His mother was weaving him
through the crowd after a bus dropped them at Bakin Asibiti. They were visiting
his sister, a little taller than his mother. They called her Aunty at home. He
had the impression she was older than his mother.
They pushed their way,
avoiding traders and vehicles arbitrarily parked by the roadside. They gobbled
off both sides of the road with a world of wheelbarrows, and pushed the
hospital into exile. Bans and evictions failed to clear off the place.
She continued amidst the throbbing
and the forever moving buses, occasionally feeling her bag. At Bakin Asibiti, everyone
moved with their wit.
Bakin Asibiti was loose
kind of a sort market place, trading in whole world wide of things. If a woman
lost her item, her first instinct would direct her there. Sometimes they
succeeded, sometimes they failed because some traders were doing fencing
operation.
Stops-over at Bakin Asibiti
was more important than the actual outing.
As she moved on, a black
abaya caught her attention. She would have gone for it but decided until her
return. She was obeying the rule. She would only ask the price to know how much
these people cheated her husband. He bought her a new abaya lately. She always
suspected he did not really master the tricks of the market.
Around ten in the morning,
she bathed and rubbed the boy with Vaseline, from head to toes. Two days ago,
she told her husband to buy new bottle of pomade, the one she was using had one
day to finish.
Unlike Laraba, she wouldn’t
go to the neighbors borrowing and begging. The moment Laraba salaamed into a
neighbor, everyone knew: it was a broom or salt or matches. She was also
spoiling her kids. Auwalu bloodied one boy’s mouth at borehole. When the boy’s
mother complained, Laraba simply apologized. All the children bore grudge
against him and ganged up one day and beat him up.
By 12:00pm, they were at
Kofar Mata, and took their way to Kofar Nassarawa. To the east, by the left, beside
the mosque, was a construction site. A lot of machines. Strange to him! The
world started and ended within his family. Rahila, he loved her a lot. But it
was not love. They played on sand together and visited her home, ate, played
and when afternoon fell, her mother would change him into Rahila’s clothes.
Little children kuma, she would say, they can wear everything.
Rahila went home one day
and never came back. His mother told him she had gone. He thought about the going
and determined to avoid it. For him, when people slept the sort of sleeping
Rahila did, they never came back and people carried them to a strange place. “I
will be closing and opening my eyes in my sleep.”
In his world the only
people on earth were his family. The only other location was his Aunty’s home.
But any time they were out he would see other people.
People from his family
travelled to Mecca. That alone was enough to wash away his doubt but instead joggled
off his head. He thought Mecca was in the sky, he used to see aero-plane in the
sky and was told there were people in it. Wouldn’t their weight fall the plane
down? Could people in Mecca walk? They
walked lightly so as not fall. Did they have ground like ours? One day he asked his mother “Umma,” as they
called her, “where Mecca is located?”
Mother too did not know.
What was not in doubt was that Mecca was not in the sky. East, east, just east,
gabas. She was certain. Unlike the child, she did not expect grain of soil to be
falling down.
As for travelling to Mecca,
one thing remained a mystery to him. How people got into the plane? His mother
said they had to go to airport. Unconvinced, he mused his reservations.
The flight comes when I am
asleep and hovers over the roofs. Passengers climb up by ladder.
He wished one day the
flight would come during the day so that he could see the whole thing. How the
flight was able to gather all passengers? He remembered how they were able to
go to his Aunty’s home: the bus was taking passengers here and dropping them
there. As his mother dragged him, he imagined the spectacle in his mind.
The number of cars speeding
by was endless. They should stop and rest. The road might have been tired. And
the cars too.
They arrived at the
construction site, his head up marvelously in the sky. The crane, he called it
a car with a long neck. The thought of neck reminded him of his mother’s words in
Watan Cika-Ciki and his promise to eat and eat until his throat choked.
He looked at the crane one
more time in wonder and thought the man inside would fall. It was very, very
tall nearly touching the sky. The irresistible desire to touch the sky-roof
possessed him. Only if he were the man.
He glanced to size up the
crane to compare it with himself. He couldn’t even imagine the difference. He gave up hopelessly after realizing the
crane was taller than even his mother. For him tallness meant agedness. That
was why he thought his sister was older than his mother.
A man was coming from the
opposite, his head up in the sky. Suddenly bumped into each other,
and the boy asked, “Please what are they doing here?”
“I don’t know.” The man
said.
