Not all childhood experiences were imaginative and fun, some were unpleasant and exposed one to realities.
Aremu Lydia@lydiaaremu315367
10 days ago
Non-English Words in the Story
Angwan (Hausa): neighborhood, community or area.
face-me-I-face-you (Pidgin): long rows of rooms built opposite each other, with the toilets, bathrooms built apart.
Alhaji (Hausa): Muslim pilgrim; a male Muslim who has travelled to Mecca for pilgrimage.
Islammiyyah (Hausa): a religious school where students are taught the Qur’an and other Islamic books like the Hadiths; usually held in the evenings.
Ayekoto (Yoruba): a common Yoruba name for a parrot; literally, it means the world hates truth.
Jana’izar prayer (Arabic): prayer for the dead before burial.
Allahu Akbar (Arabic): God is great.
Imam (Arabic): a Muslim Cleric
Kafan (Arabic): white material for burying the dead.
Makara (Hausa): wooden carriage for carrying corpses.
A PIECE OF MY MEMORY DIARY
Sometimes little kicks and other times a lengthy stretch that all seemed to want to puncture my tummy. “She is active,” I smiled to myself. Early before 6 am, I arrived at the maternity centre to win one of the first ten number cards in the queue because any minute later than that, the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital’s Maternity Centre would be swarming with hundreds of convex shapes and sizes of pregnancies. Clinicals usually started at exactly 8 am, as a result, my common practice was to wait. While waiting, I checked my card and I recollected that I would be vaccinated with a second Tetanus shot. “Tetanus shot, Tetanus shot,” I muttered subconsciously as I recalled my childhood friend, Buhari.
I grew up in Suleja, Niger State, Nigeria. My neighbourhood, Angwan Eminence comprised mostly of Hausa folks and diverse southern residents. It was a harmonious ghetto environment where houses were built in flats and bungalows with rusty silver aluminum roofing sheets. The dirt roads had beside them make-shift shallow gutters filled with disposed polythene bags. Adjacent to my parents’ four-bedroom bungalow was a face-me-I-face-you building with ten rooms. This was the house of Alhaji Dan Asabe, the father of my friend, Buhari.
Buhari was a dark, handsome and chubby boy with the darkest, thickest, and curliest hair I had ever seen. He and his brother Murtala were mostly left unattended because their mother had left their father for another marriage after a bad divorce. It was typical for Hausa boys of his age group to be wild, loud and strong-willed. Each of these qualities of Buhari was a constant adrenaline spike. He achieved stupid, outrageous and unimaginable feats. I observed that he had a challenge differentiating fun from violence. Consequently, I kept guard of the kind of activities we played together. Most times, he would roam the streets with his peers. When alone, he would perform cruel manipulations on animals in his quest for play. One time, he caught some agamas, scavenged syringes and needles from the trash of a nearby clinic, sucked up water into the syringes and injected the liquid into each of the poor and frightened lizards. The horrors of the dying bloated reptiles scattering in pain for safety haunted me for a decade. Other accounts of Buhari’s uncontrolled adventures were the fights at home, at islammiyyah, at school and on the streets. One day, he fell from the neem tree beside my house and earned a cut on his right elbow. His dark skin excellently concealed the scars he acquired from fights and falls. I used to call them Buhari’s Battle Scars.
I loved Buhari anyway because I admired his curiosity anytime I spoke English to him. He never understood a bit of the language. For extra food and snacks, he would gift me live dragonflies, beetles and grasshoppers. He had a talent for hunting. When my parents got my brothers a parrot, Buhari would visit regularly to hear the parrot whistle his name to his amusement. With excitement, he would run errands for his father’s wives and assist in the clearing and burning of dry leaves and refuse around our surroundings.
On Friday, the last day of term, as usual, Buhari got home from school with a deep cut around his left eye. The cut was a perfect crescent which travelled above his eyebrow to the upper part of his nose and ended at the topmost part of his left cheek avoiding the eye socket outrightly. It was as if someone had shoved a wide metal pipe onto his face. Like always, he was treated at home. The following day, the bleeding stopped and the surface clotted dry leaving black patches. Everyone thought he was going to be alright, but we thought wrong.
