BLACK COCKTALE

The silence that pervaded the entire room, you knew, was not what even a mad man would expect from the provocation of the news; its melancholic message and its misery melange. If a stranger had walked in that evening, he would have seen you holding tight to the chiffon cotton that separates your room from the large sitting room. He would have seen your sorry eyes too and how they shuttled between the ground and the empty space that bonded you with your parents that sat on opposite caramel colour cushioned chairs at the centre of the room which was also the only rug covered floor space in your house with an old centre table as its hat. The sofa and the other seat were empty. The silence, your mother's sanguine eyes, your Father’s building rage and the whistling winds, would have suggested to the stranger that his sojourn had brought him to an eerie cold house and the only lively thing the red petals at the centre of the table and the golden splendent breath of the sun on the room’s ember. It was like you were behind a screen and the movie viewer had paused the movie to pick on some popcorn or look closely at the poster hanging on a rusty nail on the wall that read TRAIN A GIRL AND YOU HAVE TRAINED A NATION attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, or look closely at the point where all our eyes had been directed to at that moment, a national daily that lied innocently on the table, like it was oblivious of the news that it carried and instead wondered why it provoked  such silence and its imminent ire.      

The only reason you were safe was because you had been jailed by your Uba (father).

Freedom is not always a good thing, you thought. It was that liberty to walk down the street and be maimed by an angry assailant or be hit by a stray bullet. It was what made it possible for men to be split by bombs in marketplaces and motor parks. It was what now separated you from Nafisatu, your ambidextrous twin sister. You had wandered off from school in your imaginations and the school teachers sent for your father to complain to them that your mind was never in class and that sometimes you walked off, alone, imagining things and speaking to yourself. So your father took you home after questions had been asked about your sanity.  

And if the stranger was your father’s younger brother, Yakubu who lived with you but was several decades younger than your father, he would be standing near the door, a few stubbles around his thin shin, his white jalamia stopping just before his ankles, and his eyes sitting in a tearful socket. His thick eyelashes exaggerated the misery his face expressed, but could it be less? He was the harbinger of the news, the institutor of the horrifying silence.

That silence was only common when Nafisatu was in the room reading. Your father would frown at anyone that made any noise. She was unlike you, even though you strikingly resembled each other that one of you had to sacrifice her face to get mark beneath her chin to reduce the confusion you both normally caused.

Nafisatu was unlike you in every way. While she was crazy about everything science, you were one who only saw art in anything good. While you both loved to observe the surroundings, you both saw and picked out different meanings. And while she loved to read, you were one who only believed in your imaginations and wanted to dictate from your thoughts the eventualities of life. But then, you both had resolved the in your own ways, to be bent on creating a dent on the earth, to make your impact felt.  She called it creating your own earthquake; you called it rewriting the earth’s script.

The memories of your moments together flashed before you and you could see her gentle smile sit well on her fair skin, fair as the evening’s hue with an extra tint. She was as bright as summer’s day but calm as winter’s moonshine. You could paint her face over and over again, but now with the tears that now rolled down your cheeks relentlessly, it blurred out severally. The effect of the news was not sudden, it took its time to gradually overwhelm you like shadows shading in and fading out as the sun enacts its daily monotonous dance.

It was not the first time that such tragic events had taken place but it was the first time it blew your own roof open, tore off your clothes and exposed your helplessness, your terrible uncertainties and the humongous fear that was banked in your hearts and your heads. One person or two always had those heartrending stories to tell; stories of broken bones, of splattered blood, of scattered splinters, mangled limbs or twisted necks, and vanishing bodies. And you have always carefully listened, shrunk your face in a duet of annoyance and disgust, cursed in fury but then walked away with only bits of those stories reappearing when you want to retell those stories too, not as a thing to act on, but as a topic to chew away with time at coffee breaks or between sales at marketplaces, receiving nothing more but a few extra head-shakes, your only form of solidarity.

