Baba had not returned from night duty. Could something have happened to him on his way back? Where had he gone afterwards?
By 3 p.m. I was really worried, not knowing what to do, when Sergeant Abu came. His appearance alone conveyed his message. I greeted him. He did not sit down. Rather, he asked me to follow him outside. Standing by his Vespa, he looked into my eyes and spoke to me in our language. ‘Your father is in trouble.’
‘What’s it?’ I heard myself exclaim.
‘Yesterday, he was late to work. Our DPO went to his outpost on patrol, searching for policemen who couldn’t do their job well. A new DPO who thinks he knows discipline better than anybody in the world. He didn’t see your father and there was no excuse. He ordered that your father be locked up.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘He said to inform you. Tell your mother.’
‘Thank you.’
I watched his Vespa disappear.
I told my siblings. They wondered how Baba, himself a policeman, could have been locked up by a policeman. Ajara giggled and said, ‘That man is telling a lie. Baba is drinking beer in Sabon Gari.’
Imatum hissed loudly when she returned from her outing. ‘We’ll rest from the disease of poverty in this house.’
I told Mama what had happened to Baba. She remained calm, as if used to hearing such news. She sat down opposite me and said, ‘It’s nice the police can discipline him.’
‘Not a kind thing to say, Mama.’
‘There’s a consequence for every sin. Did he not drink and forget to go to work?’
I heard Imatum giggling from the inner room. Emayabo and Oyigwu were engrossed in the TV. Ajara and Anyaosu were inside the inner room, eating. Yakubu was not at home. Perhaps he was at his best friend Denis’s house.
I implored, ‘Mama, I want to go see Baba. Please help me with the fare.’
‘I can’t waste the little money I earn by sitting under the sun on a man who has lost his senses to beer.’
Mama kept her word.
I went to bed sad. Now and then I awoke, pushing Yakubu’s legs away from mine. He slept heavily and moved restlessly on the bed. I heard the faraway howling of dogs and crickets chirping nearby. An owl was hooting somewhere in our compound. I stopped my mind from wandering as I wanted to think. Then I became conscious of the movements of the mice in our room. I heard their rushing motions, right on the springs of my bed. They were racing, fighting, shrieking. They scratched the plates on the floor. In the quiet of the night the noise was incredibly loud.
*
The next day, Saturday, at about 11.30 a.m., I was contemplating trekking to Yarkura Police Outpost when Ola appeared at our house.
‘Hey, Murtala!’ He was right by our door, about to step in.
‘Ola!’
I jumped up with a mixed feeling of joy and sadness. I had been evasive each time Ola asked me to invite him to our house. I did not want to bring him into our poverty, to make myself an even greater object of pity. We knew of the social divide between us and treated it with a delicate silence. I had been wary of exposing the extent of my destitution to Ola.
Ola wore a pair of sky-blue jeans, a new white Nike T-shirt, a Nike baseball cap and a pair of Timberland boots. He had a bag strapped to his back. He was bustling with life. He sat down even before I offered him a seat, but chose the worst chair. It wobbled and he drew his buttocks to the edge, carefully holding the arms.
‘Be careful with that chair, Ola. Come to this one.’
‘Thanks.’
He stepped on a drop of pap. I saw other drops lying where Oyigwu was sitting and eating his breakfast.
Our room still stank of urine, as Emayabo and Oyigwu would not stop wetting themselves. I tried to look happy for his sake, but it was difficult.
‘My dad hasn’t got his salary. I can’t come to school.’
‘I know. I missed you. The whole class misses you.’
‘I miss all of you too.’
‘How are your parents?’
‘They’re fine. My dad is at work and my mum in the market. What about your parents and the lovely twins?’
‘They all said to greet you. Always want you to visit again. The twins say they must pay you a visit one day.’
‘All! I’d be happy to have them,’ I lied.
‘Your house isn’t far from the school.’
‘How did you find your way?’
‘Hauwa, our classmate, described it for me. She lives close to you.’
‘I know.’
‘Our maths master is worried that you came first in the class, but don’t have the money to pay the school fees.’
‘How did he know of my problem?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Is Millicent fine?’
‘Very worried.’ Ola grinned. ‘She begged me to… Well, if she had the money, she would have paid for you.’
Ola removed his bag from his back, unzipped it and dipped his hand inside. He brought out a small, folded paper and handed it to me. It was a receipt.
‘My dad gave me money to pay for you when I told him.’
I stared at him, astonished, open-mouthed.
‘Yeah, he likes you.’
‘Thank you, Ola. I’m really grateful. But you didn’t have to tell him about me.’
‘I had to, Murtala. They’re happy that I’m doing well in school. You’ve been helping me.’
‘That’s not enough for this kindness, Ola.’
Ola was quiet, looking round the room. Then he said, ‘I also got some books for you.’
I grabbed the books with joy. It was the first time I had been given books as a present. ‘Wao! They’re beautiful.’
They were wide hardcovers. The bigger one was blue, with tall letters at the top: Wild Animals. Its glossy pages contained the pictures, names and habits of wild animals. I stopped at the picture of an animal that looked like a goat, but was thinner and more beautiful. Under it was written ‘gazelle’. The explanation said it was a small slender antelope, found in Africa and Asia, with curved horns and a yellow-brown coat with white underparts.
