Season of Crimson Blossoms (22 page)

Fa'iza sat motionless as the Short Ones argued. Kareema got
up and went to the mirror to inspect her face. She reached for Hureira's make-up kit and took a lipstick. She didn't particularly like the shade but she applied it nonetheless. She reapplied her eye pencil and stood arms akimbo. ‘Well, come on, let's go.'

Abida patted Fa'iza on the shoulder and said they would return later. They walked past Hureira, still sitting on the veranda, who watched them go, swinging their hips as they went.

Before they reached the gate, Hajiya Binta, returning from her escapade, pushed it open from the outside and stepped in. They saw how she turned her eyes away from them, feigning interest in the yellow-headed lizard on the wall.

‘
Sannu,
Hajiya,' Kareema snorted.

Binta caught the unmistakable inflection of disdain in the greeting. She turned to catch the expression on the girl's face. Kareema's shoulder brushed her, ever so lightly, as she walked past her. Abida stooped briefly, coyly, as she walked past the gaping woman.

‘
Lallai
! These children,' Binta closed the door and hurried past Hureira, whose greetings she acknowledged only with a nod. In her room, she yanked the veil off her shoulders and threw it down along with her handbag and collapsed on the bed.

Reza's face kept looping in her mind. She had never looked rage in the face like that and the menace she had seen had stunned her. If he had struck her, she knew it would have broken not just her face and her pride, but her heart as well.

She waved away his pleading face as he knelt on the floor, his voice so close to her ears, his arms around her, strong, protective, as he swore to kill himself first before ever hitting her, as he threatened to kill himself if she did not forgive him.

She put her palm on her left cheek, where he would have struck her if he had not restrained himself, where he had kissed her as she was leaving the room, and suddenly felt tired. Tired from being strong, from daring him and telling him off even though her heart had been trembling all the time. She lay down on the bed and allowed her tears to seep into the bed covers.

She dreamt, fitfully, of fireflies kissing her face with their glowing lamps and sending tingling pulses through to her heart. They crawled in through a tear in the mosquito netting on the
window, one at a time, until they were all over her, touching her everywhere. She became a luminous mass and started to levitate, hanging just a foot from the ceiling. But then they descended on her bag and when it ruptured into flames, she saw the money. She reached out for it, and crashed to the floor.

Sitting up panting, she grabbed the bag and pulled out the money, all five wads, and piled them on the bed. A quarter of a million. She thumbed the necklace around her throat. He was just a desperate young man who needed her guidance. But she would find ways to hurt him, if he ever again attempted to hit her. Now she thought of ways to convince him to open that bank account. She would never feel safe being his vault, where he deposited his things. All sorts of things.

Reza locked the door and turned to the girl curled up in a foetal position on the mat. Before her were an untouched bowl of noodles, a loaf of bread and a mug of tea that had gone cold. He looked at her eyes, which betrayed the gnawing hunger she felt, which she refused to raise to his masked face, and at her lustrous hair.

‘They tell me you haven't been eating.'

Her eyes moved slowly to the level of his boots.

‘Do you want to kill yourself, Leila?'

She raised her eyes briefly when she heard mention of her name.

‘I know your name. Leila.' He pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slid down against the door. Sitting on the floor, he lit up and inhaled. ‘I have seen your licence and student ID. I've always thought Leila was spelt with an ‘a', but yours is with an ‘e'. I would have been curious, if I were the curious type, you understand?'

Her eyes, ringed by day-old kohl, flicked up to meet his.

He had spent the night at San Siro listening to Mamman Kolo interspersing his anecdotes, peopled by iniquitous djinns and cheaply-perfumed prostitutes, with his tambourine. He had realised how much he missed San Siro in the few days since their mission began. After he had collected money for the sales made by Sani
Scholar, he rewarded him with a handful of dirty weed. It was, in their kind of business, essential to reward loyalty. And Scholar, who had no use for weed since he did not smoke it, would know how to dispense of it and earn himself respect among the boys.

On his way back, in a rather crowded bus heading to Wuse, he had seen the man with a child in a bag. He could not erase the image from his mind. And when he returned to the mansion, he had sat down quietly, away from the others playing cards on the living room floor, contemplating the atrociousness that a hunger for riches induces in men.

