Right Hands (4)

She swept the compound in a smooth zig-zag pattern, bending and turning at each corner until dust and particles of rice, millet, and beans gathered at the entryway. Under the thinning bristles of her sorghum broom, Khadijah swept away all the noise of Faruk. It was the last Sunday before Ramadan began, and she had slept dreamlessly. An internal landscape of dark and transient images. Perhaps it was the eerie peacefulness of her sleep that offered her the clarity of the morn.

She returned to the kitchen for her next task, making zobo. She had prepared her unique combination of hibiscus leaves, dried ginger bits, and cinnamon sticks in a bucket before she began sweeping the compound. She had hoped that the water on the fire would come to a perfect boil just as she finished sweeping. Her hope was met when she opened the massive steel pot. A boiling drop of water splashed onto her thigh. The long wrapper she had tied around her chest prevented a burn. This was her portion of the pre-Ramadan tasks shared with Mama Aisha. The duo had decided to make kunu and zobo in preparation for the month of holiness. Khadijah was to bring the hibiscus concentrate to the middle of the compound, while Mama Aisha would bring the kunu blend. Together, the women were to sit under the early morning sun and make two refreshing drinks, which they would then divide equally between their households.

When Mama Aisha appeared with her own buckets, Khadijah noticed the woman squeezing her forehead in intense concentration. The lines made an inverted cross. Khadijah took it as a sign that this would not be one of their shared work sessions that began with long, meandering conversations about everything and nothing. About the strange evolving habits of children and about a father who rarely came to visit. They expressed their worries to each other through metaphors that neither thought necessary to decipher. The joy was in nodding one’s head in understanding, while total understanding remained evasive. This left room for future conversations.

Khadijah and Mama Aisha proceeded in silence and with reasonable alacrity. It was a seasoned dance of co-pilots who loved flying. One fetched water from the compound tap while humming a no-tune tune, and the other lined extra buckets and turned over a sack of accumulated plastic water bottles. One filled some buckets with water, and the other began washing the bottles. One brought out granulated sugar, which she dissolved in hot water, and the other laid a massive cloth sieve over the central bucket, where the left-right sifting motion would separate precious juice from chaff. By the time the sieved and sweetened kunu settled and they began scooping it into the plastic bottles, the calm and wonder of flying above Earth induced a desire for total honesty.

“Ya kike?” Mama Aisha asked. 

“I am fine,” Khadijah answered. 

Mama Aisha dug, “Inna fa?” 

“Tana nan lafia.” 

“How’s her leg?” 

“It does not hurt her so much, but I know once Ramadan comes and she starts waking up at night to pray, she will start complaining.” 

Mama Aisha wanted to laugh, but she restrained herself from the faithlessness of laughing at an old woman who insisted on worshipping her creator until her limbs hurt. Inna had always been lukewarm to her. Polite on the rare occasion they crossed paths. To Mama Aisha, Inna deliberately chose the coziness of staying in her rooms, praying all day, and making Khadijah serve her, a kind of quiet, comfortable life within which the old woman thought of Mama Aisha as a distant witness. Perhaps a witness who judged her for her creature comforts.

“Gaisheta for me.” Mama Aisha offered as recompense for almost laughing. 

“I will,” Khadijah responded. 

“Mijin ki fa?” 

Khadijah was a bit surprised at the question. She had shared briefly about Faruk when he started courting her. And she was aware that each time she opened and closed the gate to the compound to go see him, Mama Aisha must have heard the creak. But there had been no explicit admittance from Khadijah about her feelings for Faruk or his intentions toward her. Khadijah had come to think that Mama Aisha intentionally avoided mentioning him during their tête-à-têtes. Yet, here she was referring to him as Khadijah’s husband, Khadijah’s miji.

“Mijina kuma? He’s not my husband o. He’s not anyone’s husband.”

“Don’t you want him to be your husband? Just accept the title and laugh.”

They both laughed.

A pause, broken by a sigh from Khadijah.

“Mai ya faru?”

“He wants another wife.”

Mama Aisha burst out laughing again. “He does not even have one wife, why is he thinking of another one already. Kai maza.”

Khadijah did not laugh with her this time.

Mama Aisha, cup in hand as she scooped the purple inkiness of zobo into the bottles Khadijah passed her, then passed them back to be sealed, realized that the younger woman was troubled. Her comedy was another person’s tragedy. The sudden moroseness on Khadijah’s face reminded Mama Aisha of the grief with which she had started her day. The lightness of laughter she sought, her intuitive flights away from sorrow, had approached their end in the face of another’s disturbing reality. So, she cleared her throat and tried again.