‘One of the prettiest animals in the world,’ Ola said.
‘It’s really beautiful.’
The other was brown, with Senegal Photographed splashed on the middle of the front cover. I flipped through the book. The glossy pages contained fantastic pictures of cities, mansions, seas, villages and peoples in traditional attire. I stopped on a page that showed a young man and woman, scantily dressed, with strands of cloth round their heads, their arms open and their heels raised in a torrid dance. Beside them were four men, beating drums. Two of the drums were long, one was large and the fourth was quite small.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Ola said.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Senegal is in West Africa, not far from here.’
‘Must be a small country. Our social studies master says most of the countries in West Africa are small.’
‘It’s francophone.’
‘French-speaking?’
‘Yes. Let me show you something.’ Ola took the book from me and turned the pages. He stopped at a particular page and gave it to me. It showed an ancient stone building with a small, low door, lower than the doors to our rooms in Kwana Hudu, that opened onto the sea. The water was so close that one could step from the door right into the water. There were small rocks at the foot of the building. Under the picture was written ‘The gate of no return’. I read that the location was Goree Island, where African captives bound for Europe and America were kept before final transportation. Every captive who passed through that door never returned to Africa.
‘It’s so small. The people had to bend to pass through it,’ I said.
‘Yes, Murtala. My dad says in those days if you were taken as a slave, you became short and bent, no matter how tall you were. You could never walk tall. Everything made for you was short to make you bend and look short.’
‘Interesting.’
‘When we were there on holiday, we saw that the rooms in which captives were kept were low and small. People squeezed themselves into the rooms.’
I stared at the picture.
Ola continued. ‘My dad says it is one of the reasons why Africa finds it difficult to grow tall.’
I pondered over what Ola said. I would discuss the issue with Uncle Tony, who studied history at Kano University, when next he visited us.
Suddenly, I realised I had not offered Ola a drink, although I had no money to buy him anything. I thought of offering him water, but ours was dirty. When the water was collected in a cup, it had particles dancing in it.
Frankly, I said to him, ‘Ola, I’m sorry I don’t have anything to offer you.’
Ola smiled at me. ‘Why don’t you take me around this area? My first time. It’s called Kwanar Jabba, no?’
Glad for the option he had offered, I said, ‘Yes.’
I put on my shirt and we went out.
The sky was bright, but not without light and straying clouds. We walked through the nameless, untarred streets which stank of gutters, freshly shovelled. Heaps of slime from the gutters lined the streets. It was a national sanitation day.
‘I notice that there is one wall between houses. No house has its own space,’ Ola said.
‘See the sizes of the windows.’
‘So small. And Kano is a very hot city.’
‘Imatum, my sister, calls our room an oven.’
‘It’s not healthy,’ Ola said, his eyes on the squat houses.
We came to the main road of Kwanar Jabba, its only tarred road. Bus conductors were calling out: ‘Sabon Gari’, ‘Yarkura’, ‘Bata’, and the blaring of car horns filled the air. Wheelbarrow pushers jostled us. A man, pushing a small bicycle, an ice cream cooler fixed in front of it, was singing loudly in Hausa. Children followed him. Yoruba women, carrying large basins filled with plastic household items, with babies strapped on their backs, walked along the road.
We came upon a crowd in a circle. Inside the circle was a wiry man, holding a long rope that encircled the tiny waist of a monkey. The monkey, dressed in trousers and a T-shirt, was dancing to drumbeats. At one point, the drumming stopped. The wiry man asked the monkey to walk like a prostitute. It catwalked. Then he asked the monkey to lie down as a whore does, satisfied with her pay. The monkey briskly lay on its back, threw its legs wide apart and, with his tiny palms, beckoned the imaginary male to mount it. The man told the monkey to imagine itself as the goalkeeper of the national team. The onlookers would want a glimpse of his stamina. The monkey hopped about, diving to the left and to the right. People cheered and applauded. Ola was fascinated. At the top of his voice, the man implored the spectators to be quiet. Then he said, ‘In the name of Allah, we seek kind donations for our intelligent friend here.’
Ola was one of the onlookers who gave him some coins. Thereafter we went to the biggest provision shop at Kwanarjabba. Ola bought Coca-Cola and egg rolls for us. We sat on a bench in front of the supermarket and watched people coming and going.
‘So many people,’ Ola said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like to come here frequently to watch these goings-on.’
‘Really?’
‘You don’t see such things in my place.’
‘I know.’
All of a sudden, Imatum appeared in front of us, accompanied by a young Hausa man. I recognised him from the cemetery, where I’d seen him smoking marijuana. I was embarrassed, but remained calm, pretending not to know her. She did not acknowledge my presence either, though she saw me. She took the boy’s hand in hers and wiggled her buttocks as they walked into the shop. My body tensed up and tears stung my eyes. Was it anger? Was it pain? Was it frustration?
‘Do you want some more to drink?’ Ola’s voice jolted me back to the reality that he was there beside me.
‘No, thanks.’
‘I would really love to come here often to see people.’
‘It would be nice to have you around all the time.’
Before Ola left he gave my siblings some coins. He wanted me to promise him that I would be in school on Monday. He did not need my promise. Already bored at home, I was very eager to return to school.