Independence Day

The mechanic walked into the station and drove out the DPO’s car. But nobody actually knew the man and was thought to be the man servicing the DPO’s car. With the car serviced, it would be great spending weekend watching Independence Day with peace of mind and didn’t have to worry having problem starting the car on Monday. But Monday was a public holiday. If prison authorities would consider the day, then it would be cheerful and rest and laughter for inmates across the prison yards. 

Until in the evening police at the gate realized they were in big trouble because the DPO was furious and accompanied his order with ‘Things will sort out themselves in the course of investigation’ in reference to instruction of random arrest he had issued after his car was stolen. 

Though concerned on the outside, but not with the thought of how to buy a new vehicle. To bail themselves out, the DPO put 20k on the head of each detainee, and when those who could afford the bail paid and walked out, he slashed the money down, first to fifteen thousand, then ten thousand on and on… the rest was a new car.

Wasa nearly became a police man, but didn’t join the service, complaining corruption and bad arrangement and all that when in reality his decision was borne out of something else. Whatever direction his father took, Wasa would take the opposite. 

In the first months in service, no salary, no allowance, no nothing. And at the end of the day the man at the office is waiting you to bring something to his table. Wasa pretended to watch disgustingly at anything dishonest, but when he talked I listened to him with my own reservations. If a lady used high heel, put talcum powder on her face and plant a cup at the back her head to appear as if she had long hair, then it’s karraption. “You must have to know that my sister you are taking undue advantage over others. You just have to know that change must begin with you.” 

Perhaps he had forgotten or was deliberating erasing some fact. Naturally, a man like Wasa shouldn’t be in position to hold such view. Once a challenge was thrown at him to swear by God about his piety and whether he truly believed he could marry virgin girl. Knowing what he had in the closet, he pronounced “Half virgin is better than completely unvirgin.” He stole his mother’s jewelry and sold it at Bakin Asibiti and burnt the money on girls and drugs. In the morning, he came out wobbling and speaking in very slow pace. It was highly unwise to buy anything you can get free. “If you need shoes, go to mosque.” 

I reminded Wasa that thousands others no better than him were in in the service. I was once shocked to see a police man doing aswaki.  I thought that was the business for good Muslims only. So, I was only encouraging Wasa to get into the service for our own advantage someday. 

A year or two ago, after the crisis began and the attack was intense, a police caught me at the Orthopedic Hospital junction Gwammaja, after the government banned passengers on motorcycle. I didn’t have money, at my behest, a younger friend in my neighborhood drove me there. He feared police might catch us but I reassured. And now it happened, none of us had money and the officer was determined. An idea struck me, I whipped out my ID and prayed for esprit de corps since I was also a government worker. Generally, police were like that. This was the idea I was pushing into Wasa’s head. 

The officer kept thrashing out his pocket at my side, gloating over his accomplishment going home each day with no less than 4k. In the police arrangement, once a uniform was dished out to you, it was considered a seed capital to generate more profit and grow your business. “I am not stupid,” the officer said, insisting I must feel his pocket to which I refused and only said. “I believe you officer, you cannot tell lie.” Form his sudden glance at me he was probably thinking I was throwing jibe at him. Knowing where Nigerian police get their money from wasn’t an Aleppo moment.

Somewhere I felt like I read the story of my life with happy ending where one could die without knowing he died. Because people disbelieved me if I told them my result and made me feel ashamed, I learnt to smile and say, “I am first-class.” 

If we were doing one thing in class, I would be doing another. I hated reading my books and loved reading novels instead. Friends were shocked by my total indifference to grade. I was not alone.

“Useless degree” a friend once said, “any degree that couldn’t fetch you job at NNPC, CBN or FIRS is useless. You should prepare for the real life in the real world. ” His words sank into my head and since then I began preparing for the real battle.

Like every Nigerian child, back in primary school days I had a dream of becoming a medical doctor. But science killed spirit here, no nothing at all. I went to the library and read books in Media and Communication as I planned to be doing contract business with all the top guys in the economy. And if the next election came, I would want to be a campaign manager for a presidential candidate. But I think I was stupid, I deleted an email thinking it was old and later looked for it to read and found it was gone.

