Season of Crimson Blossoms (12 page)

For the third consecutive morning, Binta woke to the aroma of omelettes and the strong smell of café au lait. Hureira, having inherited her father's affinity for coffee, amongst other things, had scoured the shops the first morning after her arrival. When she came back with three tins of Nescafé, a bottle of shampoo and a pack of sanitary pads, Binta knew that her daughter's matrimonial strike would linger.

Hureira, desperate to apply herself, had scrubbed the kitchen units and made the floor tiles glisten. Binta returned from the madrasa the first day and was astounded by the sparkling whiteness of her bathroom fittings. When she ran her finger over the cistern, it actually squeaked. She was uncomfortable with Hureira cleaning up after her, in her room, where evidence of her fornication might be found. So she took to locking her bedroom door each time she went out.

Amidst the clatter of utensils in the kitchen and the protest of potatoes or some unfortunate eggs being fried, Hureira's voice would startle the habitual peace of breakfast time. ‘Ummi, eat up. You mustn't be late for school.'

Ummi would look up at this mother she had not seen for half
the months on the calendar, marvelling at the sheen of the honey and egg-white face mask she was wearing.

Fa'iza would look up from her breakfast or from the handheld mirror into which she was pouting. ‘Late? We are not going to be late, Aunty Hureira,
haba
!'

Hureira would look at her daughter. ‘Ummi, you are spilling crumbs on your uniform, for God's sake!'

Ummi, stunned by the aggression in her mother's voice, would brush away the crumbs and lift the mug to her mouth, looking over the rim at her mother now busy flipping an omelette in the pan.

After the children had gone off to school, Hureira would lie on the couch with slices of cucumber over her eyes, allowing her face to benefit from the wonders of whatever concoctions she had applied. She would say, ‘Hajiya,
a dawo lafiya
,' when Binta breezed past on her way out to the madrasa. The older woman would only grunt and shut the door behind her.

After three days, they still had not had
the
talk.

Until Reza called Binta's phone. She was at the madrasa, just after Ustaz Nura had left with his
Fathul Majid
, from which he had just read, under his arm. Mariya, one of the students, heaved up the bag from under her desk and placed it on the table. She proceeded to draw out baby wares, assorted flip-flops, printed
Ankara
wax cloths, heady incense from the Orient and exotic underwear from the Occident. Mariya had a piece from all corners of the world in her bag.

The women crowded around her. They fingered the fabrics, sniffed the incense and tried out the printed material against their complexions.

‘I am dark; I think this will go with my skin tone.'

‘Don't you have a bigger size for this, Mariya?'

‘This bra won't fit my boobs, don't you have a bigger one?'

And in the middle, Mariya sat, handing out goods. ‘This will suit you just fine.' Her voice was coated with the sweetness of a practised merchant.

Binta feigned interest in a pair of slippers whilst she cast sidelong glances at the booster pills and vaginal creams and ointments Mariya had displayed on the table. Women with husbands contemplated these, unscrewing the lids and sniffing the contents.

‘Try this, you can thank me tomorrow.' Kandiya picked up a small jar and handed it to another woman.

Binta's phone rang. She dropped the slippers and rummaged through her bag. She found the phone and looked around at the women. They, too, were looking at her as she said hello into the phone and hurried out of the class.

‘Hi.' She stood under the zogale tree outside.

‘You're still at the madrasa?' Reza's voice sounded hazy.

‘Yes. Did you go to the house?'

‘No. You asked me to wait until you called first. It has been two days since.'

‘I know,' she whispered into the phone as some women from the madrasa walked past. ‘She's still here.'

‘When is she leaving?'

‘I don't know. She is waiting for her husband to come and do
biko
.'

‘Oh, runaway wife.'

‘Unfortunately. Do you want to see me?'

‘Yes.'

She cradled the phone closer to her ear and sighed. ‘Don't worry. It's just for a couple of days, I'm sure.'

‘OK.'

‘Have you been taking care of yourself?'

‘Yes.'

‘And your prayers? Have you been praying?'

‘Yes.'

‘Try not to neglect your prayers.'

There was some hesitation. ‘I will try.'

‘I will see you soon then.'

‘OK.'

She hesitated. There was also a long pause at the other end. When the call had ended, she was not certain who pressed the button first.

Binta emerged from the bedroom with a plastic basket of hairdressing paraphernalia. ‘Come braid my hair.'

Hureira, who was lying on the couch flicking through an old magazine, sat up, collected the basket and placed it by her legs. Binta sat on the rug between Hureira's thighs and took off her scarf. Hureira opened the jar of hair oil in the basket and massaged blobs of it into her mother's thick, dense hair. She took a yellow plastic comb from the basket and proceeded to untangle Binta's hair.

‘You are going grey, Hajiya.'

‘I know.'

They fell silent as Hureira picked up the
misilla
from the basket and expertly ran the metal tip along Binta's scalp, drawing intricate patterns in her mother's hair. She dipped a finger in oil and briskly ran it along the swathe the
misilla
had made before she started weaving curving cornrows.

‘
Wayyo
! Not so hard, Hureira, you are not fighting with my hair.'

‘I'm sorry.' Hureira's grip on the hair slackened. ‘You are angry with me, Hajiya.'

