Right Hands (2)

In a flame, there are spaces. Spaces between the fiery blue section and the coal, and between the blue flame and the burnt orange tip. Khadijah fixed her gaze on such a space while waiting for the young fire to catch. Pieces of black nylon sizzled amongst the coals. Plastic fuel to amplify the little caps of kerosene she had poured to start the fire and maintain its expansion. The coals picked up heat until wind arrived. Tender flames swayed left and right. Khadijah paused for a second too long, and spaces grew, the fire died, gone with the wind. She considered starting all over or going next door. Mama Aisha would have hot coals she could sweep into a shovel and hurriedly transport to her stove. But Khadijah hesitated, even as Inna was already performing her morning nafila and would expect some tea right after. Mama Aisha was too inquisitive to not observe her downward lips.

Khadijah had never been good at hiding how she felt on the inside. This morning, she felt particularly leaky, unsure she could tuck away her woefulness from the prying eyes of her neighbor. She had woken up exhausted. The dream of her mother was so tangible that it stayed with her long after sunrise. Her mother had arrived that night in her usual glee, calling, “Dija, Dijaa, Dijaaaa.” Buoyed by that husky, impatient voice, Khadijah transitioned between realms until she was back in their bedroom in Badarawa, and it is 1998. Khadijah is almost nine, and her mother is almost dead. Khadijah is wearing a pink plaid dress two sizes too small. Her mother, Onozare, who came to Kaduna in search of gold along the mouths of a river, had found the dress amongst the throwaways in Central Market. She had brought it back home, taken a needle, some white thread, and all the buttons she had collected and saved in a tin cup, and transformed the uniform into a beaded wonder. Khadijah lived in that dress. She woke up, ate, followed Onozare through her daily motions as a seamstress, and slept in that dress. “It is a dress that makes music,” her mother had said. “But you have to learn to dance its tune.”

The dream ends just as Khadijah joins Onozare in dance. Moments before in the dream, she had watched her mother twirl and twirl around her, a radio blasting music from the edge of their shared bed. The lyrics of the song are muted, but its sound accompanies her mother’s movements seamlessly. Onozare is twenty-five in the dream, and it shows in the confidence with which she holds her hands to her hips, bending her lower back in and out, around and around. “This is how you make a dress like yours dance, Dija. This is how you make the tune of the dress yours. Give me your hand.” Onozare reaches out, and Khadijah leans forward, buttons clanking against each other. It is then that the dawn adhan returns Khadijah to the present. It returned her from the memory that is a dream and reminded her how much like death is silence. To feel like her mother was alive, all she needed was a dream with music. The woman in her dreams was not dead but quiet. She roamed her daughter’s mind endlessly, traversing the corridors of her thoughts, waiting for her daughter’s body to ease into the softness of sleep to return. That morning, twelve years ago, when Khadijah had woken up to discover Onozare lying breathlessly next to her, it was not the end of their relationship, but another beginning, one in which the mother’s whispers never left the child’s ears.

And Khadijah knew what her mother whispered concerning Faruk’s question. It was what tired her even before she entered the kitchen right after Subhi prayers. Whereas Inna had proceeded to lie against her bed and recite verses before nafila, Khadijah began her tasks for the day. They would have some tea and bread for breakfast. Khadijah would have to go to the butcher at Junction to get a good cut of cow leg, which she would use to make stew. Then she would return to clean their rooms and attend to other tasks as Inna saw fit. It could have been like any other day when she did not go to Islamiyya, except that this day she had the warring voice of Onozare coursing through her body. She wanted to ignore it. But if she went to Mama Aisha, there was little doubt that the older woman would know she had something to hide and would attempt to pull it out before giving hot coals in exchange.

“Khadijah, is it ready?”

Inna’s inquiry was suggestive. Her grandmother would become fidgety, a woman deprived of the safety of routine, if she did not eat anything soon. Khadijah cautiously knocked on Mama Aisha’s door. Mama Aisha, whose real name disappeared with each child, opened the door holding Abba. Grey flakes coated Abba’s mouth to hint at a millet porridge feast. Behind their mother, Aisha and Zarah vanished any remaining evidence, swallowing the final spoonfuls of koko garnished with kosai.

“Enter, enter,” Mama Aisha said. 

“Do you have any fire left I can get?”