While famine pervaded commoners’ streets, hunger for meat in Abuja quarters, At Bakin Kofa gurasa has increased in value, not as a result of recession. We could only give some token amount for it out of respect like we did for religious books. These days we have been worshipping gurasa, going to pilgrimage to Kwanar Ungwaggwo if our random wandering took us there (God forbid I shall write Ungogo, Goron Dutse, Sokoto), and because now we were no longer in college, we travelled infrequently to Civic Centre where, near the place, someone with looted funds from the nation’s coffer was setting up health tech institute.

Applanders, children of apps, while in mosque would still be on their phone. I remembered reading a tweet from Wasa reading “last tweet before Sallah kicks off,” apparently in congregation in a mosque.

Wasa was constantly in loggerheads with his old ones. He found it hard to understand his parents. Naturally, it didn’t sound good to start eating Tuwo just two days after Sallah. “Why our parents are doing like this? Our worldviews are fundamentally different but they are never aware of that.  That’s why I am leaving the house.”

If it’s for that, you could side with Wasa. He didn’t like it his father waking him up at dawn or banging and shouting at the bathroom door. Wasa could go to toilet with his phone, logged online and forgot existence in the outside world. “Some people are full human beings but possess half human brain,” Wasa said if someone knocked at the door.

Wasa heavily ate meat during Sallah, went to the toilet in pain and failed to deliver the pregnancy he was carrying. He realized he was simply in labour and began to sympathize with women. “You can get the idea how women feel when you go to the toilet and the thing refuses to come.”  He had a strange way of saying things. “I am going to do a small death,” he said when he meant he was going to bed. Or things like “I don’t share bad news, but eight died in auto-crash.” It was from him I first heard strange things like “Donald Trump wishes all Muslims happy Eidl Mubarak.”

In primary school, it had been great mystery for us to fathom how Ali was able to get through the week with tidy and clean clothes. It was beyond our little brain to understand that he had to wash them two or three times a week. We remained in touch even after primary school and college, after life had thrown us in different ways.

He regularly called to vent spleen about very grave issue, which in the end would turn out very trivial. I didn’t understand why he should bother himself on small things like grammar that happened everywhere.  “Did you read the paper? Who wrote that advert FIRS did in their job opening? He must have to go back to classroom. In all the vacancies at federal level, no one job place for those of us in language. Unpardonable, they massacred a simple grammar.”

He called last time angrily to complain about what he called national shame when Information Minister was addressing near empty hall at National Assembly.

It was middle of the month and I was not interested in such things and preferred to talk about the money I had been expecting from him. As soon as I broached the issue, he reeled out excuses about recession. Glad to know that the suffering wasn’t from heaven. Satisfied with their fate, some folks had no idea and thought their suffering was God.

Rain I Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

 

The day it first showered was not really day-time. The area around History Department, where grocers’ shops stood, was quite between 7 and 8 pm. People began running as soon as the rain started.

When the rain subsided, to gentle breeze, the atmosphere turned to feel like a paradise, with strong urge for phone call reeling in the air.

Normally, I waited till past midnight when the world had gone to sleep, before I rang Habashiyya. By then, my roomies were fast asleep.

Lovers in conversation. Ensconced, curled up on the mattress, low tones evaporating from under the blanket.

Three days past I felt weighed down by fear. I would always feel that when I would call Habashiyya. I wasn’t sure if she would answer.

Any time I called and she did not answer, I would feel totally diminished and inadequate. I would regret ever calling her in the first place.

On bright days, when she picked up, I would grope and struggle for words, like she wasn’t the girl I used to speak to with ease when we were friends.

I failed to understand the shapeless fear in me surfacing each time I was to speak to Habashiyya. I must tell her everything on my mind, or else I would die with untold feeling.

Finally, the quietness of the place won over.

When her voice came up, she asked the date we’re starting our exams. Being together for long made lying unnecessary, but I lied to her anyway.

“Friday…” I said, “After next.”

