Why The Sky Is Always Blue? I By Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

I was beside her, in the hospital, when she was dying. The warmth we shared followed us from our mother’s womb. I came twenty and four months after her. 

Fa’iza was the sister I loved most. On Fridays, she’d fasten me on her back and carry me to our granny for Yawan Juma’a. We marked our relatives who gave us money and stopped visiting them with our friends. We didn’t want to share the money with them.

While growing up, our father would send Fa’iza to call us home when we stayed long outside. She would come direct to the river. It was beating if he knew. Fa’iza would save us his whip, hung to a nail inside our mother’s room.

She would come with pomade in a ROBB tin hidden in the edge of her wrapper and gave us. After we rubbed our body, we would walk home slowly and slowly like chameleon. By the time we reached home, our skin and our eyes had cleared.

Father was getting old, his energy was slowly going down. His plan had failed. The men he married our sisters to killed the businesses he set them to manage. So, we took food to our sisters. The husbands thought differently, beat and sent them away.

Fa’iza was the first girl in the family to attend higher education, enjoying father’s deactivation of autocratic mode. She read plenty, and watched ample, of science materials and programs. When she spoke, her colleagues watched in awe and admiration.

In the evening, we would sit before television, a habit she had grown so much fond of as if she would lose her life if she did not. I realized she had gradually dragged me into her world although the main reason for my sitting was to keep her company. We discussed things that caught our attention but often ended up in bitter quarrel. She’d insist certain things were right when they were apparently not.

Anytime I read astrophysicists going to the moon, I wondered how they were able to get out of the world. Has the world got a gate or an exit? The world’s not something that humans could get out of or stand over against. Geography had even gone further in insulting me. I couldn’t help being amazed by the idea that the world was rounded. When I looked up and saw our world hang precariously on the map, I would begin to think of the day humanity would fall. I would stare fixedly at the Atlas, imagining myself in the throng of things. We were all in this space, I would mutter and pat the map admirably hopeful I would feel the touch. 

My head could not take the idea that bodies of waters were in greater proportion than the earth. All this vast expense of land. Was overwhelmed by water? Yet warning about shortage of water daily greeted us. If it was true, then, one day we would be flooded and get killed.

“You guys are funny. How do you explain this?”

She resented this line of thinking. This kind of approach would only need a little illness on her part to push her to grave. It grieved her. She would explain and explain but only to meet with stiff resistance. When she got angry, she would call my way “sheer ignorance” and never would she talk to me throughout the day. But she would forgive me the next day when her anger faded away. She was trying to raise the level of my thinking.

“You may not make much sense,” she said one evening, after an analyst gave a talk on Global Warming.  “Ozone was originally normal. Accumulated emissions cause opening in the layer and severe temperature here on earth. Ozone accounts for only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere. When it’s highly concentrated, it turns into pale blue. The gas condenses to liquid at -111.9°C (-169.52°F) and freezes at -192.5°C (-314.5°F). Liquid ozone is deep blue, solid ozone is dark purple.

Too much of them is dangerous. But without them, these gases, the earth would be a frozen planet with an average temperature of -18°C (about 0°F) which will turn the earth too cool for man to survive, instead of 15°C (59°F) which is normal for humans.”   

Fahrenheit, I repeated the word over and over again on my lips. I used to mumble some gibberish whenever I encountered the word. To tell the truth, even now I couldn’t read the numbers she said out. Fa’iza’s cracking of science fanciest argots dazed me.

Hajiya was worried by a taboo she committed. Words thrown up in the air deeply hurt her. At women gathering, she kept low and moved less and spoke only when necessary, in solidarity with Fa’iza.

“She is studying.” Hajiya would feel compelled to explain. She had tried to learn to ignore them but it was betrayal to let Fa’iza being eaten up raw by women.

“She hasn’t got a suitor.” They would insist. Any girl that was not married was because she lacked a suitor. But Hajiya knew that was not true. Fa’iza rejected several men, her mind was simply not ready. They would never understand. Mother would choke with agony, went to bathroom and quietly wept.

“‘Yan Boko,” they would finally come out, the disapproving cleverly disguised. But Hajiya could tell the way they said it was far from compliment, scolding tone heavy with accusation. For only ‘Yan Boko were such stupid enough to do such foolishness. Foolishness to let their daughter into university.

God forbid your daughter be one of those schoolgirls who did bad things with schoolboys and schoolteachers. The frequency of such encounter made the fortress in Hajiya shake, believing as if she was wrong for allowing Fa’iza to stay that long. She was quietly repeating what everybody was saying.

Hajiya was troubled whether Fa’iza would be moved to change her mind. She called her, spoke her first word and kept silent so that the word would sink into Fa’iza’s essence to make her feel the pain and break her spirit.

“Your friends have their own children already. You have grown older like me. People no longer differentiate us in the street. They say you are my sister.  It is shame.”

“Hajiya,” Fa’iza said, in measured tone, someone in control. From Fai’za’s tone Hajiya sensed she was flatly defeated. Her words got into Fai’za’s right ear and flew out the left.

“People have the right to say whatever they want. They won’t bother me. They are not feeding me. They are not paying my school fees. If they think I am doing something, you shouldn’t. You are the first to know if I engage in bad manners. The same people would cry lack of women in hospital.”

Not entirely stupid talk, Hajiya was not ready for that. Children were children. If she understood the way of the world, if she could feel Hajiya’s pain, she would not speak this flim-flam she was talking.

Hajiya’s eyes moistened.

No child raised in good manner would cause anguish to their parents. To correspond with her graduation, Fa’iza said, “Alright, I accept. I will marry.  But that should be next year.”  

It was shame, a girl as old as Fa’iza to be living with her parents. Shame enough to burn one to ashes.

In her stupidity, Fa’iza would have not married soon even after graduation. Wannan ‘ya ba ta da kan gado. Hajiya would say behind Fa’iza.

She didn’t know, but she was a rotten tomato in the fresh basket. Once removed, Hajiya believed, everything would be fine.

Barely two days, Hajiya’s voice began to recover her lost glory, confident, loud, in the community of matriarchs. She spoke of Fa’iza to everyone who cared to listen. “My daughter is getting married” she would say as if Fa’iza had chosen a definite husband. You could not miss the apology in her tone. Her quest for social acceptance was genuine, like a sinner atoning their transgression. The society of women punished deviance, watched conformity in deference.

Suitors came in numbers that wrapped Hajiya in all shades of delights, streaming in as if they had a secret agent working for them. Hajiya could have gleefully revealed to her friends, a tactful advert to make a kill for their sons. Perhaps they also told their friends, because, the numbers soured in fairly short time.

It had been long since Hajiya felt a thing close to that. Something missing in her was back again, the feeling of real motherhood.

A real woman at Hajiya’s age would not be called a real grandmother if she did not lose count of her grandchildren. Herd of them, grandchildren, brought a pride at family event when other women would keep inquiring, child after child as they moved in and out, romping around Hajiya, and Hajiya was responding in her usual manner:

“Don’t you know this one? He is Amina’s second child.”

“Not him, the one in red, who just gets out?”

“That one is my father. He was named after my father.” Hajiya would reply even though it was not her father. It was the name of a distant relative in the generation of her father. Sometimes it was the name of their neighbour who saw her grow up or her father’s friend who once gave her mazar kwaila. Younger women would watch in awe, praying silently to be like Hajiya when their time came.

As a decent family, father did not approve of keeping multiple courtiers.  And asked Fa’iza to make a choice. Her choice fell on a man who confessed to her initially but she told him to stop. By then she did not want to start any relationship while in school.

Since the time she chose him, he called at our home each weekend and brought goody bags with him. When she asked him to send his people to meet our parents, he demanded a little more time because he was soon travelling abroad, and did not finish his house.  

“My building will not finish if we arrange the marriage so soon.” He offered in the end after reading her mood. “What should I buy for you?”   

    

“No, thanks. Save your money for other things.” She said. “I have you in my prayer.”

On the wedding day, our home was turned into a mini world. Hajiya attended everyone’s wedding and everyone had showed up to her event. What would be of all her presence in people’s events if they should not attend hers? The way she behaved made it clear she wouldn’t forgive anybody who missed the wedding, nobody joked with the wedding of a last daughter.

Our house was already filled with visitors days before the actual wedding day. I moved carefully to avoid treading over people. Full of excitement, Hajiya and her friends were busy with tons of food all day. They set three different hearths outside.

