hope they had of the unfolding nightmare ending before it fully manifested.

‘Where is he?! Where is he?!' There was a heavy bang on the door.

Amidst so much screaming and so many enraged voices, no one could be certain what was happening.

Mu'azu snapped out of his stupor first. ‘The bathroom, quick!'

It was the sound of desperation in her father's voice that struck Fa'iza. And when she tried to look into his eyes for some reassurance, he turned his face away. They crammed into the bathroom, all five of them, and locked the door. In the small space, they waited, like the cows Fa'iza had seen packed into open trucks at the Yan Awaki market on their way to the slaughterhouse. The smell of overnight piss, still waiting to be flushed in the toilet bowl, swelled. But above it, the raw stench of fear made Fa'iza's head turn. She wanted to bend down but bumped into Jamilu.

‘Watch it.' It was a whisper.

‘Shush!' Even in that whispered word, there was anxiety in her father's voice.

Amina began whimpering and would have started wailing but for Asabe, who hugged her tightly, hushing her and suppressing her own cries.

‘Keep her quiet.' Now there was anger in Mu'azu's voice.

Asabe held the girl and clasped a hand over her mouth. Then she herself started whimpering, her steady drone filling the silence.

Jamilu wriggled his way to the top of the toilet bowl and squatted, resting his weight on his legs. Fa'iza heaved and wriggled into the little space her brother had vacated.

When they heard the front door being bashed in, Asabe's stomach rumbled like a disgruntled volcano. ‘I want to use the toilet.'

Jamilu's foot slipped and he hurtled into his father's back. They crashed into the door. The commotion outside blanketed the noise and they waited, holding their breath.

‘
Ayatul Qursiy
,' Mu'azu ordered. Fa'iza mechanically started reciting the verse from memory.

‘In the toilet?!' Jamilu was incredulous.

‘In your hearts.'

But they froze as they heard the doors being broken down and furniture overturned; the crash of the TV and the splintering of glass. Some maniac hacked at the wall with a machete, the angry sound of metal on concrete and his hate-filled scream jarring Fa'iza's nerves. The warm smell of shit bloated and filled the room. Fa'iza turned to her mother and saw her mouth moving mindlessly, her face, in the dim light, glistening with tears and sweat.

Fa'iza felt a hand searching for hers and knew it was her father. He squeezed it and quickly let go. But she still sensed the trembling.

When they broke down the bathroom door, her father went first, hands raised above his head. Fa'iza felt a warm liquid run down her thighs and pool around her feet.

‘Spare my children, please.' Mu'azu knelt down before the armed mob that had invaded the house.

‘Kill him! Kill him! What are you waiting for?!' It was a woman.

Fa'iza knew then that she would never forget the voice of that woman. She would never forget the hate in it. She perceived the contagious nature of hate that makes one want to murder people they have never interacted with. Or people with whom they have eaten from the same bowl, mourned alongside and shared laughter, people with whom they have nurtured the verdant canopy of a friendship that was on occasions closer to kinship. But that woman's
voice, in one sweep, ripped that canopy, letting the pieces fall, heavily, like shredded foliage around their feet.

Fa'iza stepped forward and saw the face of Jacob James, her maths teacher, who always dressed smartly – his shirt ironed and tucked in with a neatly knotted tie. The students made fun of his sturdy brogues because they had never seen him wear any other shoes. He always smiled at their jokes. But, that morning, he was not smiling. His face, made fierce by war paint, glistened with sweat and odium as he raised his machete and brought it down. Bright, red blood, warm and sticky, splashed across Fa'iza's face and dotted, in a fine spray, the shell-pink nightdress that her father had bought her.

She dreamt in sepia. Like rust-tainted water running over the snapshots of her memories, submerging her dreams in a stream of reddish-brown. But when the blood spurted and flowed, it would always be in astonishing red. That night, the sounds too echoed in her head – the dull thump of metal chopping into flesh. Cracking femurs. Splitting skulls. The first agonised screams. The moans and grunts. And the thunderous silence of disbelief that followed. She woke up panting and was further startled by little Ummi's frightened eyes peering into hers.

‘You were screaming in your sleep.'

Fa'iza sat up and was shocked to find her dress, drenched with cold sweat, clinging to her skin. She got up and changed and then sat on her mattress, hugging herself. Ummi sat looking into her face.