My voice stammered. What if she had seen through me? I felt bad and half guilty. It was with a sigh of relief that Habashiyya trusted me. I lulled myself with the belief that I was not essentially lying, there would be a test next Friday. 

Habashiyya was the only weight heavily oppressing my mind. As I sat on a bench, beside a case at the mini mart, and started thinking her. In a situation like this, a thick barrier would suddenly erect between me and the reality.

While I walked, I punctuated my thoughts with shrugs and mumbles in a voice audible to the people. Just as I started on a path, I’d stop to follow another and would quickly return to another, disturbed from conflicting urges, in displacement activity.

Passers-by stared at me. Something must be wrong with him, I thought they said. I was certain when they reached home they told the story of a madman they met in the street.

As I walked, my legs often fell into the gutter. I would rush confidently to the people whom I saw a kettle in front of them, apparently used from the last prayer.

I wouldn’t know it was empty, until I inflicted damage to myself. As I nudged it with my toes, I would discover it was blank. The men would look at me in surprise, then exchanged looks, questions filling up their eyes.

I was becoming loner and loner. Always sitting forlornly at one side of the classroom, near the window, or outside after the lectures, cupping my cheeks, lapsed into my own world. When my friends asked, I would always say I was alright.

“Faruq, what’s wrong?” Aisha’s voice brought me back from reveries. She was concerned how I was fast receding into degeneration.

“What is happening?”  I asked her in return, not knowing my hand was morbidly cupping my cheek.

Suddenly, her face took a new shape.

“Oh, you don’t even know?”

It was then I became aware of the situation.

Any time I was thinking Habashiyya, I would pretend it was not Habashiyya on my mind.

Sitting cogitatively there, I fumbled out my phone and scrolled through the contacts, hoping to find a name that would neutralize Habashiyya’s, and free my mind.

I scrolled past several names. Not even Ruqayya’s name was able to catch my attention. I thought Ruqayya’s name would grip me because we were sharing text messages each Friday.

Her last message was nicely crafted, kept in my phone. While reading it, my eyes closed and opened in disbelief and pleasure. I thought such show of love could only happen in TV.

I relished in every subtlety of her words, hinting beyond just good wishes. With this, I was behaving like someone not used to being nicely treated in other relationships.

Best delicacies were reserved to be eaten at the end.

For a week now, Ruqayya’s message was the last activity I did to close shop each night. I would lie on my mattress, sipping her words leisurely like Sunday morning tea before caressing me to sleep. I would stop to ask, to no one in particular, what she meant by “May Allah send love and gentle rays to fill your heart,” even though I had an idea in my head what she meant.

It had always been her voice in the reading. In the morning, I would wake up to find the phone lying carelessly at my side.

Scrolling.

When I came to Habashiyya’s, I lingered. Unable to move on, I stared.

Habashiyya’s name evoked the illusory picture of her face and the sound of her voice. I kept returning to the name time and again, stared hard to give room for the enigmatic feeling to wash down utterly through me.

“I think it is time we talk. This should not kill me. We can’t continue like this.”  I found myself muttering.

She should know my heart or else I could die without having her ever knowing my feeling.

I shuddered in horror whenever Aisha’s story rewound in my memory. I didn’t wish to be in her situation. Or even love to see my enemy in the same situation.

In her first year in college, she fell in love with a final-year student. They looked each other suggestively, with something in their eyes, but never really talked. They hung around after classes, to see each other in the department. Or taking opposite seats and pretended chatting with their friends. Or going to read in the same class at night. When their eyes met, they would quickly avert and looked the other way, as if that was not their aim.

A week after graduation, she was devastated when she heard the news of his death. It was then she realized merely seeing him was a pleasure. To feel that someone you loved was alive brought relief to the heart.

I guessed that was what pushed her to show her feeling about me frankly, although at that time we were beginning to know each other.

She did not say it openly. The message she sent on WhatsApp was pregnant with meanings.

Considering it was unusual in this land for a lady to initially declare her love to a boy, I voiced to her my fear that her friends would say she was throwing herself off at me.