After supervising food distribution, ensuring everyone ate to their fill, Haijya would return to her room, a respected chamber mainly for the elderly. The conversation here was different, established women discussing issues of their families, scheming about whose son should marry whose daughter, indoor, hushed and reverential, unlike the inexperienced young women speaking  about lace and necklace issues noisily in the corridor.

It was in this gathering an offended mother in-law would disclose her plan to the house for further reading and contribution about making her son divorce his wife or making him bring another woman because the first was disobedient.

“What do you see about it?”

“For me, they never dare do things like that. Dan uban ‘ya ta fara when she sees the way I deal with him!”

“It is good Hajiya Tabawa. You are firm.”

“Those little girls should be made to understand they could not treat us like that.”

 “It is your fault Hajiya. I would never allow the son I born to reject my decision. Never, except after my death.” A woman commenting on a boy rejecting an arranged marriage. She would speak pointing at her stomach, where the child sat, to show total, complete ownership.

I asked Hajiya about those I did not really know, distant relatives from different places. The way Hajiya told it made me appear like I was careless about the rest of the family. They were people I could easily fight in the streets and pass. But never mind Hajiya, she was over-communal. If I were to heed her words the whole Kano would turn out our relatives.

Post wedding days were flurry of activities. Seven days after, you would be forgiven to assume that the wedding was gearing to be started, as some women stayed behind to help Hajiya clear the house.

Moons after Fa’iza had moved in with her husband, I decided to visit her. My visit was reinstated when my ears caught news floating in the family that Fa’iza was down with morning sickness.

When I arrived, she was bony and emaciated. It was normal, I concluded, she was receiving her first induction, a newcomer to the marriage.

Her husband was a good man. He stayed at home, did the cooking, dishing, and cleaning-up and washed her clothes while she was away in office.

I was puzzled by her revelation. “What then is wrong?”

“You won’t understand,” she said. “He borrowed everything. The car, clothes and money, everything.” I was stunned, mouth agape, in shock.

“When he said he was abroad, he was actually hiding somewhere. There was a time he phoned to tell me he ran out of cash in foreign airport.”

Dots began to connect in my head. I thought of the gifts, the betrothal and the dowry. When the weeding came, he asked father to lend him money. He complained that he made an investment in a newly joint business he and his friend set up.

“Even the rent of the house was paid out of my pocket.” She tried hard to suppress her tears, but I knew she was bleeding inside. As she was narrating the story, gravity was pulling her. In minute, she was down in labor, her pregnancy five months.

Hospital.

I attempted entry to the maternity room where she was wheeled in, but doctors stopped me. A light scuffle ensued as I kicked back and forth before I finally gave up. I stepped into a shelter, barely noticing the people inside. They looked tired, weary from waiting to see a doctor and by noon, none of them was successful.

I waited, the longest hours in my life, very tense and agitated. Then, a medical staff called me out into a room. The air inside, smelled of gloom. Talk of death was not new here.

If familiarity was anything to go by, this room had long been a very good friend of death. Several families received their worst here. I was going to receive mine. And the nurses. They wouldn’t care your feeling while doing their job.

“Is she dead?” I preempted the nurse, although this was not my wish, but I should make peace with what was destined for me before someone told it off. The angling of their head sideways, in manner of extreme pity as if you were the first to have been in death situation, would add to the pain.

“Please tell me.” The way the woman acted, so emotional, confirmed my fears. The mask in her face prevented her facial reading.

If Fa’iza was not already dead, the nurse’ sudden attempt to speak caused a buckle in my knees, and drained my little strength. I felt hollow and flimsy. Her lips tightened, struggling for manner that would lighten the pain and enormity of her words.

It was until she spoke that a nuanced sense of relief clicked in me.

“Your wife needs a C-section.” You wouldn’t know how I felt. “She couldn’t deliver on her own.”  

I filled out the form they gave me after the counseling. “Relax and set your mind free. The only little problem we are facing is her pulse. Our people are working on that.” She said reassuringly, her voice had the effect of inspiring hope where none existed.

I sat down, after pacing the hallway of the Maternity Ward up and down, imaging Fa’iza’s situation.