“Good morning to you too.” The unpleasant edge of the greeting compelled Khadijah to look into Mama Aisha’s face. It was a rare exercise. Their relationship, where one was a young, unmarried girl with choices ahead, and the other, although only ten years older, had many decisions finalized, did not encourage direct eye contact. They almost always only sat next to each other on the depressed sofa in Mama Aisha’s living room, a small TV screen blaring between them, signals going in and out. Through many afternoons spent watching pirated Indian movies or Mexican telenovelas dubbed in Hausa, they came to appreciate what each had to offer as a companion. Mama Aisha’s circle of acquaintances in Malali Village was both deliberately small and a matter of her strangeness. There were not many people who came from Niger, from the other side of the lake, to live in the settlement as the Kaduna wife of a reputable merchant. Even stranger, very few women gave birth completely alone. Mama Aisha’s announcement of her births, in the calm of mornings, the off-handed way she declared them to women on their street, as if she had just finished cooking a meal, clouded her in dislike and mystery. The rumor was that Nigeriens were more potent in sorcery, that they had greater mastery of the alchemic formula for survival, knowing more of what lay above and below. Mama Aisha did not care to dispel the myths. Better yet, she spent many evenings with Khadijah, sucking on oranges and laughing about how she remained uninvited to this wedding or that naming ceremony.

This morning, there was no conspiratorial laughter. Khadijah tried to interpret the frown she saw running across Mama Aisha’s face. Mama Aisha jerked her head to tell Khadijah to come inside. Leaving her door open for too long would get her kids sick. Khadijah felt a bit silly. She was often so absorbed in what Mama Aisha would think of her that she rarely acknowledged how the woman must have her own worries.

“I am sorry, good morning. I just wanted to see if you have some fire I can get. I was struggling with the one in the kitchen…”

“Yes, just go and get it yourself. I need to bathe Abba.”

The door widened slightly with Mama Aisha’s retreat inside. Khadijah felt her staring as she rushed toward the annexed kitchen. The coals were still hot, ash spreading lightly to mark their age. Khadijah did her best to grab a sizable amount with an old, scarred shovel, then wheezed past Aisha and Zarah, who had moved on from their meal to pulling at each other’s clothes and hair.

Back in her kitchen, she told herself she still had a fighting chance. The day had just begun, and she would find a rhythm to settle into, thoughts of Faruk and her mother pushed away. But a rhythm never arrived for Khadijah to settle into. A few hours later, as the afternoon rolled in, and she was simmering stew over another fire, those grievances that seemed to be hers but were more her mother’s, came alive again. She recalled the ride from Badarawa to Malali after her mother’s death. Her father had said little. When he did speak, he addressed the air in the car, informing her that Inna—the elder sister who was like a mother to him—was expecting her. Khadijah would be her grandchild and helper. Sitting straight upright in the front seat of his blue Peugeot, she had squeezed tight the small, bundled wrapper filled with her life’s things. A few shirts, one pair of sandals, and that musical dress. She remembered looking out the window as they approached Malali Village and realizing she lived in a city. Until then, her world had been constrained to the long spread of a street in Badarawa, a street of low-ceiling houses with mud walls and a kiosk or two. 

Khadijah recalled her father’s last words as she left his car that day. He had handed her over to Inna without crossing the threshold. “She might be my sister, but even me, I think she’s too stubborn. She would not let her husband move her somewhere comfortable, even though he made a lot of money during Abacha’s time. She could be living in a big house if she wanted, but she just told him to send us the children to school, and she remained in this house.”

Moving a stone that propped the stove to improve the airflow for her stew, Khadijah recognized those words now for the warning they were then. Inna did not welcome strangers who did not follow her exact ways. And so it made sense when, at the end of that day in June, all those years ago, Khadijah started crying when Inna told her to go to bed earlier than she had ever gone to bed in her short life. She had cried not only because Onozare was dead and her father, whom she had mainly known through her mother’s admonishments of the man who had used her, had left her somewhere unfamiliar, but also because her character was to be reshaped. Inna would supplant Onozare’s lackadaisical child-rearing. She would squeeze out of young Khadijah the desire to leave her shoes out at night, to go to bed without praying, or to wash the toilet only when it got dirty. She would squeeze out more than enough of Onozare from Khadijah until all that was left was a pulsating fury from an ignored mother-ghost. 

Bubbles informed Khadijah that it was time to close the pot. She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Like a weight had been lifted with the closing of the pot, Khadijah became aware of what lay ahead. She still had to clean the kitchen and put rice on the fire. She would have to make sure the meal was ready before Azahar because Inna would expect it to be served right after they prayed. She would also have to do some washing. A pile of clothes was steadily growing in the corner of the wide bedroom they shared. Her day would end where it started, with her bent over coals to serve leftovers for supper. She truly hoped she would have arrived at some mindless calm by the time Faruk arrived later that night. She imagined hearing his car horn, her walking toward the electric pole where he would likely be parked, and this matter of being the first wife dissolving into just another moment in the expanse of their love.