He blew a stream of smoke ceiling-wards and sighed. ‘The world is pretty fucked, you understand?'

The girl waved away a mosquito that had been preying on her foot, her kaftan rustling softly.

He took another drag. ‘I guess it has always been that way.'

He relished the cigarette for some time, pausing to consider the stick in his hand as if to determine how much weight it had lost since his last drag. ‘Some people are trying to find new cures, others are creating new weapons. And then there are those who are trying to kill themselves. Pretty fucked, you understand.'

She looked up at his eyes and looked away.

‘I saw this man today. I never wanted to kill someone as much as I wanted to stick this man.'

He watched the ribbons of smoke curling up to the ceiling, remembering the enduring image his mind had grasped from the encounter.

‘He had this bag, a big travelling bag, you understand? Black. And he got onto the bus with it. The conductor wanted to collect the bag and put it in the boot but the man refused. And he was holding onto the bag tightly as he sat right next to me.' He paused to take a drag. ‘But the conductor, he had felt something in the bag. And he sat down and kept looking at this shifty man, you understand? So when the man wanted to get off, the conductor offered to help him with the bag but he refused again.'

Leila sat up weakly, but Reza paid her no heed. He continued staring at the ceiling.

‘So he hailed a policeman and asked him to look into the man's bag. There was … a child, in the bag. Three years old.
Dead. Suffocated. She was the cutest little girl I've ever seen. I can still see her now, her face, the coloured beads at the ends of her braids—'

He measured the weight of his cigarette again as he watched the horror come into Leila's face. Then he leaned his head back against the door and put the cigarette to his lips. ‘He said she was his brother's daughter.'

‘But why?' Her voice, long unused, sounded rusty. She cleared her throat, with a grace that suggested good breeding.

Reza crushed the butt of the cigarette on the floor and lit another one. ‘Rituals, you understand. He wanted to use her head and body parts for charms and stuff, to get rich. Kai! I wanted to kill him
wallahi
.'

‘He was arrested, wasn't he?'

‘Unfortunately, yes.'

‘Unfortunately?'

‘Yes. Never wanted to stick anyone so bad in my life, you understand? Never. I will look for him someday and kill him, I swear.'

For an instant, she glimpsed the hardness in his eyes. But in a moment he blinked it away. When her body, weakened already from hunger, was racked by a mild shiver, she pulled her limbs closer to her and put her arms around her shins.

‘The world is pretty fucked, you see.' Reza rose and slapped the dust from his jeans. ‘Anyway, eat your food. That's all I came to tell you. Eat your food.'

He turned and hurried out, but she had caught a glimpse of the tears forming in his eyes.

Reza set down the LED lamp in the middle of the room, away from the girl on the mat who watched him from the half-shadow as he turned to leave. But he hesitated, looking at the lamp casting its white light on the wall.

‘Wait.'

He watched her mouth trying to form words she seemed unsure about.

She stopped and tried to compose herself. She drew her legs close to her body. ‘I've been sad about the little girl, you know.'

He sighed.

‘I'm so sorry.'

‘What are you sorry about?'

The words now tumbled out of her. ‘I'm sorry she died, I'm sorry he killed her. I'm sorry you didn't get to kill him.'

When she started crying, he remembered what the man in that Bollywood flick had done, how he had drawn the girl to his chest and rocked her shoulders and patted her thick, lustrous hair. He looked at Leila's bowed head, at her hair that was beginning to lose its gloss and its scent. He wanted to sweep away the rebellious strands that had fallen out of line. But she was not his girl. She was the girl he would have to, if the need arose, put down and dispatch. Probably in the gully – where she would rot before she was discovered. He imagined what she would look like as she decayed: how her eyes would putrefy and her hair would fall off her shrinking cranium, how worms would crawl between her fine, little lips and eat her tongue. He shook his head and then felt a certain provocation because he could not find a kinder euphemism for kill (murder, exterminate, terminate, slay, execute). Something more … humane, perhaps. Even ‘put down', if considered carefully, had a quality one could only associate with brutality. Like something the Americans, with their crazy infatuation with animals, would do to a tired, broken pet. As that murderer had done to that little girl in a bag.

‘I know you're going to kill me, you are just going to kill me, and I don't want to die. Please, please.'

He listened to her crying, a strange sound that made him restless. ‘I will not kill you.' And he meant it. He sat down on the floor, on the blind side of the lamp so his masked face was shadowed, and from his pocket pulled out a joint Gattuso had rolled earlier. But realising that the pungent smoke would choke the room, he put it away and waited for her to calm down.

‘Why are you holding me?' she sniffled.

He sighed and reached again for the joint, which he lit before he changed his mind again. He took a drag. ‘It is necessary. That's all you need to know, you understand?'

‘Is it money you want? Have you called my uncle? What did he say?'

The pungent smoke filled the already clammy room. When she pulled her scarf and held it to her nose, he put the joint out and unlocked the door. With his foot, he kept it from opening all the way.

‘Can I go out, for a while? For some air, I mean?'

He cleared his throat. ‘What course are you studying?'

‘What?'

‘Your ID card. It says you are a student at some university in London. What course?'

‘Oh. Palaeontology.'

He had never heard of it. And when she explained that she studied fossils in relation to the history of life, he laughed so loud that Gattuso called out from downstairs. Reza said he was fine.

‘You are as stupid as all the rich people I know.'

‘What?'

‘Rich people. They are all stupid, you understand.'

‘How so?'

‘See, we here, people go to school, they study medicine and things so they can cure sick people from useless diseases caused by poverty, you understand. You rich brats, you go to schools in London and America. UCLA – you must have heard of it – you go there and study stupid courses no one gives a shit about, playing around with bones of long dead animals when people are dying and there are no doctors to treat them—'

‘Well—'

‘Well what?'

She was silent and he could see the hurt in her eyes. But he imagined she would, someday, if she survived this, dig up his bones and put them in an exhibition in a British museum. Or his father's, who was at that time, no more than a fossil clothed in weary tissues. A relic of times gone by, of an unrequited love for a woman of malevolent temperament. And when he looked at Leila's hurt eyes, it reminded him of the expression on his mother's face when she saw him turning away from her in disgust.

He walked out and locked the door behind him.

Fa'iza, who seemed to have lost her faculties completely, started screaming without making a sound. It was a strange occurrence that only Hureira, now fully convinced of the presence of malicious djinns in Fa'iza, could have anticipated.

It would have been a totally unremarkable day but for the incident. Hajiya Binta had woken up and complained about how brightly the sun shone so early in the morning. Her foul mood had intensified because of the campaign rally that had stormed the neighbourhood in the early hours. A bus mounted with a public address system crawled along the streets, blaring some campaign song that was too loud for the lyrics to be discerned.

Grumbling, Binta had thrown off the bed covers and yanked aside her curtains. ‘What accursed bastards torment us this morning, eh?'

Over the loops of the razor wire she saw the sky blue banners of the CPC and heard chants of ‘Sai Buhari!' from a multitude, beneath the hostile blare of the PA. Though she shared their passion for Buhari, she did not approve of this boisterousness, especially not at this hour of the day.

Being a Friday when classes at the madrasa were not held, she
sat at home enshrouded in a sullen haze that Hureira managed to avoid by keeping out of sight. And then the phone call had come, from Reza. He was at the hotel already.

‘Again?'

‘Yeah, I don't know what's happening. Just need you to come, you understand, please.'

‘Yeah, so you can threaten me again, right?'

‘No, no, please. Listen, you understand, I am feeling bad about this. Really bad,
wallahi.
I want to make it up to you.'

And even though she stalled and made him plead some more, she knew, as he uttered those words, that she was going to put on her perfume and go.

She left a little later, having painted her face with subdued make-up. And Hureira, much relieved, wondered at the cause of this girlish exuberance.

A little after Zuhr prayers when the sun was still bright and burning intensely in the middle of the sky, Fa'iza pushed open the gate and stomped in, dragging her school bag on the ground and awakening a trail of dust that stalked her homeward progress. Little Ummi ran to keep up but by the time she reached the gate, Fa'iza was already at the front door.

Hureira, stretched out like a cat on the couch, luxuriating in the breeze from the ceiling fan, looked up and saw Fa'iza's bleary eyes. And when the girl, rather uncharacteristically, did not even offer a greeting and hurried to her room, Hureira concluded that it was yet another manifestation of the djinns' presence. She was paralysed by fear and indecision. When Ummi eventually came in and made for their room, she called her daughter and sat her down next to her. She did not want Ummi anywhere near a person whose sanity was so evidently suspect.

Hureira considered what form Fa'iza's demons would take, whether they would strip her naked and have her walk out to the market, baring her virginal endowments to the eyes of the traders, or have her turn violent, shredding people's clothes and yanking their hair. She had heard how strong the possessed could be, how they could wrestle down four grown men and snap their bones like dry twigs.

Eventually, after the minute hand had crawled and covered a
quarter of the clock, Hureira got up and went to check on Fa'iza, muttering under her breath the verse she believed would shield her from iniquitous djinns.

‘Inna hu min Sulaymana wa innnahu bismillahir rahmanirrahim.'

Tentatively, she prodded the bedroom door, which squeaked on its hinges as it swung open. Fa'iza was crouching on the floor, violently crumpling a piece of paper into a ball, which she threw against the wall. Then she picked up her pen and bent down over her book. Her brow arched in furious concentration as she pressed down hard on the paper, whimpering all the time. Hureira watched her, mesmerized by this Fa'iza who was not Fa'iza, this entity sitting in their house, spurting violence onto paper.

She ran to her phone on the couch and dialled Hajiya Binta's number. The phone rang unanswered. When she heard Fa'iza groaning like an angry imp, she pulled Ummi by the hand and led her out of the house.

At the gate, she met the Short Ones who, having noted Fa'iza's strange frame of mind at school, had decided to check on her as soon as they had changed out of their uniforms.

Hureira let out her breath. ‘Fa'iza's djinns are raving.'

‘Djinns? What djinns?'

‘Yes, she is shredding things already.'

Kareema burst the bubble gum she had been chewing and cocked her head to consider Hureira's face. ‘Fa'iza is not afflicted by djinns.' The condescending note in her voice did not register with Hureira, whose mind was already preoccupied with other notions.

‘Oh, just shut it and go get the ustaz. She needs exorcism. Quick. Quick. My cousin is being driven mad by these blasted beings.'

The sisters looked at each other but the sheer hysteria evident on Hureira's face alarmed them. They shrugged and left, Hureira urging them to hurry along. She remained at the gate, holding on to her daughter.

Ummi squatted and picked up a rock with which she scrawled meaningless patterns on the floor. Hureira chewed her nails, turning every now and then to look at the house, and then outside, in the direction the Short Ones had gone.

A brown bulbul perched on the razor wire and seemed to
consider the troubled woman with optimistic eyes. It hopped twice from one loop to another and tweeted into the glaring afternoon sun. Hureira looked at the bird, and unimpressed by its colouring, and distressed by her cousin's state of mind, she chewed more of her nails and spat the bits towards the bird.

Ustaz Nura stood in the living room and caressed his beard as he listened to Hureira's hysterical account of Fa'iza's apparent descent into insanity. Not grasping much from Hureira's discordant narrative, he asked to be taken to the troubled girl.

Fa'iza was huddled against the wall, still in her school uniform, but with her hijab thrown aside, lying on the mattress like a great tent flattened by a storm. When she saw Ustaz Nura standing at the door, she reached for her headscarf and put it on. She hid her face between her knees and wiped her tears.

She responded to his salaam, but not to his cautious calling of her name. He wanted to know if he was speaking to Fa'iza, or, as Hureira had suggested, some malevolent entity occupying her form. It was something he was practised in, by the constant exposure his vocation provided. He had been punched by a possessed girl and could have sworn it was a full-grown man who had struck him.

So from a safe distance, well beyond the reach of her arm, he prodded Fa'iza. The only symptom of possession she had manifested thus far had been shielding her face, which hardly confirmed anything in itself. So when she said she was certainly Fa'iza, not some supernatural creature possessing her body, he asked her to look at him. She raised her head, but kept her eyes away from his. It was a good sign. Troublesome djinns were prone to dare, to look one in the eyes and goad.