‘I am scared, Aunty Fa'iza.'

Fa'iza looked at her and patted her head. ‘So am I.' She got up and held Ummi's hand. ‘Come.'

With her other hand, she picked up the novella she had been reading before she fell asleep. She looked at the lovelorn face of the girl on the cover and wished she could disappear into the pages and be woven into the words. Into the sentences, into the story, where there would only be love. And sweet, whispered conversations wrapped in the veils of adoration. And marriages.
And fragrant happy endings. No blood or chopped flesh or dreams in painfully toned shades.

Holding hands, they went to Hajiya Binta's room. Ummi knocked on the door. ‘Hajiya, we are scared.'

Fa'iza tentatively opened the door. Binta sat up in bed and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She looked from her niece to her granddaughter, her gaze resting briefly on the book in Fa'iza's hand. She shook her head, made a clicking sound from the back of her throat and gestured for them to join her on the bed.

When they were tucked in beside her, Binta asked the girls to say a prayer to ward off the bad dreams and the officious Shaytan who implanted such terror in their hearts. Not long after, Ummi's steady breathing complemented the screech of the crickets serenading the night. But from the way Fa'iza lay, one hand tucked under her face, which was turned away from her aunt, the other hand resting on the book she had laid before her, Binta knew the girl was far from sleep.

‘They will pass, these nightmares.' She squeezed Fa'iza's shoulder. ‘They will pass.'

Fa'iza wiped the tears on her face and nodded. ‘Do you still think about it?'

For a while, Binta pondered how cruelly fate had united her with this girl who was still grappling with the meaning of life. How they had both lost the men in their lives, almost a decade apart, to the conflagrations of faith and ethnicity, to Jos. Fa'iza had been a toddler when Zubairu left home and never returned, when it had first started on September 7
^th
, 2001. She still thought about it, about how they said Zubairu's corpse was butchered and burnt in the street. She thought about it, all the time. ‘Not any more, child. Life is too short to dwell on things that have already happened.'

Fa'iza nodded. ‘But you still think about him, don't you?'

Binta sighed. ‘I do. All the time.'

Fa'iza patted the book under her. ‘You must have loved him a lot.'

‘Love?' The word felt strangely heavy on Binta's tongue. ‘I don't know, really. But when you have lived with someone all your life it doesn't matter whether you love him or not.'

‘How can you live with someone you don't love?'

‘In my day, we lived by what our parents taught us. We obeyed
what they said. Now, things are different. Little girls like you are talking about love. And what good has that done to the world?'

Speechless, Fa'iza lay still and listened to Ummi's steady breathing, as the chirping crickets inscribed their own stories on the desolate night.

There was a shadow hanging over San Siro. Inside, in one of the rooms the boys shared, the stream of ganja fumes reached up to the bare rafters, where some of the youths had taken to stowing their personal effects: snakeskin amulets procured from shifty marabouts promising protection from the evil eye; bundles of medicinal bark reputed to cure ninety-nine ailments acquired from itinerant medicine vendors who cavorted with live crocodiles and displayed photos of people with disease-ravaged genitalia; and sometimes stashes of cash wrapped in plastic bags.

Dan Asabe lay on Babawo Gattuso's dingy mattress, staring up at a package squeezed into the thighs of the rafters. He seemed unmindful of the horrified faces looking down at him. When Reza pushed his way through the half dozen bodies and examined the huge machete gash on Dan Asabe's head, he saw that the blood had soaked up the black powder that Dogo the resident herbalist had administered to stem the bleeding.

‘This thing is poisoning his blood.' Sani Scholar was squatting over Dan Asabe's prone figure with a bowl of warm, salted water and a piece of cloth. He still fancied himself the doctor he might someday become, should he ever go back to school.

‘Don't you lay a hand on him.' Dogo was sitting against the wall
with angry eyes, puffing on a joint. ‘Don't waste my medicine, you hear?'

The damp cloth in Sani's hand hung between the bowl and Dan Asabe's battered head. ‘Your herbs will give him an infection.'

‘What the hell do you know, boy? I said leave him alone.' Dogo stood up and slapped the dust off the seat of his trousers. ‘That is the problem with this place. Nobody listens. When Dogo says take this for
tauri
, take this for protection, people say Dogo is high. Now see what has happened.'

‘Dogo, don't start now.' Gattuso glared at him.

‘Why not? Before we left for this rally business, I said take this, take this. Reza said no, that nobody would attack us. Now see.' Dogo had offered, for a fee, of course, some charms and amulets for protection against all sorts of weapons. He had extensively investigated the potency of amulets procured from various mallams, often using himself as the guinea pig. He had dedicated himself to the pursuit of
tauri
, which would make his skin impenetrable to metal, a useful asset considering the occupational hazards of their existence. The procedure was never clear-cut as Dogo was prone to experiment with mysterious herbs and decoctions of questionable origin and intent, but his dedication to these pursuits had earned him a reputation as the resident herbalist of San Siro, and he was often consulted when there were stomach upsets, fevers or headaches to be remedied.

Dogo's standing, however, suffered when he had been forced to admit that he had indeed been swindled while trying to obtain an amulet that would enable him vanish in times of trouble. He had stolen from his mother and some of the boys at San Siro and gone on a burgling spree in the neighbourhood. When he had amassed enough money, he went to the travelling mallam and collected the talisman reputed to contain, among other things, the eye of a leopard. For a week he followed the instructions diligently. He refused to come into contact with water or eat anything that had been subjected to the torment of fire; he slept wedged between the wall and some bricks, for the charm demanded he slept only on his back. And he stayed away from babies, whose pee or puke had the power to render the talisman ineffective. After the prescribed seven days of preparations, he put on the amulet and
discovered that he did not disappear. And when, in a fit of rage, he shredded the talisman, he discovered it contained nothing but the folded pages of old newspapers.

‘Okay, Dogo, cut the crap. We gave as good as we got.' Reza leaned against the wall, his voice quietly authoritative.

‘Sure.' Gattuso punched his palm with his fist. There was a timbre of pride in his voice. ‘Kai! I must have slashed off that boy's arm—'

Dan Asabe coughed and Sani tried to make him comfortable by prodding the grimy pillow beneath his head. ‘I think we should take him to the hospital.'

Dogo took a long last drag on his roll and cocked his head to one side. ‘Can I get my balance now?'

Reza eyed him. ‘Wait, like everyone else. You saw how the rally was disrupted before the boss settled us.'

‘What do you mean? No balance?
Kan buran ubannan
! With this broken head and the entire day in the sun, no balance? And I had to travel with my head hanging out of the bus like a travelling chicken, almost grazing my face against the flyover—'

‘Dogo, that's enough now.' Gattuso cracked his knuckles.

‘It won't work, Gattuso, you hear me? It won't work. I need my money now!'

‘Come and take it then.' The challenge in Reza's voice was unmistakable. He looked Dogo in the eye. The tall youth looked away and started rolling another joint, grumbling under his breath.

‘No one has got his balance yet.' Reza's voice took in the entire room. ‘I am going to see the boss now about that. Wait until I return.'

As he stepped out into the compound and stood studying the battered bus parked out at the front, Gatttuso caught up with him.

‘Reza, we need to get Dan Asabe to the hospital.' Gattuso rolled his head. ‘This thing doesn't look good.'

Reza thought for a while and hissed. ‘Have you not lived through worse?'

‘A lot worse.'

Reza examined the huge spiderweb crack made on the windshield of the bus by a rock missile. ‘Next time, don't bring this
dan daudu
to any rally. He doesn't have the stomach for it.' He took a final
look at the battered vehicle and walked away, the light of the evening sun in his eyes.

Reza reached the huge fenced house in Maitama, where peacocks walked the lush lawns. He was ushered into the anteroom where several other people, mostly elderly men, were waiting. A large flat-screen TV showed Barcelona in battle with Osasuna. He leaned against the wall and watched.

‘The senator is in a meeting, you have to wait.' A man grinned toothily at Reza as if he had known him all his life. Reza smiled back.

‘You know, elections are drawing close, he will be busy seeing all these people.' The man continued to smile as if imploring Reza to say something.

Reza said nothing.

‘This is politics!' The man's voice made the seven heads in the room turn to him, glaring. When he said nothing more, the men turned back to the screen. The man drew close to Reza. ‘Tough rally this afternoon.'

This time Reza deigned to look at him. The man adjusted his zanna cap, which had seen better days. The red and the blue and the yellow yarn embroided into it had washed out and there were strands of thread coming undone.

