Rights Hands

I.

That evening, in front of Faruk, Khadijah understood for the first time how women got their happiness trimmed and sized. She could not reject his proposal, but she could not accept his conditions either. If there is a God as she had always believed, and He insists upon the coexistence of men and women, then surely, He has to know how terrible it is to be a woman. Because only this Superior knowing could justify that she, daughter of Hassan, is expected to play first wife to a man who sought many.

Faruk crossed and uncrossed his arms behind his back. He stared away, looking toward where his car was parked, and fiddled with his keys. Here was a man whose absent sprightliness belied his intensity. His long and relaxed profile invited her to remember why she had found him attractive. Under the wraps of a blue kaftan and matching cap, she imagined Faruk’s core must have been roaring as he asked her that question.

“Will you permit me to marry more wives in the future?”

Khadijah swallowed the bile rising from her stomach. She had wanted to laugh incredulously. His solemn manner confirmed that it was not a joke and he would not repeat himself. A rug was pulled from under her feet. This was the man she had resisted only to eventually capitulate. Faruk, whom, when she did admit to herself that she loved him, she had to fight her late mother’s warning ringing in her ears. If you choose to marry a man, know that your happiness can never come before his.

She wondered if it was sabotage. If Faruk had asked the question to know who she was under the weight of his desires. Although Khadijah replied that she would carefully think about it, she wondered if she had already failed. A more confident woman would have immediately said yes. Yes, of course. A woman who understood marriage and her role within it, who was already committed to the man in front of her. She could have been like her friend Laraba, who had not hesitated to be Alhaji Maman’s third and youngest wife. Love was supple and malleable to such women. They knew love could be divided into satisfying little pieces consumed as necessary across each wife’s household.

With no more words between them, she entered the compound, Faruk’s taillights flashing away. Inna was asleep. The kerosene lamp glowed faintly at its minimum. She was relieved to not have to answer her grandmother’s questions. Is the man knocking on their door after Isha prayers the one to take Khadijah on? Is he a man ready to make himself honorable by taking on a wife? Inna thought their courtship was unnecessarily prolonged. But everything was prolonged and exaggerated to make Inna feel old. It was preposterous that girls did not get married at sixteen. That they did not pick the man closest to their right hands and move on with their lives.

“Khadijah, a man is not to be dotted upon, only attended to. So if you want to choose a man, just ask yourself, will he be easy to attend to? That was why I picked your grandfather. Nobody in Shekau thought too hard about such things, wallahi. We just got married and accepted the duties.”

Khadijah ignored Inna’s ideas about marriage because they appeared too simple. There were more things to consider now than forty years ago in a village where everyone knew everyone. For one, her mother was an example of how things could end poorly. How a girl with potential and promise could be subsumed in a bad marriage. If Faruk was not sabotaging their courtship, all the slow knowledge of each other they had gathered over six months, then it must be because he saw her as a genuine prospect for a good marriage. His question was an invitation. An opportunity to further define who they are to be. Perhaps being the first wife was no condemnation, and she could rely on Faruk’s straightforwardness. It was one of the first things she had noticed about him the day he parked his car a few minutes away from her Islamiyya to share greetings with Ustaz Aminu. In Faruk’s polite but directed salam with hints of a lisp, she heard it: surety. Walking next to her, Hajara and Salma giggled nonstop, raising the armhole of their hijabs over their mouths. Khadija had wanted to push them away, their childishness apparent despite being twenty-one years of age. Courtship had to begin on a similar stature, and so she had tried to confidently say salam back. She believed she was approached because her value had been recognized.

II.

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.

III.

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.

IV.

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.

V.

It was a day that folded into other days. Today nestled so comfortably between yesterday and tomorrow that it was easy to miss it. To forget it in the vast expanse of memories. Until she heard the car horn that signaled Faruk. His arrival transformed her nostalgia for all that passes, making time stretch into something with wings, something that ascends. He honked again, and the sound confirmed that today was to be cherished. Today was not just another day.

