Season of Crimson Blossoms (25 page)

She was standing by the window when Reza unlocked the door. His immediate thought was that she was trying to prise open the window and attempt an escape, but he saw that she was looking at him expectantly and that the window behind her had suffered no damage from her delicate fingers.

‘Some clothes, for you, you understand.'

She looked down at her dirty clothes and then at the new ones he had laid down on the mat. They were the sort sold by rambling roadside traders pushing ware-laden carts. Cheap things. But neat. She remained by the window waiting for him to leave.

‘How are you feeling now?'

‘I'm not dead yet.'

He laughed and stood awkwardly, uncertain how best to position
his arms, looking at her as she flattened her hair with her palm and as much grace as her circumstance would allow.

‘So, this course you are studying, this …' he searched for the word.

‘Palaeontology.'

‘Yes, that. What made you want to study that?'

‘I thought you said it was a stupid course. Why are you asking now?'

Reza caught a glimmer of what he feared she had lost when she first looked into his eyes. Spirit. Passion.

‘Well then, never mind. I was just trying to make small talk. It is not important, you understand.'

She sat down on the mat, and he could see the passion ebbing from her eyes as she brushed back her hair with her hands and sniffled. But she was not crying. ‘You don't know why you are keeping me here, do you?'

‘What?'

‘It's not for the ransom, is it? Because my uncle would have paid days ago, I'm sure.'

‘Well, there are some complications, you understand.'

‘What complications?'

‘Just complications.'

For the first time since that first night, she looked into his eyes framed by the mask and saw a glimmer of uncertainty.

‘It's politics, isn't it?' And she proceeded, with the most minimal of gestures, to elaborate her theory of how her uncle's political adversaries must be behind the kidnap. Not for the ransom, but for some political purpose, to keep her incorrigible uncle focused on her plight, distracting him from some political endgame they were trying to achieve.

She paused and thought of the plausibility of her own theory, not now looking at Reza, who, behind his mask, was gaping.

‘I wasn't even the target. My cousin was. It all makes sense now.' And this she muttered, more to herself than to him.

‘Haha! You have your brain pumped full of nonsense.' His laughter sounded contrived, even to himself.

‘Not nonsense. Can't you see? You and I are like … let's say I am your prisoner and you are my jailer and we are on a ship at sea.
Let's say the ship capsizes and we are adrift, clinging on to a log or something. Would you then want to handcuff me to secure me?'

Reza contemplated the scenario she had portrayed and since in his mind, the sea had always been a body of blue-green water travelling to distant shores, lapping them tenderly, he laughed. ‘Whatever. No one escapes me.'

Leila smiled. ‘
There is the sea to think about. There is the frigging sea to think about
.'

He lit a cigarette and the enthusiastic sound the lighter unleashed in the silence was almost startling. He turned his back to her and puffed for some time. ‘You smoke?'

She shook her head.

‘You must be used to people smoking around you. In England, people smoke a lot, not so?'

‘I had a boyfriend who smoked.'

‘Oh, I see. And you are going to marry this … boyfriend?'

She smiled wryly. ‘I don't think my mum would have liked that idea. Anyway, I don't like him enough. Actually we are no longer together.'

‘Ah, the mother.'

‘Yes. The mother.'

Thoughts of his mother, the great whore of Arabia, whose musky fragrance still eddied in his memory, wafted before his mind like the cigarette smoke.

‘And your father? What would he say if you brought this
bature
boyfriend home?'

‘My father died when I was six.' She hugged herself. ‘I hardly knew him.'

‘
Allah ya jikan shi
.'

‘Ameen.' She leaned back against the wall and stretched her legs before her. ‘What would your mother say if she knew you kidnapped someone?'

‘Ha!' He restrained himself from declaring her a whore. ‘She won't know.' He got up and headed to the door.

‘I would like to see my mother again.' There were tears, not in her eyes but in her voice, and it made Reza stop and look back at her. ‘I hope you will find it in your heart to let me go so I can see her again and tell her I love her.'

He stood by the door wondering about the bond between mothers and their children, something he knew he would never fully understand.

‘Mallam Audu.'

‘Who? That's not my name.'

‘So what's your name then?'

‘Nothing. I don't have a name.'

‘I have to call you something and since you won't tell me, Mallam Audu it is.'

He looked at her with his hand still resting on the ornate doorknob. ‘What do you want?'

She sighed. ‘My mother told me something. She often said,
Leila, even if you know the world would end tomorrow, plant a tree
.'

Reza contemplated what she said and shrugged. When he spoke, it was in English. ‘
And what fucking use will that be?
'

He opened the door and as he turned the key to lock it from the outside, he heard her voice through the door shouting; ‘
Remember the sea, Mallam Audu! Remember the sea.
'

After Subhi prayers, Hureira waited for the first light of dawn and then, with her face set in a warlike mien, donned her hijab, picked up her suitcase and went out into the awakening sun. The space she left in the house, previously filled by a nebulous brooding and the pungent smell of belligerence, was replaced by a sense of relief akin to the coming of rain to tortured flora after an interminable dry season.

Having seen off her daughter, admonishing her against setting aflame her matrimonial home, Binta watched Hureira go and then turned back to the house with a heart floating giddily on the morning breeze. She went to the kitchen and prepared herself and the young ones a sumptuous breakfast with fried potatoes and omelettes dressed with fresh tomatoes and onions sliced into neat rings. She made some kidney sauce and finished with a dumame in miyan taushe. Then she sat down to eat.

But still, there were shadows in the house. The first was little Ummi, who, despite her not so cordial relations with her intemperate mother, was sad to see her go. And there was Fa'iza, who had seemed uninterested in the affairs around her and had sat down calmly to try to sketch her brother's forgotten face in a notebook. She had gone to the mirror and seen how hollow her
eyes were, how like a stranger's they seemed to her. And then her eyes fell on Ali Nuhu's face stuck in the corner of the mirror. She spent some time regarding it as if seeing it there for the first time. Without any ceremony or provocation, she proceeded to peel the sticker off the mirror and crumpled it in her palm. Then she devoted some time to taking down all the images of the film star in the room. She ripped them off the walls, off the wardrobe, the door panel and the covers of her notebooks. Where they stubbornly refused to come off, she tore off the covers. It was this hunt that led her to her easel that had lain forgotten at the foot of the wardrobe ever since she passed her fine arts class. She peeled off the film star's face and rested the easel against the wall.

By the time she was done, she had a heap of crumpled stickers in the middle of the room. She gathered the pile into her hands and went out to the back where she dumped it all into the garbage bin.

Fa'iza sat down on the couch in the living room, her back board-straight, her legs folded into the lotus position like a Sufi mystic. She turned her face to the blank TV screen and, with the devotion of a spiritualist, proceeded to summon her brother's face with the sheer will of her mind.

When Binta emerged from her room and saw the girl shrouded in a disturbing aura of calm, a serenity that made her uneasy and afraid to distract her, she packed her things and went off to the madrasa, careful not to disturb the girl on her way out. With Hureira gone, she imagined what it would be like to have Reza visit the house again. The only trouble would be getting rid of Ummi and Fa'iza since it was Saturday and they would not be going to school. But she would find a way.

Following the incident at Laraba's, thoughts of entirely forfeiting her studies at the madrasa had crossed her mind overnight. But realising that her silence would have encouraged these rumours, burying her in shame, Binta decided to face her accusers and, before it grew any worse, put an end to their malice.

She was still thinking of the shari'ah's ruling on falsely accusing decent women of depravity when she reached the madrasa and found two groups of women. One was huddled around Mariya while she tried to interest them in wares from the huge bag beneath her desk; make-up kits, perfumes from Arabia, henna from India,
bottled honey and the usual variety of sex boosters and creams. Another group had formed at the back, clustered around Mallama Umma, going over previous lessons under the guidance of the matron. Ustaz Nura was not in class, neither was his wife, Murja.

Binta was enthralled by some of the wares on Mariya's desk and reached for a jar of pure honey. When she asked if it was definitely pure, Mariya scowled at her.

‘Well, it isn't adulterated, if that's what you mean.'

The other women turned to her. Binta felt cowed by the attention. ‘Well, you know sometimes people do add sugar—'

‘Binta, keep my thing if you are not buying. Who are you to come here with accusations? Imagine the hyena calling the dog a savage,' Mariya hissed.

That wasn't how Binta had imagined the scenario would play out and before she could marshal her thoughts, Ladidi, the skinny woman famed for her half-dozen divorces and her children fathered by as many men, waved her hand before her nose and cleared her throat. ‘What is that God-awful smell?'

The women sniffed the air and having failed to perceive it, they turned to Ladidi. After an appropriate interval, in which Ladidi savoured the attention, she made a declaration that stunned the entire class, including Mallama Umma's earnest group devoted to the study of hadith at the rear.

‘It's the smell of
zina, wallahi.
I could perceive it from anywhere! There is a fornicator in this class.' And she spat and turned her back to the slimy mucus that slid sordidly down the wall.

‘Who are you calling a fornicator, Ladidi? Are you making false accusations against me? Can you prove anything?'

Ladidi chuckled. ‘Who mentioned your name?' she hissed. ‘But did they not say that a guilty person would sweat even in the rain?
Aikin banza.
'

Binta put down the bottle of honey on the table and, in the heavy silence that followed, walked to her seat in the middle of the class. She sat down and bowed her head. But then Shafa'atu, the young bride, who was stationed just behind Binta, and was queasy already with the burgeoning seed inside her, got up abruptly and knocked over her bag in the process. She gathered her books
from the floor and holding her hand over her mouth, hurried out of the class.

Ladidi adjusted her hijab, spat on the floor, cast a sidelong glance at Binta whose head was still bowed, and walked out of the class. Two other women followed her.

And then Mallama Umma resumed her tutorials with a voice made unnecessarily loud as to take in the entire class and with a fervour that was driven by restrained fury.

