Literature

By Khalid Shafi’i

After our high school graduation, each day seemed to blur into the next. I had no structure or purpose, no reason to get up in the morning. I was going to bed late every night. I spent hours hanging out with friends at Amar’s house.

Deedat, Abdul, Serdeeq, Amar himself, and I will cocoon in the tiny room so much more than the sum of its parts when it encourages the soul to breathe. We would play games, surf the web, and occasionally chit-chat. Moments I’ll hold unto for the rest of my life. 

And one fine morning, after returning home, my phone buzzed loudly, waking me from a restless sleep. I reached for it blindly, knocking it from the nightstand. It fell to the floor with a clatter. And one gaze was enough to recall the caller, Leila.

Leila and I met at a friend’s birthday party. She’s beautiful, alluring, and angelic. She has midnight-black hair that always flowed over her shoulders, and even though I had never tasted her honey-sweet-looking lips, I can tell they were lilac soft. After all, we are not married, or not yet.

I know Leila wasn’t the type to fall for a guy like me. Nevertheless, I made a botched attempt to ask her out. And since then, I never heard from her again. So, I wonder why she still held on to my phone number. 

“Hello, Omar”. She called from the other end of the phone. 

I took a deep breath. Even though it’s been a while I heard from Leila, I still recall how mellifluous her voice was. It always sends a chill down my spine. Like a form of therapy, her voice would heal a psychic patient.

“Hi, Leila. Is that you?” I managed to answer.

“I know It’s been a while, but I’d love to hang out with you tonight if you wouldn’t mind? Meet me at Southern Fried Chicken.” She ended the call before I could protest, but as soon as I caught her words, I was confused.

Leila sounded desperate. “This could be my chance,” I thought to myself. Immediately, I got into the bathroom, cleaned up, wore my favourite clothes, and headed to SFC. Upon entering, I sighted Leila seated with grace, like the Queen she should be. One look was enough to see the restlessness she’s trying so hard to hide. 

“Hello Leila”

“Hi, Omar, I need your help, please. Help me, and I’ll not only love you but also remain indebted to you for the rest of my life.”

“Whoa, whoa Leila, take a deep breath. Make an order, eat something and let’s talk,” I insisted. Of course, Leila didn’t want to do that, but I was insistent. I could see how desperate she was to talk, but I refused to give her audience.

Leila was not in the right state of mind to make an order, so I waved a waitress and placed the order – for us both. Immediately the waitress brought the food, Leila pounced on it like a hungry lion would pounce on a deer after starving for a month. I watched in shock as she devoured everything within a short period.

“Why wouldn’t she eat in the first place? Whatever is wrong must be so serious to prevent Leila from eating despite being this famished.” I thought to myself.

Leila suddenly stopped in the middle of her food and said, “Omar, I am pregnant for a guy I just killed.”

Like a break in transmission, the whole place became silent, at least, for me. I looked up to see if really that utterance was coming out of Leila’s mouth.

“Leila, did you hear yourself? Tell me you’re joking, please,” I quizzed.

One look was enough to make me register the seriousness on her face. After that, I didn’t know what more to say. 

Looks could deceive, but Leila is in no way a killer. I mean, how could she? She’s a lady, a beautiful young lady, for God sake. I raised my head to look at her face again. I wanted to see that ‘killer face’, but NO. All I saw was an innocent, scared young lady. I was lost in my thought when I heard her say, “won’t you ask me how it happened?”

“Yes, please, how?”

“It’s a long story, Omar. But I’ll try to cut it short.” She said. 

“Please, do,” I answered, almost nervously. 

“We don’t have much time now. Omar, please help me dump the body, and I promise to tell you everything.” 

“What! Leila, I…..” 

“It was an accident, Omar. Believe me. I won’t put you in harm’s way,” she interrupted. 

“what If..” I began again

“No what-ifs, Omar. Nothing will happen,” she assured. 

“Okay, where is he?“ I agreed.

I quickly went to the counter, paid for the food I ordered and in no time, Leila and I headed to her boyfriend’s house, retrieved his body and set out to dump it. I was driving, with Leila seated in the passenger’s seat and the body…. Well, the body was a tad uncomfortably lying in the trunk of my car when, all of a sudden, we were stopped by the police.

I was nervous, confused and scared. But, surprisingly, Leila was a little more composed than I was. How could she?

“What should we tell them, Leila? We’re caught. What should we do?“ I exclaimed. 

“Keep calm”, she retorted. “we’re not caught yet unless you want them to figure us out now, keep calm. Let me do the talking.”

“Hello, Madam,” the Police officer asked. 

“Yes, Officer, any problem?”

“No, we just want to see your particulars.”

