Season of Crimson Blossoms (18 page)

When his phone chimed, he picked it up, looked at the screen and raised a hand for silence.

‘
Yallabai
,' he greeted. There were some noises on the other end and then the senator's voice.

‘Reza,
yaya dai
?'

Reza greeted the senator again, unconsciously bowing his head in deference.

‘Reza, where are you, is that noise I hear?'

‘At home, sir, I am at home.'

‘Oh, I thought you were with your girlfriend. You know, you young men of nowadays.' There was a laugh that resonated down the line. ‘When I was your age, by this time you wouldn't have found me at home. I would have been out trying my charms on young girls. But now I am left to play squash with old men with sagging bellies. You play squash, don't you?'

Reza shook his head. ‘No, sir, I don't.'

‘Then what do you do with your life? Someday, I will bring you to the club so you can see me play. I am a pretty good player,
wallahi.
'

‘I would like that.'

‘But you must bring me your girlfriend, Reza. Bring her to greet me,
ko
?'

‘Yes, sir. Perhaps someday.'

‘Yes, we will arrange that,
ka ji ko
?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘
Madalla! Madalla!
Well, my opponent is ready; let me go deal with him. But, Reza?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You remember what I said about the job you are going to do for us,
ko
? The last time you came to the house?'

‘You haven't told me yet, sir.'

‘Yes, yes, I know. Well, you remember Moses, my PA? I will give him the phone and you will talk, but whatever instructions he gives you, make sure you take it seriously,
ka ji ko?
'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘It is very important, Reza, so pay attention.'

Reza heard him asking Moses to take the phone while he went off to his game.

When Moses came on, he explained that it was important they discuss face-to-face and so they arranged to meet. Reza put down the phone with a smile and took a long drag on his joint.

There was, Hureira realised, something disturbing about the way Fa'iza bent studiously over her book. Perhaps it was the almost tangible determination with which she held the pen and the way her hand seemed to tremble. From her place on the mattress across the room, Hureira could not see what Fa'iza was writing, but she could see the bold, virile curlicues, the drawings that appeared indiscernible from where she was lying.

When Fa'iza raised her head, Hureira looked away. When she managed to look at the girl again, she saw her casting a haunted gaze at the wall.

Hureira crawled out of bed, avoiding Fa'iza's line of vision. She walked out of the room, stealing a look at the seated figure out of the corner of her eye and wondering if she should take her sleeping daughter away with her as well.

Hureira knocked on Binta's door and entered without being invited. She was momentarily taken aback by the sight of her mother seated at the dressing table, staring vacantly at her own reflection.

Their eyes met in the mirror, mother and daughter, and Hureira felt the disapproval refracting off the glass and reaching for her heart. But it passed quickly. Or was her mind playing tricks on her?

‘Hajiya,' she whispered. ‘Are you sure Fa'iza is all right?'

‘What's wrong?'

The disinterest in her mother's voice brushed Hureira's face, wafted away through the parted curtains, through the window into the sunny courtyard. Hureira shook her head. ‘She was having conversations in her dreams, and it went on all night. Now she is sitting in the room trying to bore a hole in the wall with her eyes.
Wallahi,
I think she is being possessed by djinns.'

This time, Binta turned and looked at Hureira. She hoped that the incredulity on her face would dissuade her daughter. ‘Don't be silly, you are too old to be running around saying such nonsense,
kin ji ko
?'

Hureira stared back. ‘That was how it happened to my neighbour's daughter,
wallahi
.'

‘Hureira, stop this nonsense.'

‘But Hajiya, I'm being serious.'

‘Stop it, I said.' Binta stared her down this time. With Hureira's gaze directed at the open window, her countenance defined by her pouting lips and bland eyes, Binta added, ‘I have had a bad night and I don't need you and your stupidity causing me more distress than you have already.'

‘Bad night? What happened?'

Binta looked down at her palms. She had been surprised when she woke up and hadn't seen blood on her hands. ‘Just a bad dream.' Her voice seemed to echo from another realm, one tottering between dreams and reality.

‘Bad dream about what?' Hureira placed her hands on her hips.

Binta was still looking at her hands. Her dream had been of Yaro, of her holding his bloodied corpse in her arms and calling him by his given name. But she could not bring herself to tell Hureira that when she had woken up panting, certain she would see his blood on her hands, her first thought had been of Reza, of his face looming before her mind's eye.