By the time it was next morning, dread attacked me as Fa’iza did not come out. I began praying for miracle when my mind cast back to our conversation years ago.

“What we have here is mockery. In advanced countries, people no longer die in surgery. Women here think operation risky. Life and death fifty-fifty. Others feel that maternal death is natural.”

She reeled out certainty and assurance that were hospitals in advanced countries. When I showed doubt about androids in hospitals, she laughed. “Sure, our people won’t witness twenty-first century in the twenty-first century.”

While I waited anxiously, a nurse came out brilliant, brisk, with joy all over her face. The operation was successful, she said, but the mother was yet out. “The baby is in incubator.”

Eyes brimmed with tears, I toyed with the idea of calling Hajiya, but I reconsidered. Hajiya would know only when Fa’iza came out.

I huddled in a corner, deep in thoughts. Things that I didn’t want to think about, pretending they did not even exist, began insinuating in my mind. A weak voice cut me mid-thoughts.

“The mother is still bleeding. We need blood type B.”

The nurse dashed me to a room for blood test. I winced from the eruption of sweet pain as the syringe pinched my flesh. The woman squinted at the content for a while before disappearing back to the door.

Before the blood test she inquired if I had eaten. I said yes. I had a foreboding Fa’iza would slip away in the course of further delay.

I went with a nurse to the incubator. The baby was snuggled comfortably inside, eyes closed, hands clenched with promise. Babies were the most beautiful things to behold, especially while asleep. This one would not be able to see her mother.

Finally, I called Hajiya when it was afternoon Fa’iza did not come out. I explained things the way they were. One could sense Hajiya’s fear in the awful silence that followed. She would have to see her daughter and bid her final goodbye.

Fa’iza was transferred to a room, (because it won’t be called ICU) after her bleeding stopped. Old rickety beds were arranged across the room creating a passageway at the middle, banana and orange peel laid here and there on the floor, food-flasks under the beds while the uneaten fruits were seated on the window ledges, nearly to the patients’ heads.

Families had to bring food three times. I cried as I watched my hospital neighbours receive visitors. They came with something in their hand, a black polythene bag which they deposited and left without a word. Everyone understood. 

When they left, the person on the patient would open the pack to see the content inside. In the morning, another person would come to take over the shift. It killed me when I saw them leave.

Discharge letter came very late in the afternoon, when we had already given in for the eighth day. Fa’iza had recuperated well enough to recognize our faces. While awake, she played with her baby. But the nurses warned her when they came on round. She would hurt herself because she had to strain to reach out to the baby. After giving her medication, they would lift the blanket to take a look at her wound. 

The nurses made friend with Fa’iza when they learnt she had the knowledge of their work. The day a drug would be last used, Fa’iza would ask for change, saying it was too strong or took weak as at the time.

On their shift change, before they went home, the nurses came to spend time with her. They would joke her that she must be grateful for having a caring husband like me. “You know how others are. They never come to see the wife.” Fai’za would smile, an accepting smile that shut up door for further talk on the thread.

I knew why Jamilu refused to come see us in the hospital. There was money for firewood and the ram for the baby. And the shame and disappointment he would meet in our faces and voices. He won’t dare come for the scolding that was our relatives, to be torn apart in public.

Seething with venom, I grabbed him by the collar and pinned him to the wall when he showed up in our home a day after the discharge.

“Why did you deceive her?”       

“I am sorry,” he said, genuine regret in his voice. He gathered his hands to his face like the Indians did, vowing as he sought forgiveness.

“I have never meant to hurt her.”

“Shut up, liar!” I thundered at him, my clenched fist to his face. “Hajiya, this is what I have been telling you. You see what happened ba, just within a year. Now she must have to come back home and live with us.” 

“Leave him alone.” Hajiya said, removing my grip. Slowly, my firm hand loosened. I stepped back, arms akimbo, nose flaring, chest heaving.

He adjusted his collar and straightened his shirt, and said, “Forgive me. I had a strong feeling. When I saw her first, I was afraid she would not accept me if I told her the truth.”

She was asleep when he came. Tears dripped down her face when I told her his words. “I would have still married him. It hurts he lied. I would have still married him.” She spoke, shaking her head in forgiveness.

(@abubakarsulai13)