I passed the papers to Leila, and she did the same to the police officer. He inspected the documents and went away to a patrol car not far from us. My heart began racing. The officer responded to a call on the radio and nodded. It looked like he was receiving instructions to arrest us.

The officer passed the instructions to his colleagues and came back to us after. “Oga, open your booth abeg. Make we see wetin dey inside,” he yelled in Pidgin. 

“Nothing dey inside officer, we dey in a hurry to go the hospital. My mama no well,” Leila answered in the same language. 

“Eyya, sorry ehn… just open the booth, and you’ll soon be on the way”, the officer assured her. 

I was confused. I didn’t know what to do anymore. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t me. I wanted to say to him that I was only helping her. I knew it was over for us. What was I going to tell my parent? Would they ever believe I didn’t do it? My friends, oh my God, how would I possibly explain this to them. 

“Oga just radio us say make we dey check booths. Queue don dey form, driver come open dis booth make I clear dis road,” he uttered.

His face was not friendly again. If I don’t open this booth, he might probably shoot me, I thought to myself. 

I came out from the car, went round like I would open the booth, but I didn’t. Instead, I dipped my hands into my pocket, brought out a fifty naira note and offered it to the police. 

“Officer, please accept this small change make we kuku japa for here. We dey in a hurry abeg,” I said, mustering all the courage I could. 

“Oga, open dis booth before I slap you now. You’re wasting my time,” he asked angrily. 

To be continued.

Khalid Shafi’i can be reached via alhausawiy_esq@yahoo.com.

By Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji

I winced while taking the journals I studied back into their bookshelf. Next, I rubbed my back slightly due to sitting in one place for so many hours. Then, I remembered I had a funeral to attend later in the day. So, I called Annabelle, my housekeeper, to prepare a light lunch for me to eat while I freshen up for the day’s businesses.

My junior colleague at the office lost his wife while giving birth. As I arrived at the venue, there was a commotion because Mr Andre, the bereaved, refused to allow his deceased wife’s body to be lowered into the grave. He was crying profusely. Looking at his unshaven face and unkempt beard, I knew he must have gone through a lot these past few days.

My eyes burned with unshed eyes, making me remember a fleeting memory of the worse day I pray never happens to any mortal on the face of the earth. I quickly shrugged off the bitter moment and walked over to the crowd gathered around Mr Andre. He was being consoled, but all was futile. He was devasted at the loss of his dear wife. After the burial, Mr Andre refused to leave his wife final resting place.

After an hour of waiting for him at his house to pay my final condolence, his older brother walked in, worries written over him. He attempted to explain to sympathizers how Andre refused to leave the cemetery. I smiled bitterly and told his family members I would get him.

I went back to the funeral ground, met him staring at her final abode, tears running down his cheek. I sat quietly behind him, asking him why he couldn’t accept destiny and let go of what had been ordained by the Creator. After all, death is a plane all of us will board.

He turned to look at me with a grief-stricken face saying, “Prof. Akin, you won’t understand. My wife and I have been through a lot. She had been through thin and thick of life trials and tribulations with me, but when my hard work is paying off today, she is no longer here with me. So what’s the essence of all I have endured getting if my loving wife is not here to enjoy it with me?”

I chuckled, swallowing a bitter taste that erupted in my mouth. I looked into his eyes. “Andrew, whatever has happened to you today, worse of it has happened to others, and I am one of them.”

My statement startled him. Yes, I nodded, adding: “Do you remember how often you asked me about my family, and I often shunned the topic? Let me tell you something today; I am the last of my kin.” Andre looked more surprised in disbelief.

Thinking about it, I started recollecting the sad memory.

“Darling, please, I have a senate meeting at the university. So I won’t be able to come with you to pick up our kids and their families at the airport but please, help me explain to them. But I will try to go home early enough for the family reunion dinner. Bye, my love,” I told my wife.

I hung up the phone with a big relief. I was not happy I could not pick up our kids coming home after a year abroad. But what could I do as official duty at times comes first?

An hour later, I received a call from an unknown number to come to a fatal crash scene involving a motorcade of cars. I ran out of the meeting; only God knew how I got to the accident scene with my sanity intact.

I could not believe my eyes until I saw the dead bodies of my wife, my three kids, daughters-in-law, seven grandchildren all lying dead. My world turned upside down. Though many people lost their lives in that accident, my loss was colossal. I lost my entire family that fateful day.

I later heard the cause of the accident was that they were in the traffic when, unfortunately, an oil tank lost brake and collided with many cars, going up in flames and affecting the other vehicles.