“Mai ya ce?”

Khadijah hesitated, as one does before experiencing something painful, something they wished they did not have to admit. “He just said he wants to be sure I am okay with him marrying a second wife in the future.”

“In the future?”

“Yes, in the future. He didn’t say much after that, but he wanted to be honest and let me know his intention is to marry more than one wife if Allah wills him to do so.”

“And what do you think of that?”

“What can I think?”

Mama Aisha felt her anguish, the rising tide of shame that must have washed over the girl when she heard his words.

“When was this?”

“When he last visited me about three weeks ago.”

“Have you seen him since?” Mama Aisha realized that the conspicuous sound of the gate’s heavy metal hatch being lifted a little after Isha’i had been absent for a while.

“I haven’t seen him. If he likes let him not come.”

“Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”

“I mean it, let him not come. It is not by force for me to marry him, wallahi.”

“I thought you said you liked him. Kuma yana da kirki, yana da ilimi, ba fushi.” Mama Aisha’s listed Faruk’s quality like she was making a list of things she was about to send someone to buy for her. A good man, she thought, was a formulation of character, education, and faith. When Khadijah had mentioned Faruk all those moons ago, she had considered him a real prospect as Khadijah’s husband because he checked those simple boxes. He was well-spoken, having completed his education through the university level, and had a job lined up in the state civil service that would ensure a steady income. She had thought then, through the details she careened to make his husbandly resume, that Khadijah would want of nothing. That was what mattered most in a marriage, for a woman to not want, her ungodly desires for more sealed under the umbrella of man and wife.

Khadijah felt more hollowed out by Mama Aisha’s comment on Faruk’s character. He was a decent man, a great catch even by some extreme measures. Even if what she was guided by was an attraction to him that she could not tidily describe among his many other qualities, she saw what every person saw when they nodded in approval at their courtship.

“I do like him,” she admitted. “I do like him very much. But because you like someone does not mean it does not hurt. Maybe that is why it hurts even more. If I just wanted to marry because I want to marry, I would marry anyone, but what about…”

Khadijah’s words trailed off into tears. Her long deliberation had ended with a confession. In submitting to the probing of Mama Aisha, her confusion became acute. She liked Faruk so much that she felt betrayed, convinced his question was evidence of her one-sided intensity of feeling. She did not want her love to be divided into little pieces. Her fantasy had always been a monogamy. A matter of one Man and one Woman. There they would be, nestled under the shelter of a place called home, building and building and building into time until all time disappeared. She could not tell where this fantasy emerged, who gave it to her as reprieve, as a wanting that once achieved, happiness would arrive, and maybe it mattered less and less as she grew older, the origins of this fantasy. Maybe it mattered more that it had all been shattered with Faruk’s question.

Mama Aisha looked into the bucket right by her feet. The inky liquid revealed very little of what she could say or do. She heard the girl take deep breaths, trying not to cry. She became the older sister she wished she had been that early morning when her real younger sister had called her and told her that her husband had hit her. The rush of rage she had felt. The helplessness that followed. The desire to call her own husband and ask him to do something. The admission that nothing will be done. The worry that she had lived her life all wrong because although she had carefully and precisely chosen a man who would love her enough to care for her, but not too much to destroy her, she had not acquired anything else. Anything that could let her be free to protect her sister. That would allow her to ease Khadijah’s pain.

“Kin san me, ba a bauta wa miji. Allah ne ake bautama.” 

She waited for the words to pierce Khadijah’s confusion and land as wisdom. “I am serious,” she continued, “If you know how many girls I knew who kept trying to serve the men they married. Me, I said no. I said noO. I said I will marry someone who respects me. I do not care if he has two, three, or ten wives. I do not treat him like he is god because no one is God except Allahu subahanahu wata’ala. So the question is, why do you want him to choose you and only you, as if he’s God, Khadijah?”

Khadijah did not know what to say. The size of her fantasies even more trimmed. If happiness could not be found in the monogamous union of man and wife and after all her years of careful living, each day folding into the next with the precision of dutiful daughter to an absent father and a ghost-mother, and humble caretaker to a grandmother who believed she was molding Khadijah to be accepted somewhere one day, a place where her disciplining efforts will be recognized, Khadijah finally virtuous, if virtuosity was not enough to redeem a woman from the edges of misery, to give her a place that she could call hers right here on earth, play the part, raise the children, love the neighbors, if there was no translation of self-respect into action, action into the singularity of love, one man and only one woman till eternity, then perhaps, certainly, surely, there was something amiss with the idea of a woman searching for happiness.