‘Nothing.' She spoke absently. ‘Just a bad dream.'

Hureira shrugged. ‘Well, I am certain Fa'iza is being plagued by djinns,
wallahi
. I suggest you call that ustaz of yours to look at her before it gets worse.'

‘Ok, Hureira. Just go now and prepare breakfast, will you, before I starve to death?'

When Hureira got back to the room, Fa'iza was lying in the middle of the dark green rug, staring at the ceiling. Hureira stood by the door, hunched slightly forward while keeping half her body outside. When she called Fa'iza's name, the girl responded by moving her feet.

‘Hajiya said you should go prepare breakfast.'

For some time nothing happened and then, finally, Fa'iza rolled onto her stomach and raised herself. She shuffled past Hureira, who leaned away from her, and went into the kitchen.

After breakfast, Ummi took the dishes to the kitchen and rushed back to sit beside Binta. She was enthralled by the wildlife documentary on TV, but covered her face with her hands each time a lion pounced on a gazelle or some other hapless prey. Binta herself sat staring at the screen, almost oblivious to the girl moulding her tiny frame into her side.

‘Hajiya, why does the lion kill other animals?'

‘I don't know, Ummi.'

Hureira, sitting on the rug, made to speak. She looked at Fa'iza, who sat with her hands on her lap staring straight ahead, and shut her mouth.

‘Why are they so wicked? I hate lions.' Ummi's eyes were turned to her grandmother's face.

‘Keep quiet and watch!' Binta glowered.

Ummi sat still, her eyes darting from Fa'iza's blank face to her mother's perplexed one. The noise from the TV filled the room but their own silence grew like cold fingers around their throats.

‘I watched this documentary on TV the other day,' Hureira blurted. ‘They talked about this stinking flower, the corpse flower. It blossoms only once in thirty years. Did you know about it, Fa'iza?'

Fa'iza looked at her blankly and shook her head.

‘It stinks like a corpse, they said, and it's huge and ugly. But when it's blossoming, people travel to see it. You know how these white people are, going to see a flower that stinks like death.'

‘I want to see it, Mommy.' Ummi sat up and turned an expectant face to her mother.

Hureira laughed. ‘It's found in Indonesia and other such places.'

‘I want to see it. Will you take me? I want to see it.'

‘Yes, I will since that useless father of yours has bought me a private jet just so I can go globetrotting with you.
Aikin banza kawai.'

Ummi now turned a bemused face from her mother to Binta, who had also cast a glance at Hureira, and then Fa'iza. Then she turned again to her mother, who was now scowling at the TV screen.

Fa'iza sighed absently and leaned back into the chair.

‘But you know, I think that flower is special—'

‘Oh, for God's sake, shut your mouth!' Binta eyed Hureira. ‘You sit here talking about some useless flower in God-knows-where while your second marriage is crumbling. I wonder what kind of daughter you are. You are so hopeless your husband has not even come to take you back and you still sit here yapping about rubbish.'

This time, their silence was heavy, and they felt its immensity pressing down on their shoulders. Even the noise of the TV seemed to have been subdued, but not Ummi's spirit. She jumped up and said there was a phone ringing. She ran into Binta's bedroom.

‘R is calling, Hajiya. Who is R?' Ummi returned with Binta's phone.

‘Give me the phone, you!' Binta seized the phone from her. She scrambled to her feet and hurried into her room as she said hello into the speaker. The sound of her door slamming jolted Hureira, who got up and stamped to her room.

‘Yes,' Binta cradled the phone.

‘Hope you woke up well.' It was Reza on the other end.

‘Yes.'

‘I want to see you.'

She hesitated. ‘Yes, so you could annoy me like you did last time, right?' She held her breath.

Finally, he laughed. ‘No, no. I just want to be with you. No talking this time, just action, you understand.'

She smiled. ‘You shameless boy, I am not one of your little girlfriends you should be saying such silly things to, you know.'

‘Just action
zalla
.' And he laughed, a deep-throated laugh that rang in her ears and made her face flush.

She drifted, almost weightlessly, in the pungent smell of weed. It was only when she opened her eyes and saw him sitting shirtless by the window, puffing on the joint in his hand, that she realised where she was. Binta stretched and yawned. ‘Hassan, stop smoking that thing in here, you could get arrested. Besides, it's giving me a headache.'