“They would say you are too eager.”

“Forget them.” She replied. “They are just pretending. They fought over a boyfriend last weekend.”  

Revealing! Are you for real? Could the girls also be like that too?

From within, I was grappling with excitement battling to break free to the surface. It was so visible and loud I thought she could hear.

I liked Aisha for her directness. She did not know, but she was my spy in the circle of her friends. I would have never believed the story had it come from someone else. I knew men could fight each other, but never for girls.

The girls kept me in awe and respect of them by their life-style. I had been thinking them as flawless humans. With this, everything collapsed. Having their secret at my disposal, I felt powerful, like CIA in possession of crucial information. When they came with their theatrics, putting one leg in front of another in swagger, they appeared naked in my eyes. It was amusing watching them. I would shake my head, saying in my mind, “See these girls, like they are not the ones fighting over a boyfriend.”

With Aisha coming into my life, I remained faithful to Habashiyya. I was blessed with a heart that learned to balance things out.

Yet, it would be foolishness to let Habashiyya know how much I loved her. It would give her power to control me. People would have a field day speaking behind my back.

Some had even gone to Wasa with their gossiping.

“The way that boy is behaving, she would turn him into her boy.” They spoke in low tones and glanced over their shoulders, carefully supervising movements around them.

“You know women, you will suffer if you allow her to control his ears.” 

They were right according to tradition. For in their eyes I was a toddler, too childish to recognize a danger.

It was their duty to personally point out the failure and struggle they envisioned in our marriage.

My mother also seemed to smuggle the idea into my head, always taking advantage of our little sister’s naivety who came to me directly to present a problem.

Mother read this to mean that, when I got married, the little sister would not have to meet my wife first before she could pass her demand. Imagine, if she didn’t have the idea already in her mind, how could she have swooped down with the energy she deployed on the innocence of a seven-year old girl, who did not even know what she was doing?

“If we live long to see your marriage, Maimuna would not have to see anybody before she can see you.” She said, sounding like she was praising the girl while thinly pushing her own interest.

I knew what she meant.

Using her voice, she was negotiating the terms of relationship with me when I got married. She was speaking on behalf of my voiceless siblings, who although sharing similar view, because of age, could not discuss the matter in my presence.

Her statement was an open secret. Even what was left unsaid was clearly said.  The “anybody” in her statement was meant for an outsider, an intruder who just met me up fully-made. She wanted to mean my wife but carefully dressed her in disguise because of my presence.

My mother’s words could also pass as declaration of war, a battle between the battalion of siblings led by my mother to fight my wife. They were throwing me off to be shot in the crossfire, because I would be offending one camp if I supported another.

My family wanted me to marry someone they could enslave. What my mother did not clearly say out but let to be conveyed through her tone was “you and the woman you are going to marry will be under our rule. So, make sure you marry someone you can control.”

But they were in a wrong place. There would be so much democracy in my home. People always thought nothing was more important than their parents.

My wife was a child like me, with relatives like everyone. It would feel absurdly awkward for me to try to control her thoughts, more so on the instruction of someone else.

It would be ridiculous to pretend anger and suddenly start shouting at her. How silly - appearing hot on the surface, cool on the inside? How could I reconcile this conflict while I was not a hypocrite?  

My relatives should understand their scope and limitation when it came to my home. My wife’s role was different from theirs’.

To me, this was normal but to them it was different and no amount of teaching, including a quote from Karl Marx, was likely going to change their mind as my mother usually shut me down with “Karl Marx din ubanka, sha-sha-sha. People like you can disgrace their mothers in front of their wife.”

Like I told Wasa, we had to forget people and their gossip. “As if they are the ones to live in the marriage.”  

They could not understand what I was seeing in Habashiyya. The routine things that would characterize our marriage, colour and flavor that would spice our life.

Many times, pictures of me and Habashiyya intertwined on bed loomed to my view, half body under the blanket. At night, Habashiyya would come to bring the meal, a little smile on her face, coquetting and genuflecting in the way of a northern girl. She would then help shelve the food into my mouth when we sat.