‘No.'

‘You haven't said anything to me since I came. Do you want me to leave?'

‘What mother would want her daughter to be a serial divorcée?'

‘I'm not a divorcée, Hajiya.
Haba
!'

‘What are you then? First marriage annulled, second one on the rocks.' Binta felt a tug on her hair. ‘Don't yank off my hair, you.'

Hureira's first marriage had come loose after twenty months. The unravelling had started with one of those insignificant tiffs that characterise marriages. She had found Cyprian Ekwensi's
The Passport of Mallam Ilia
amongst her husband's things. The novel was a gift from a former girlfriend with the provocative inscription ‘With all my love'. Even though it had predated their wedding by two years, she had set the book ablaze and inadvertently burnt down her marriage. After that, the arguments had become more intense, more frequent, fuelled perhaps by her husband's inability to hold down a steady job, which had been Binta's major objection to the marriage in the first instance.

Hureira patted her mother's hair and gingerly grabbed a handful. ‘The least you could do is to ask me what happened. But no, you just made assumptions.'

‘Only a fool asks why a man and his wife are quarrelling.'
Binta's voice, at that point, was quiet, deep and confident. ‘I did not marry you off a child. I trained you well before you went and chose that good-for-nothing for a husband. You messed that up, as expected. Now Allah, in His infinite grace, has given you another opportunity and you are messing that up as well.'

Hureira picked up the comb and yanked. Binta felt her hair being tugged from the roots and winced. She could imagine the scowl on Hureira's face, how she must be biting her lower lip, as her father Zubairu used to do.

‘It's not my fault, Hajiya.'

Binta said nothing as Hureira parted her hair, applied oil and yanked again as she began to weave another cornrow.

‘You don't expect me to sit down and allow him to trample over me. I'm not that kind of woman.'

Hureira kept parting and combing, yanking and weaving. And Binta endured. She flinched each time her daughter put down the comb to reach for her hair. She did not want to give Hureira the satisfaction of knowing that she was hurting her. Finally, she cleared her throat.

‘They say a patient man cooks a rock and drinks its broth. Your quarrel is with your husband, not with my hair.'

‘I'm not quarrelling with your hair.'

‘But you are quarrelling with your husband.'

Hureira said nothing.

‘You chose him from among your suitors, this husband of yours, as you chose the one before him.' Binta massaged her forehead to ease the pain at her hairline. ‘I did not choose your father. We didn't even have a courtship. Yes, we had our differences but we still lived together until he died. We raised four children, your father and I, and we never talked about love.'

‘That was then.'

‘And what has changed? Husbands and wives still quarrel and make up, why can't you? You compromise a little and you make peace. Stooping to a dwarf is not a shortcoming.'

Hureira finished the last row and put the comb and
misilla
back in the basket. She screwed the lid on the jar of hair oil and put it back in with the other things.

Binta trawled through the basket until she found the handheld
mirror. She twisted her neck this way and that so she could examine Hureira's handiwork. She nodded, barely. ‘It's a bit taut.'

Hureira kicked away the basket, almost spilling the contents, and moved her legs away from her mother.

‘I pray your daughter doesn't inherit this leper's temper as you did from that father of yours.'

Snatching up her magazine, Hureira rose and as she stomped to Fa'iza's room, her mother called.

‘Go and make peace with your husband and don't be living here in shame,
mara kunya kawai
.'

The sound of the door slamming marked Hureira's depature. But the shadow of her rage lingered in the living room like dark clouds in timid skies.

Hureira woke up the next morning with hangover rage. She banged the utensils while making breakfast. No one came to find out what the racket was about. She ate standing over the worktop and, having quelled the unrest in her stomach, retired to her room. Her honey and albumen masked face and cucumber-shaded eyes faced the ceiling in an icy glare as she lay down on the mattress.

Fa'iza crouched at one end of the other mattress, scribbling into her Secret Book. At the other end, Ummi sat looking from her mother to Fa'iza. Eventually she got up and left the room.

When Fa'iza's hand started to tremble, she slammed the book shut and huddled against the wall. Her eyes jumped around, bouncing off the ceiling, to the mirror on the wall embellished with stickers of Ali Nuhu, to the ceiling fan languidly slicing the light. Then, she started whimpering.

Hureira carefully raised the cucumber from her eyes to see what was happening. She hissed, got up and walked out of the room. In the living room, she turned on the TV and flicked through the channels.

In her room, Binta sat on the bed reading Priscilla Cogan's
Compass of the Heart
. Every now and then she looked up to see Ummi dressing up her stuffed doll, winding a piece of cloth
around its head, laying it down or burping it. Binta would smile and return to the book.

When the noise of the TV from the living room reached Ummi, she picked up her doll and ran out. She stood and watched Hureira scowling at the TV and flipping channels.

‘Mommy, can we watch the cartoons?'

Hureira flicked back to the cartoon channel and flung the remote onto one of the seats. She watched Ummi sit down on the floor, not too far from her, her eyes trained on the TV. She saw her daughter's dainty smile, the dimples on her cheeks, the excitement gleaming in her eyes. When Ummi chortled, Hureira felt her anger defrosting.