Khadijah did not want to keep him waiting, but she also did not want to run towards him. Her pace altered with each activity. She wore her blue-green atampa with the ruffled sleeves fast, but she tied her scarf slowly. She powdered her face in hurried dabbing motions, but she applied long, gentle sweeps of gloss on her lips. She wrapped her veil around her shoulder with a quick flourish, but she sat down comfortably to put on her silver sandals. By the time she was outside the gate and walking towards his car, her heart rate was slightly above normal, averaging out from the quick turnaround and attempts to appear nonchalant.

Seeing her walking towards him, he turned his headlights on. It was her stage. He was parked a bit discreetly away from the narrow lane that made the road into an alley, just behind the NEPA pole, but not so far that Khadijah had to tread through mud to reach him. She knew the neighbors were peeking out of their windows. She wondered if they saw her back straighten, her gait slightly adjust to the intentional walk of a woman, a grown woman. The audience was good for morale, but even better was the acknowledgment of her prospects. They, the amorphous blob that formed society, had to know that today, she was on the verge of being chosen.

In the car, the smell of suya wafted between them. It made their salutations move quicker, and silence settled as he spread the newspaper open and offered it to her. At 50 Naira a stick, this was some of the best suya in Kaduna, and giving it to her was equivalent to several bouquets of the best flowers from the highlands of Kilimanjaro.

“Thank you,” Khadijah said, and she meant it. She was pleased to see him again and pleased to sink her teeth into a soft, fatty piece of meat. 

“You are welcome,” Faruk said, and he also meant it. He was happy to please her, to have her see him again.

Between bites, the whole world became contained in the car. He had turned off the headlights and turned on the interior light. Khadijah knew that after their meal, the conversation would pick up where it had left off. He would ask her about her thoughts in the weeks since. She would need to express something sincere, something true, something that would lead to other things. She would have to decide the direction of her feelings. The upcoming conversation made her breathe deeply. He heard her sigh and sighed back. They kept chewing until all that was left in the newspaper were crumbs of groundnut marinade and some large, unwieldy onions. He crumpled it and put it in a piece of black nylon tucked between his legs.

“Turn off the light,” she said before he could clear his throat and speak.

He was surprised but did not hesitate. This was the first time Khadijah had ever requested to plunge them into the darkness. The street was poorly lit by lamps from living rooms, and the car’s light kept them distinct on the street while also ensuring they maintained their chastity, a third presence. As Faruk reached to turn off the switch, Khadijah turned to look in the rearview mirror. Objects are always closer than they appear. And there in the distance was the object of her mother. A woman who could never know happiness, even if she had wanted to. Onozare, by trying to make it known to Khadijah that she should beware of the people who stepped into her life, had created an abiding fear in the young girl. Her mother’s hurt was ancient, the sum of betrayals from wanting to belong and failing to belong. Perhaps it was a reasoned wellspring of fear. The kind of fear that blooms with age and makes a person distrust their feelings and reject the feelings of others. The fear that bubbled up as Khadijah looked at the profile of Faruk’s face and wondered what she would really tell him today. Perhaps she could admit that she did not know what the future held, and his request for more was misplaced, grand, and ambitious. Perhaps she would even dare to say no, that she would prefer a life without other wives, a family contained. Perhaps she might even surprise herself and tell him that she would consider it much farther down the line, after they had a kid or two. There were many things she could say, and she might indeed say, but what mattered was what instantaneously arose in her heart. The way vessels expanded as the car went quiet and dark. The dare she felt as she leaned away from the rearview mirror and toward Faruk. In another world, where she was not her mother’s daughter, her father’s offspring, Inna’s grandchild, and even Mama Aisha’s sister-neighbor, she would merely be a person looking for the widest degree of freedom. Something that felt good and gave her options. One could accept the trimming of their happiness if only it were comparatively better. It took only a fool to recognize that anything was better than life continuing as it was. She let him speak. She will answer.