So you see, Mr Andre, your loss is nothing compared to mine. That tragic incident left me shattered. I go home every day from work with no family to welcome me. I have no family left, No kin to continue my lineage. I can no longer have kids talkless of remarrying because I am old now. My bones are crumbling, but what keeps me going is the sheer pleasure and smiles on my students’ faces. I take solace in them, seeing them as my kids.

So, be grateful at least you still have kids your late wife left behind. You better man up and start being a mother and a father to them. Please, don’t mourn for a lifetime because you have kids waiting for you to fill the vacuum of a mother and a father to them. Death is a whirlwind of fate that comes unannounced into our lives, but anyway, we are leaving the seasonal shade of life someday.

Mr Andre looked at me, dumbfounded. My life story numbed him. I patted his back and told him to go home. He stood up, smiling faintly grateful for my kind words and left. I stood watching the sunset in, a favourite pastime of my late wife.

Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji is a student at the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Niger State, Nigeria. She is also a member of the prestigious Hilltop Creative Art Foundation, Minna Literary Society, etc.

By Adamu Isah Babura

 

“Baban Khalifa”, Hafsat called me.

I don’t like this Baban “father of” appellation. Since the tradition demands that she, as my wife, should not call me “Muhammad”, which is my name, why not something like “Sweetheart”, “My Love” and so on that she used to give me before we were blessed with children? Khalifa is the nickname of our first child. He too has his real name hidden. I named him after my eldest brother, Abubakar. As another tradition requests, we should not call him by that name. It would look quite disrespectful.

“Baban Khalifa,” she repeated, now a bit louder, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yes,” I responded and looked at her with rapt attention. I knew she wanted something, a request or a favour, I guessed. I would grant her wish, regardless of the difficulty, I said to myself. The setting and timing could not be better.

It was on a peaceful Sunday morning. It had been raining since dawn. The rain began soon after we finished the early dawn prayer (Subh) at the mosque, which was behind our street. We barely reached home when it became so strong. Most likely, those faithful staying behind after the prayer for Zikr could not make it home without getting drenched. Or, they could extend their stay in the small, poorly ventilated mosque, especially as its single door and two tiny windows had to be closed to prevent the rain from coming in. Whatever it was, I was back at home. I slept until after 8:00 am when Hafsat woke me up for breakfast. As usual, she had already arranged everything and more, for she had put on one of her best clothes. There was scented air blowing beautifully from a lighted incense. Moreover, the electricity company had brought back power, which went off during the rain. It is their habit always to take it off whenever it rains. Almost everyone now expects power outage as soon as it starts raining. Quite unusual of my wife today, she insisted that we listen to my favourite music by Nura M. Inuwa. I agreed.

The children were still asleep. After all, nobody would wake them up this early for any reason on a Sunday morning. On the weekends, their Islamic school opens at 2:00 pm. For now, the house was ours, Hafsat and me. I was expecting her to ask for something pricey or a complex task, but she came up with a question I was not ready to answer. No, I could explain it there and then, but I did not want to revisit that unfortunate event that had shaped my life forever.

“I want to know you better,” she uttered with a serious yet smiling face. That was quite uncharacteristic of her. “Tell me, why are you so dovish?” she asked and then added that she had never seen a man like me who, as others, including my friends and hers, told her, acted like a spineless woman. We had never had a little argument since our marriage seven years ago.

Well, I did not know where to begin. Marcus Aurelius, a character in the famous Gladiator movie succinctly said, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” Quite early in my life, I started doing exactly that. Additionally, I expected others to do the same, not only for themselves but also for the sake of humanity. I envisioned a world where peace and understanding exist and reign in all quarters. You may call it El-Dorado on earth. I was well aware that some close friends jibe me on that, saying that this world could not be what I wanted and that I was simply an idealist. I never argued further, for I considered myself a pragmatist. Therefore, engaging them in a debate would be futile. None of us was willing to believe with the other, and that would contradict my principle.

People could be born like that, but I was not. I then narrated to Hafsat a life-shaping incident that happened during our childhood to a neighbour called Tijjani. It left an indelible mark on my personality. Since then, I agreed with the Hausa maxim that says “Mutum rahama ne”, meaning “a human being is a mercy”. Before the unfortunate incident, Tijjani never cared to talk to anyone in the community. The most shocking fact about his antisocial behaviour was his being poor. Often, it was the rich that looked down on the low-income individuals. That was not the case here. However, his wife was somehow unlike him as she used to visit one or two friends in the neighbourhood before he forbade her. In short, no one knew anything about him and his family.