‘Yes,' Reza nodded.

‘All these people trying to cause trouble for the senator's candidate will be put to shame
insha Allahu
!' The man adjusted his old cap again. ‘Did you know they tried to disrupt the rally? If not for Allah's favour, I tell you
wallahi
—'

The account the man gave of the rally, embellished with choice onomatopoeic expressions for effect, could have been plucked straight from a blockbuster. Reza, despite being a principal actor in the whole melodramatic episode, did not remember it that way. He did not even exist in the man's account. One of the other waiting men, probably as irritated by the man's incessant chatter as Reza was, said it was time for prayers and rose. The others followed him out to the mosque.

‘Shall we go to the mosque then?' The man with the old cap stood uncertainly.

‘You go ahead. I will be along shortly.' Reza slid onto a leather seat one of the men had vacated and threw one leg across the other. He turned his face to the screen but out of the corner of his eye he could see the man hovering by the door before he eventually went out.

When the men returned, Reza did not give up the seat and the man who had been sitting on it before stood deliberately over him until he noticed the scowl on Reza's face. He moved away and perched on the armrest of another seat occupied by his friend.

Men emerged from the adjacent room periodically and, each time, a young man in a shirt and tie would poke his head round the door and scan the faces. He would then point at one of the waiting men and usher him in.

By the time the match on the TV ended, Reza had given up trying to suppress his yawns. They came at regular intervals, and each time he felt more exhausted and leaned further back into the seat. He thought of Hajiya Binta and her long gone clumps of ancient pubic hair, and her gold tooth. It was then he allowed himself to think about the woman who had ridden towards him on a scented breeze, whose gold tooth still gleamed in the dimness of reminiscence.

He had been seventeen in 2003 when he next saw his mother. He was playing football with the other boys on the plot down the lane when she came. Because the field was small with a huge rocky outcrop in one corner, they played ‘monkey post', with four boys on each side trying to sneak the ball through a pair of stones placed three feet apart at both ends of the field. Reza's team was playing skin, their bare torsos glistening in the dimming sun.

She must have been standing there for a while, behind the rock where the other boys sat waiting their turns, because when Reza looked up to pass the ball, he saw her. It was the radiance of her flowing, silky white jilbab with sequins down the front, like little mirrors catching the sun, which first arrested his attention. And
then he saw her face, and the pride beaming from it. He made the pass and stood indecisively.

She was smiling when he finally walked towards her, stopping by the rock to collect his shirt. The boys watched, and as soon as he walked past them, the whispers began.

She was as beautiful as she had been seven years before but the years had added crow's feet around her eyes when she smiled. The fingers of musk wafted in his direction, drawing him to her. He resisted and stared down at his dusty feet.

‘You play well.'

He looked up and saw she was smiling and then looked down again at his feet, grinding his teeth.

‘My father used to do that a lot. Grinding his teeth like that when he was angry. You are not happy to see me, are you?'

‘What do you want?'

There was an irreverence in his tone that made her flinch. He wished his anger had reached out and smacked her in the face, because he could not do that himself. He wanted her to understand that he wasn't the meek boy she had seen back in '96. He had grown past the age of becoming and Reza had swallowed whole the puny Hassan Babale who had clung to her jilbab all those years before.

She sighed and adjusted the headscarf that framed her face. ‘It's been a while.'

‘Were you deported again?'

She held her breath for a moment. ‘No, I wasn't. I came back to see you.'

He looked up at her and their eyes met.

‘I went to the house and they told me I could find you here.' She glanced about her at the boys in the field. ‘Look, let's leave this place.'

He turned back and saw that the boys were gazing at them. They must have figured out who she was by then, the great whore of Arabia who had birthed him and abandoned him to scorn. He walked with her up the lane, away from the football field to the mango grove some distance away. They stopped, as if by unspoken agreement, under a tree. He kicked away a fruit that birds had half-eaten and left to rot at the foot of the trunk.

‘So, you've finished school?'

He scoffed.

‘What happened?'

The concern on her face seemed genuine to him. He turned his head this way and that. ‘I was expelled.'

She sighed. ‘What for?'

‘I was caught selling weed to some students and I broke a teacher's jaw.'

‘
Ya Salam
! Why on earth did you do that?'