The only other time it happened so close to you was when Yakubu narrowly escaped a bomb blast after he walked away from a gathering of friends when he saw Karima, the girl that he had become obsessed with and spoken of in his dreams, singing love serenades that were mostly marred by his rather dreary baritone voice. Karima sold Fura de Nunu in large calabashes with motifed edges and Yakubu would run after her whenever she passed through his vicinity and even though he had nothing except stipends gathered from his apprenticeship at Mallam Sokoto’s leather workshop, he would promise her everything in the world. You sometimes watched the way she smiled sheepishly when Yakubu taunted her or made one of his lofty promises with artfully swaying arms like the conductor of an orchestra. It was her Yakubu had chased that day when a bomb went off behind him. You watched from your house and he fell on his face into the soil from the shock that jolted him. He had risen and turned to see the rising cloud of smoke and the raging fire that bottomed it. His face shook in horror as he stood there speechless watching people scramble around him, waiting for someone to nudge him back to life, to tell him it was a fragment of his imagination, a self-conjured vignette, something that faded away in time, something like the rising smoke, a vampire of history, that left no scar nor told stories of its birth as it vanished into space. 

It took Yakubu several months to escape from the emotional and psychological trauma that repressed his thoughts and held him in confinement. Those times, shattering sounds of a fallen glass mug or heavy thuds of books on the ground could fan the flames of his depression and send him into another bout of grief, of brokenness and detachment from life’s gestures. Nafisatu and you would peep several times from the window to watch him cower from unseen gestures and shake your heads in pity. You saw him falling, losing his mind over your shoulders. And when he finally broke out free from the entanglement of the mind-bending ordeal, though not fully, he visited the mosque more frequently. It was one of the many vicissitudes of life.

It seemed your father’s sigh gave your mother the licence to cry out loud. She erupted and threw her arms in the air. And you saw a tear fall from your father’s eyes for the first time ever and through that empty space, the emotions reached you and you broke down in tears too. It was as if it just dawned on you all that Nafisatu was gone, like you had just checked her room and did not find her there and someone had to you said she might never return again. Yakubu gaze was planted into the ground and his tears watered it.

“Where were they taken?” Your father finally said without lifting his head.

“People said the forest in Sambisa, some men are gathering to go there to search for them but they have nothing but some bows and arrows” Yakubu replied in a rather calm way. You feared that he might be struck again by his lurching and lurking ordeal.

“We will go too… with whatever we have… machete, knives or even rakes. We would not sit and moan all day… we must do something… now”.

It was already dusk when your father stood from where he sat and walked inside the room. He returned, expunged of the jalamia he formerly had on, and was now wearing a pair of jean and a white shirt, with a brown furred-collar wool jacket. He went near the study table that sat at the corner of sitting room and paused a little before bending to pick the green plastic kettle. It was on that table Nafisatu sat daily to read her notes after school, slouching at the nights’ end on the giant wooden chair after hours of reading and you usually would see your father carry her in his arms after Tahajjud and pacing quietly to her room where he placed her on her bed amidst smiles. You always wanted that affection, but you barely got it because you never really came back from school to read your notes at the study table or anywhere or anytime far from the examinations, instead you would wander down the street to listen to the gusty winds and watch the dancing leaves, painting a new paradise for yourself and feeding yourself that gusto that no one else gave but at the end offered strong objurgatory remarks more borne out of your unwillingness to study like Nafisatu than your obdurate affection for art and life, though you knew of your father’s extant affection for you too because you served him better than Nafisatu ever could.  Nafisatu was a quintessence of a good child, you were her defiant alter ego.

Your father and Yakubu prayed at the corner of the room while you watched. Mama sobbed quietly at the other end where she had now rolled to. And when they were done, you saw your father cry out at last with outstretched and shouted “Allah, bring back our child, bring back Nafisatu”

He rose and went into his room and came out with two machetes. His face was now stern and his tears wiped away.

“Hafisatu, take care of your mother” He said and you nodded from behind the curtain.

“I am going to bring her back… we won’t sit here and do nothing” He said for the last time, walked over to Mother and bent over her to kiss her forehead. He rose and walked out of the room without looking back. Yakubu followed.

We were his only two children and we had come at once after eight years of a barren marriage. The doctor then warned your mother that another childbirth should not be attempted as she could lose her life, after she had to go through caesarian session to conceive you.  

Suddenly, your mother rose from where she sat. You wondered where the sudden rush of strength came from. She slipped into the kitchen and came back with two big knives. The rage in her eyes was like that of a mother hen whose chick had been attacked. She stormed out of the house and you raced after her.

“We will not be left behind” she shouted between rage and tears. “She is my daughter too”. You felt she was almost crazy.

But then as you paced after her, looking left and right for a weapon to carry, you knew that one day when your story is told, it would not be of those who folded their arms and waited when they could have risen and done something!

The wind slammed the door behind you.  

HABEEB KOLADE PROFESSOR X

#BringBackOurGirls