On one fateful day, Tijjani, who lived in Hotoro, a suburb of Kano city in those days, took his wife to their house in the metropolis. That was their routine whenever he was travelling. However, quite unusual f their schedule that day, the wife returned to the home in the evening. With a phone in one hand, she picked up a piece of stone and knocked at their door repeatedly, loudly. As she later revealed, he didn’t answer or return her several calls since they parted in the morning. Therefore, she suspected that he might have abandoned the idea to travel and came back home. But, the house was still locked. She frantically called his phone number, again and again, no response. She gave up and went back home.

Days and almost a week passed, nobody heard of Tijjani. All efforts to trace his whereabouts proved in vain. His wife, whose name I cannot recall, could not ask anyone around, for she very well knew that her husband did not interact with anyone. She resorted to reporting the case to the police who later came and forcibly opened the house. To everyone’s sheer shock, they found an almost decomposed body of Tijjani inside their bedroom. No doubt, people in the neighbourhood had been complaining of a strange smell recently. He was gagged, both hands and legs bound with curtains, and his stomach ripped. The house was almost empty, and everything had been packed away. Upon investigation, people in the neighbourhood could only recall seeing some unknown individuals with a truck carting away property from the house. Nobody asked them why, how or anything whatsoever. The few eyewitnesses interviewed by the police thought that Tijjani was simply relocating to another area.

Hafsat’s eyes were already filled with tears. She gently argued that that was the highest form of I-don’t-care attitude on the neighbours’ part and prayed to Allah to rest Tijjani’s soul in peace, and for the punishment of his cruel murderers. Although I said “Amin,” I didn’t agree with her entirely. It takes two to tango. We should be our neighbours’ keepers. Both our religion and culture teach us to do that, for inevitably, we reap what we sow.

Adamu Babura is a lecturer at the Department of English and Literary Studies, Bayero University, Kano. He can be reached via adamubabura@gmail.com.

By Hussaina Sufyan Ahmad

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobi at the NLNG award night at Lagos on October 30, 2021, won the $100,000 NLNG Prize for Literature, 2021.

Chairman of the Advisory Board, The Nigeria Prize for Literature & Literary Criticism, Prof Akachi Adimorah-Ezeigbo, disclosed that Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobi’s “The Son of the House” beat two other shortlisted novels, Abi Dare’s “The Girl with Louding Voice” and Obinna Udenwe’s “Colours of Hatred” to emerge the winner.

“The journey leading to the event started several months ago with the receipt of 202 novels for the Literature Prize since the genre in focus is Prose Fiction. Immediately the Panel of Judges were constituted, they swung into action and despite the challenges imposed by the pandemic, found creative ways to do their work meticulously, using a set of 11 clearly defined and approved Criteria. The Panel of judges also worked in close coordination with the Advisory Board, and the Secretariat of the Prize to produce evaluate and prune down the 202 entries to 50, then 25. From this point, they were able to produce a long list of 11 and thereafter, a shortlist of 3,” she said.

According to Adimorah-Ezeigbo, “Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobi’s “The Son of the House” was published in 2019 by Parresia Publishers. The novel presents the predicaments of two women, Nwabulu a one-time housemaid and a successful fashion designer; and Julie, an educated woman who lived through tricks, deceits and manipulation, as they meet in captivity.

Both women decide to tell each other their stories. They soon discover that their lives had crossed at different points. The subject matter of the novel is developed through the rupture of traditional plot and the mediation of a single narrative voice. It is made up of a prologue and three-part story moments, each dominated by multiple points of narration, “The Son of the House” is an experimental novel with a complex plot structure made up of the main plot and several subordinate plots that intercept.

The All Poets Network (APN), in collaboration with the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) and Akweya Radio, organise one-day poetry writing workshop at the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Faculty of Communication, Bayero University, Kano. Dr Ola Ifatimehin, the head of the Department, will facilitate the workshop.

Engausa, a hybridised English-Hausa language, is used by many Hausa speakers in northern Nigeria. The language is gaining momentum, especially on social media. However, writing poetry in the same language is usually unconventional or even unwelcomed.

Announcing the workshop, Khalid Imam, the curator of APN, describes Engausa poetry as “a type of poetry which combines English and Hausa words in its expressions. It borrows from the vocabulary and cultural expressions of both languages to create imagery and tonality that colours and beautifies poetry in fresh modes.”

Dr Ifatimehin said that when he began writing such poetry, he was surprised to see that “so many people found it quite fascinating and some started writing as well.” He added that although there had been debates around it, it is catching on. Dr Ifatimehin disclosed to this reporter that “we have recently gotten funding to do an anthology”.

The Daily Reality is the first online news medium in Nigeria with a dedicated section on Engausa. Therefore, the company has promised to support this avant-garde movement and other creative writings in Engausa. The event will take place on 10th July 2021 from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm.