Right Hands (3)

His absence came with the proliferation of the poetry of marriage. Three weeks and no head or tail of Faruk, only four and a half weddings. Fatima and Abbas in a Kanuri event to surpass all other Kanuri events. Khadijah Dawaki Road and Abdulmajid in a silent affair, for her father adhered to that branch of Islam that found the pageantry of wedding ceremonies an insult to the sacred institution. All she got, that Khadijah, was a solemn affair with men shaking hands over a modest dowry. Then there was Khadijah Usman Close and her soulmate, an older, once-married, twice-shy man whom she would not tire of exclaiming to her friends about, because he promised her a whole house. Could they imagine, she said as they covered her hands with henna and waited for the green paste to dry, could they imagine her in a house filled with the most beautiful of things? The girl had never felt shame for her love of this material world. Then Asabe and Haman, two quiet lovers who, even as the singer at their reception shouted praises of their genealogy, past and future, did not look each other in the eye. Their aunties were more rambunctious, pushing them closer until their shoulders bumped and hands grazed. The half-wedding affair was reserved for Nafisat. Her husband, a Senegalese man, was unable to make the ceremony, and so he sent a representative, someone he knew and trusted in Nigeria. Nafisat’s father was displeased with the arrangement and changed his mind just as the imam arrived and was offered a prayer mat to sit at the center of the gathered kinsfolk. Nafisat’s father had always been flighty, the imam knew, and so he advised that the ceremony commence as planned, except that the signing of the marriage papers be delayed to a later date. Guests ate and drank from the simple morning meal of bread and stew and hot tea, praying for the bride to become a wife another day.

Each event rang with an omen for Khadijah. She felt that her world was closing up, her friends taken away by a gallant wind of bachelors. She was not anxious that her turn would come, confident that her prayers to God for a marriage, combined with her sincere desire for one, would inevitably lead to such an outcome. Rather, she wondered if it was Faruk. Faruk, whom she liked right now. Faruk, whom she could not resist. He had not visited her since the day he left between them the question of his future marriages.

She had contemplated, through each movement of the hour hand, if she should call him using Inna’s phone. The small Nokia torchlight device lay wrapped in its plastic cover and cradled in a cardboard box in the corner of their living room. There it was, always ready to be charged for that day Inna chose to call any of her children, including Khadijah’s father. Those phone calls, scattered across seasons, happened only when the old woman had one of her dreams that convinced her death was near, or when they needed caretaking money and some of her kin had not sent their regular share. Receiving her upkeep money was how Inna knew who was fine and who was not. She would call those who failed in their duty to her and patiently prod, asking if they cared for an old woman’s prayers. Some of them, especially the cousins who felt they had received the least from her husband’s wealth, found her calls irritating amid their own concerns. Yet, none could resist the specific power of an old woman’s prayers.

Each evening, when it dawned on Khadijah that Faruk was not arriving that day—for it was way past Isha’a and his car horn never called for her—Khadijah picked up the phone only to drop it like hot coal. A few times, she swallowed her pride long enough to unwrap it and try to switch it on. Even fewer times, she was able to turn it on, wait for the slow booting, and unfurl the crumpled paper where Faruk had written down his cellphone number early in their courtship. Only once did she dare type the number into the phone, and even then, she could not press the green button. The symbol that said go. That would connect her to him. That would tell him that she was thinking of them. Of what they were and what they could be.

By the end of the first week, her resistance had evolved into anger towards him. She wanted this to be done with, the not-knowing, and no one was more responsible for her conflicted feelings than the man she was falling in love with. It carried a strange acerbity, that feeling of being angry at someone you love because you felt they had put you in a bind, forcing you to choose between your pride and your love for them. Pride was not a woman’s downfall in those moments. It was all she had. Her power to say I do not need you, I can be happy on my own. But Khadijah was not happy. She was wilting under the strain of his absence.

At each wedding event—from the hen parties to the receptions, the spontaneous late evenings of girl-only talks where the bride stood at the center of aunties, even when feet were washed at the threshold of homes, incense lit with the flurry of good spirits—Khadijah yearned. She yearned not for the spotlight of her friends or the moment when she would complete her own rituals and be declared woman to the man she chose, but rather for that feeling of solution. Getting married would solve the lifelong fear she held close to her heart and buried underneath her tongue each time she cried. The fear that she did not belong anywhere.

She recognized the absolution that marriage seemed to give her friends. When Nafisat cried upon being told that her marriage was incomplete, she saw her panic about an incomplete life. She saw the joy with which Khadijah Dawaki Road and Khadijah Usman Close were whisked off in cars to their matrimonial homes, two lives given a chance to begin again through being let go. She saw an even fuller release on Fatima’s face when, as she hugged one of her oldest friends goodbye, they both swayed and accidentally stumbled into an akwati, a beautiful, patterned box that Fatima’s mother had carefully lined with all her new, married woman clothes. The girls had burst out laughing at Fatima’s permanent clumsiness. Finally, she felt her friend’s laughter echo, finally, I am off somewhere. Whether it was joy or sorrow, of being able to move from one life to another, of jettisoning with success from the care of one home to another, she saw in her friends’ weddings the promise of solving something. A man belonged to the world, but a woman, a girl, belonged to no one. Each awaits her turn to be picked up from dry earth, from infertile ground, and to be made whole in the sacraments of chosen religions. Khadijah yearned for how marriage would make her feel whole. She knew it did not need be Faruk, but she would have really liked it to be. 

It could be Umar, the butcher boy Umar. She had not escaped how he often wielded his knife so that her cuts were bigger, the crack of bone alerting her that he had exposed marrow. She had chosen to ignore how he would, a bit too slowly, pass her the black nylon bag filled with her cuts. After she met Faruk, her thank-yous to Umar became even quieter, said with a desire to escape the discomfort of misplaced affection. Umar was certainly not under consideration. But, if she called Faruk, she considered, by the third week of his absence, it might set a bad precedent.

Even in her yearning for what he could give her, what she wanted him to give her, she also wanted him to find within her something eternally differentiated from all the women in the world. If she called him, she would reveal her hands, the fullness of her heart, the occipital skip in her step whenever she saw him. If she called him, he would know she was considering saying yes to his proposal, regardless of the conditions. Yes to a life of him, her, and other women. To a life fractured with the confusion of multiple rather than the serenity of two.

The question, after all, as Khadijah interpreted it, laying on her bed in her corner of the room she shared with Inna, at the end of a full day of events, the old woman’s soft snore filling the night and the moon dancing with shadows of insects on the wall, the question was one of trust. It would have made her happy to call him. But she did not trust that she should. She also did not trust that her love for him left little room for composure. It would have thrilled her to relax into sleep, knowing that tomorrow she would be happy because she had run toward him, but that kind of running meant a complete knowing. Trust that he would not change, one day become a man who could do without her. Or trust that she would not change. Always a woman who chooses him. Her mother’s warning had been incomplete: if you decide to marry a man, you will be happy as long as it is your choice to trust him, to trust yourself.