Binta could hear her, but she was not listening. The words cascaded off her consciousness and registered only in the background of her thoughts. Her mind was numbed by the recollection of the silence that had accompanied her to her seat. Her vision was blurred by the film of tears that lingered in her eyes because she would not let them run down her cheeks. She had no idea how long she sat like that: head bowed, tears imprisoned in her eyes and a whistling silence in her mind. When she stood up, she became conscious of the abrupt silence around her. She picked up her bag and walked out with as much dignity as she could muster, her pace measured, her shoulders held straight, defiant even. But inside, she could feel the weight of her heart. And it felt so much heavier than she ever remembered.

Gattuso was in the living room, hefting the improvised weights he had found in the store where the masons left some of their work tools: a pair of paint containers, one on each end of a metal pipe filled with concrete. Feeling the weak pipe bending in his hand as he lifted reminded him of the weights at San Siro, the ones that helped him build muscles like a great, brawny zebu. His intermittent grunts jabbed the emptiness of the room and when he looked up and saw Reza leaning on the banister looking down at him, his anger bloated. He put down the weights and sat up on the scaffold, panting.

Reza descended the rest of the stairs, crossed the room and sat on the bench next to Gattuso, who had picked up his shirt and was wiping away his sweat.

‘You made me hit you, Gattuso.'

Gattuso ground his teeth and hunched forward.

If Reza noticed his agitation, he did not acknowledge it. For a while, he tapped his foot on the terrazzo to a rhythm in his head.

‘We are holding Leila for the senator not because he wants the ransom, but because her uncle, Alhaji Bakori, is his rival for the control of the party in this zone. The longer we hold the girl, the more he distracts his rival and takes control of the party ahead of the elections.'

Gattuso's face, like that of a great bovine, betrayed no excitement. Until, finally, the words percolated and his face transformed and bore witness to the escalated rage he felt inside. He punched his palm. The smacking sound irritated Reza.

‘So after the elections, we let the girl go? Do we take the ransom?'

Reza scratched his head. It was in that moment that, for some inexplicable reason, he thought of the little girl in the black bag. He saw, in his mind, her dead face and the brightly coloured plastic beads at the tips of her braids. Blue, red, yellow and green. He saw the face of the man who had put her there. His desire to shove a knife into the heart of that murderer resurfaced with an urgency that astounded him. The thought of his cold metal entering that man's warm heart excited him so much that he could feel a stir in his crotch.

He wondered why he was thinking of that girl when Gattuso was waiting for him to answer his question. He got up and left, leaving Gattuso as clueless as he had been before. Before he went far, his phone chimed and, seeing that it was his brother Bulama, he knew at once that it had something to do with his father.

That evening as he walked towards San Siro, he realised how much he had missed the place. The narrow crowded streets that bustled with vendors sitting by the roadside sharing pilfered gossip, desperate housewives engaged in frenzied shopping for the evening meal, and zealous motorcycle taxis that dove into the riotous dirt roads, terrifying bargain hunters and traders with their reckless driving and blaring horns. The sounds blended – the boisterous horns, the chattering, the wails of beckoning traders
and the occasional ruckus of belligerent junkies – to create a noise storm. Reza had missed all that.

He saw Sani Scholar's mother, Jummalo, prodding the firewood in her tripod as she set up for the evening sales. There were bowls of bean paste and sliced yam sprinkled with salt, which she would shortly torment in a pan of vegetable oil. When she saw Reza, she abandoned her task and straightened, placing one wiry arm on her narrow waist whilst she threw her worn, green veil over her shoulder with the other. It made Reza think of Hajiya's Binta's bridehood veil, the one she had worn with so much grace.

Without any preamble, Jummalo launched into her habitual lament about her son's inconsequential bulk and his stagnant ambition, about how she was trying to make his life and that of his siblings better and how, in order to prepare for her business, she went to sleep way past midnight and woke up long before the first cockcrow.

Reza's eyes wandered. Across the street, outside the dreary little police post next to San Siro, he saw ASP Dauda Baleri sitting on a bench, flanked by his lieutenants. In the evening light, and even from that distance, Reza could see how much darker the policeman had become, how much less refined he seemed than when he had first arrived, and thought how much he and the office he lorded over had become an excellent study in decrepitude.

His mind drifted to his old father suffering the desolation of age, a malady that had defied all known remedies and would surely put his heartbroken father in the damp earth in a short while.

‘
Wallahi
I haven't seen Sani in two days. Two days, Reza! And all I want is for him to make something out of his life.'

Reza noticed that the end of her veil kept slipping off her shoulder as she embellished her lament about life's inequities with dramatic gesticulations. He looked at the arms that she waved before her like the branches of a juvenile tree. He remembered then Leila's peculiar logic of planting trees when the world was ending.

‘Let me get to San Siro and see if he is there. I will ask him to come see you.' And with that he walked away from her. When he crossed the street, the policemen flanking Baleri waved at him timidly. Baleri himself sat in their midst, stony-faced; his
bleary eyes locked with Reza's, who walked past without even an acknowledging nod.