After about a week or so, Buhari gradually came down with a high fever along with severe body pains. The agile lad became calmer. He would cry for hours and grind his teeth in pains. Even in his forced naps, Buhari’s tears would flow quietly. Talking and eating became difficult for him.
A few days later, my parents forbade us from visiting him. For the first time, I assumed my parents were monsters, because I could not fathom why they would hinder me from seeing my friend when he needed me most. While on one errand, against my parents’ disapproval, I snuck into his house to check up on him. He was lying on his old, blue mat under a shed. His helpless brother who squatted beside him had a cloud of confusion above him. And his father’s wives who were oblivious of my presence, went about their businesses of cooking, cleaning, washing and talking. Truthfully, they had their hands full with the infants they had been teaming up with every year – I mentally photographed fifteen kids with no dissimilarities to their ages and sizes. By this time, Buhari’s breathing was like the bark of a tired, old dog and he was motionless. I had missed him. I felt something terrible was about to happen to him but my young mind could not comprehend it. I was sad and at the same time, I pitied him. In tears, I scooted home. Fortunately, my mother didn’t catch me entering the house.
In the first wee hour of the following day, the noise kept me awake. The dogs in the area howled, the cats meowed, and Ayekoto, my brothers’ parrot squawked deafening shrills. I heard my father leaving the house because the gate squeaked. I could see that it was pitch-black through my window. I wanted to escort my father but I was scared that if I leave my bed, my mother would scold me. So, I laid down wondering about the occurrences outside.
At about 6 am, we heard the chattering of a crowd consisting of male voices. My father had not returned. I and my siblings sat in our nightwear in the living room. Raising our heads at intervals and peeping through the window, we were mute. My mother was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. “She is not singing,” I noticed. About an hour later, we heard nothing. Then the sonorous voice of the Imam reciting verses in Arabic broke the silence. The Jana’izar prayer began. “Allahu Akbar,” the Imam would call. “Allahu Akbar,” other voices would respond. The prayer lasted 15 minutes. Afterwards, we heard women wailing. Some people were speaking Igbo, some Pidgin, some Yoruba and some Hausa respectively.
As soon as my father turned the door’s handle to come into the living room, we pushed our way out. And the last time I saw my friend, Buhari, he was wrapped in white kafan, bounded firmly with ropes and carried off on his blue mat, but this time around there was a makara accompanying the mat. My siblings sobbed. I did not. Instead, I stared straight into the nothingness of the wake of the crowd of men that had left with his body. Gently, my father beckoned us back into the house. It was our morning custom to pray together as a family and I could still remember my mother’s shaky voice asking God for comfort.
For weeks, the community was soundless except for one or two mothers scolding their children who played roughly or misbehaved. Everyone avoided cuts like a plague. I summed up the courage to ask my mother. “What happened to Buhari?” I looked into her eyes. With a deep sigh she replied, “he died from Tetanus.” I didn’t know what it was. But I concluded that it was a disease.
By now, the mid-wives and nurses had commenced clocking our vitals. With their chatty demeanour, they ensured the experience was fun and relaxing for the women. Sincerely, the entertainment relieved me of my mental state that day. After a long process, it was time for the shot. Some women closed their eyes and held their breath. Some, from their little dramatic display, exhibited trypanophobia. As I folded up my sleeve to take the shot, I thought of who was to be blamed. Was his mother or his father to be blamed? Were the stepmothers to be blamed? Or the miseducation of all of them? I pictured Buhari as a father with kids like his brother Murtala. Probably he wouldn’t have obtained a higher education but he would have been a successful business man because, I presumed he would understand the streets. Now, I was to be a mother. Though I had not seen the face of my daughter, I was convinced to make her health top of my many priorities.
In the words of Oscar Wilde, “memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.” I thought I would forget Buhari. Although I had not written about him in a diary, I knew it was impossible to erase him from my memory.
#NircleStories
#ShortStories
#LydiaOmobolanle