I pictured scenes I was shouting to her lovingly from my room, “Habashiyya, get me water to bathroom.” And visualized our warmth embrace when I would return from work in the evening.  

Habashiyya knew the nature of our relationship, but if I did not approach her openly, she would continue to pretend there was nothing in our relationship.

I promised to take the risk, and stop things being known by omission. If she accepted me, fine. If she rejected me, it was with consolation she had ever known my mind, even if she married another person. It horrified me to think that Habashiyya would graduate a year ahead of me from university.

I classified anybody as my enemy who dared tell me truth about Habashiyya. For fear of hurting me, people simply told me what I wanted to hear.

Aunty Sa’a was the only person who did not make it to the list. It would amount to wickedness and betrayal to cast a hex on someone close to me. There was amenability and understanding between us. We’d spend hours conversing any time I paid her a visit, talking freely and laughing over food and drinks she normally presented.

Discussion with her opened me up to another world, a world full of secrets, which for long had been a mysterious puzzle.

I wanted to clear this doubt, so I asked her “why women’ body get enlarged soon after their marriage?”

Aunty Sa’a was silent for a moment, assessing the words in her mind. But she gave me the answer since she understood everything between us was harmless. A young man on the process of getting married needed guidance to navigate his new environment.

Everyone had trouble, which they could share strictly to a tiny circle of friends. I met Wasa last night at Bakin Kofa. When everyone left, I approached him and said:

“Being close friends, you are like my brother. Please tell me, what do you think about my relationship with Habashiyya?”

Like everyone, Wasa looked me and smiled the other way. He knew what I was asking was something different. An honest view meant an end to our relationship.

In the end, I said, “Please don’t tell anybody” because I realized asking people constantly for advice meant insecurity. And fear.

Besides, I was tired of waking up to hear my deepest secret marketed in public domain. Wasa was a blabbermouth.

When I showed Aunty Sa’a Habashiyya’s picture, the first thing she did, she directed her attention to Habashiyya’s earlobe, comparing her golden earing with her dress.

After observing everything, having Habashiyya passed the test, Aunty Sa’a looked up to me, with suspended words in her mouth. Another way of saying: this girl is beyond you.

Habashiyya was Big Men’s wife. Everyone who saw her picture said so. It was communicated by their eyes. Only a few courageous friends, like Adoji, were able to say it out.

But Aunty Sa’a did not say this directly. Instead, she simply said, “She is almost the same age with you.” Her fears tallying with everyone’s.

You don’t marry someone your age.

Aunty Sa’a gave me hope whenever I expressed to her my worry about Habashiyya. Habashiyya doing wrong, Habashiyya hurting me, Habashiyya not picking my call, Aunty Sa’a would say, “It doesn’t matter. She might be in prayer when you call.”

“But she doesn’t call back.”

“You know us females. She has to maintain her prestige. You supposed to be chasing her to show her how you truly care.”

Trust Aunty Sa’a. If Habashiyya was so easy, the force fanning the fire ablaze would have been long dead. I feared things coming to me so easy.  Habashiyya’s estimation rose in my eyes, and made her more desirable.

Aunty Sa’a’s words flushed the anxiety out of me. I stopped being worried since then if Habashiyya upset me intentionally or not, with the belief that she was testing me. Gradually, my body started growing flesh in the places where emaciation had once occupied.

                          

Light shower was still falling, gently on my skin. The nearby mosque was calling prayer. As I looked around, the darkness was thickened a bit.

The phone remained nestled to my ear, waiting to crackle to life. With each sudden rustling, someone about picking, my heart jumped into aggressive beat. Yet, I was determined to part with the usual norm of brief talk and keep the conversation longer. Then, I could pour out my mind.

While waiting, I was mentally engaged, writing and rewriting my thoughts. I worded, reworded, rehearsed, rehearsed again, picked a word here and put it there, deleted, undeleted, so as not commit a blunder.

“My mind told me to call you.” I cringed! This wasn’t what I intended to say. I knew I lost from here.

“Thank you.” She said with unusual aloofness in her tone.