‘Why are you crying, Fa'iza? What upsets you?'

‘I am forgetting—' she sobbed.

‘Forgetting? What are you forgetting?'

But she wouldn't say anything more. She choked on her tears each time she tried to speak.

He turned to Hureira, who had been standing at the door, along with the Short Ones and little Ummi, and asked what Fa'iza
had been writing. Hureira pointed to the crumpled paper Fa'iza had discarded. Ustaz Nura went and picked it up and returned to his place.

‘Fa'iza, is it ok for me to look at what you've been writing? Can I unfold the paper?'

She looked at the balled paper in his hand and looked away again.

He unfolded the paper, pausing every now and again to ensure that she had no objection. The drawing was a rough sketch of a face; angry, urgent lines, thick eyebrows, a nondescript nose. He looked up at Fa'iza. She had stopped crying but her face was still turned away from him.

‘Who is this, Fa'iza?'

She sniffled. ‘I have forgotten what Jamilu's face looked like. How can I forget what he looked like? How can I? He was my brother and they killed him. They killed him, right in front of me.'

She was overtaken by tears yet again.

And the man, precipitously invited to confront otherworldly rascals, suddenly found before him a devastated girl, possessed only by trauma and an immense sense of loss.

While Ustaz Nura was having a private conversation with Fa'iza, the Short Ones sat in the living room and listened to Hureira recount, in rather dramatic fashion and complemented with elaborate gesticulations, the one case of exorcism she had witnessed back in Jos.

With Ummi nestled on her lap, Hureira told them how the victim, a profligate girl who went about with uncovered hair and tight-fitting dresses at just about the time mean-spirited apparitions stalked the nights, was possessed by a pair of black djinns who claimed her as a wife and, through supernatural means, disposed of any man who dared to challenge them. Hureira narrated how the girl wrestled down half a dozen men in their prime and broke the wrist of one as he tried to restrain her from tearing off her clothes and running naked to the street.

‘She was incredibly strong,
wallahi
. You should have seen how
she was flinging these hefty men against the wall and breaking their bones as if they were broomsticks.'

‘Ha!' Kareema gaped. ‘I thought you said she broke only one man's wrist.'

‘Sure.'

‘One man? Every one of them had a bone broken.'

Kareema's eyes widened further. ‘How can a wimpy girl break the bones of six grown men?'

‘
Lallai kam
! This girl! You are underestimating the power of these demons,
wallahi kuwa
.'

‘Aunty Hureira, you are adding salt to this story
wallahi. Haba
!'

For once, Abida hesitated to say sure, sure.

‘
Ke
! Kareema, don't be impertinent. I am not your mate,
kin ji ko
?'

Kareema made a clucking sound and turned her face away.

Abida sighed. ‘It must be a terrible thing to forget your brother's face like that.'

‘Sure, sure.'

They were silent for a while and then Abida started fanning herself with the novella she had been holding. ‘I can't imagine how that could happen.'

‘It must be the djinns. They are eating away her memories.'

The sisters looked at each other and said nothing. The silence distended and filled the room. It was at that point that Hureira's phone chimed. Ummi got off her mother's lap and fetched the device from the coffee table.  

Hureira looked at the screen and hissed when she saw that it was her husband. ‘
Dan iska
!'

Abida thought Hureira was being particularly odd. ‘Aunty Hureira, won't you take the call?'

She leaned back on the couch with a smirk on her face, not unlike Munkaila's, watching the phone ring, shaking her thighs with unstated rage.

And when the phone started chiming again, the girls looked at her furious face, and just when they thought she wouldn't take it, she snapped it up.

‘So you remember I still exist?'

‘Hureira.'

‘What? What do you want?'

There was hesitation at the other end. ‘You didn't even greet me. You are such a lousy woman, you know.'

‘Yes, I know. Tell me something new.'

‘Ok. I'm taking a second wife.'

Her immediate inclination had been to chuckle, to laugh it off as a bluff. But it dawned on her that he was using his honest-to-God tone, the one he reserved for those moments when he made threats he intended to see through. But she wanted to be sure.

‘Well, then, go ahead.'

‘Ok. I just thought you should hear it from me.'