With his back turned to her, she could not see his face. She propped herself up on her elbows and remembered that she was naked under the sheet. Her clothes were on the chair across the room. She had taken them off one after the other and folded them carefully while he had waited on the bed.

‘Just action.' She smiled at the now familiar tingling that thawed her insides as she did up the hook of her bra. ‘You must have been on something.'

He turned to her and smiled and she saw how handsome he looked, how his glazed eyes seemed so peaceful and yet so far away, how young he really was.

‘Action
zalla
.' He raised his joint at her before putting it back to his lips. He looked at her, then turned back to the window and watched the sprinklers watering the lawn.

‘God, what am I doing?' Her voice was low because she was addressing herself.

‘What?'

‘I don't know. You are so young, Hassan. I don't know if this is right.'

‘Why must it be right?' He spoke with a timbre in his voice that she had come to associate with what she had called his inner self: the dreamy-eyed philosopher awakened by ganja fumes. ‘Why must anything be right or wrong? Why can't things be just as they are?'

She sighed. ‘When you smoke this thing, I don't know what it does to you, you just talk rubbish sometimes.'

He smiled and put the joint to his lips. ‘Maybe you should try it.'

‘God forbid! I want you to quit. It's killing you.'

He shrugged. ‘What doesn't? I will die when I die. We all will, you understand?'

Binta sighed again. ‘My daughter was saying something earlier today, about some stupid flower that waits a lifetime to bloom.
Thirty years, she said. And when it does, after all those years, it smells like a corpse.'

‘Ha ha! What sort of flower is that?'

‘I was just thinking how much like that flower I am. I have waited my whole life to feel … as I do when I'm with you, you know. I shouldn't be telling you such things but I just need to get it off my chest, you know. No one has ever made me feel this way. But like that flower, after all those years waiting, when I bloom, it doesn't feel right. I don't know if you understand me.'

He continued to puff on the joint, looking disturbingly peaceful. ‘You mean it stinks.'

She surprised herself with her laughter. It rocked her. She laughed for a while, sniffling as she did. When she managed to stop, she wiped away the tears from the corners of her eyes. But they wouldn't stop, even after she no longer felt amused. That was when she knew she was actually crying.

Save the occasional movement of his hand to guide the joint to his lips, he kept still, as if reading the cipher in the curling fumes. It took him a while to speak. ‘You know, when I was young, still a boy, there was this Eid day, and we were so excited with our new clothes. There was this cheap brocade our father bought for us, it was called Shonekan, it was kind of in vogue then, you understand.'

She knew it; she had bought it for her children, too, around ‘93. It had been a fallout from the political campaigns when the borders had been opened to cheap commodities that politicians had used to entice voters. All sorts of things had come in: salt, sugar, strange soaps with too much soda that scalded the hands and bleached clothes, cheap shiny fabrics that coloured the water they were to be washed in; petrol with blue, pink and green hues.

But the elections had been annulled when the military decided against handing over to the civilians. Instead Shonekan was put in charge until he was upended in a palace coup not long after. His name was given to all the strange commodities that traders had hoarded from the political campaigns and which flooded the markets as soon as politicking was over.

‘Mine was white, sparkling and starched. We had just returned from the Eid and I was going to take it off so I wouldn't stain it
while eating rice and stew, you understand? Then, Aminu, my little brother; my half-brother, accidentally spilled ink on it.'

He smoked his joint until she realised he had finished his story. When he turned to her and saw her perplexed face, he smiled with glazed eyes.

‘We are like clothes, you understand. We get rumpled, and creased and torn, sometimes irreparably. Some of us are stitched up, patched up, others are discarded. Some clothes are fortunate. Others are not. They are born into misfortune and ink spills and whatnots, you understand?'

She rolled her eyes, chasing the meaning of what he said. ‘Hassan Reza, you are high.'

He raised the stub in his hand in acknowledgement and took one long last drag.

‘You really need to give these things up. Be a good man, for God's sake.'

‘I am what I am.' He crushed the stub in the ashtray and turned to her.

‘And what about that issue, about going back to school?'

He wagged a finger in front of his face. ‘No talk, just action, you understand.'

‘Seriously, Hassan.'

‘Not now, please. I have an important assignment from my boss. Maybe after that.'