IT WAS A FEVERISH DAY. Crowds. Speeches. And veneration.

I had been given a new purple dress with a purple lining to hide the ghastly gore within and also a matching veil. Mama had a flowered dress with wisps of gold that hung from the seams and trembled when she moved. Her hair was perfectly braided, in a salon where they also bathed her feet in a basin of whirling water. She was still cold with me, and far friendlier to those around her who were praising her courage and her faith.

An aide kept reminding me to smile, so I smiled. She had also briefed me on what to say and what to withhold. People did not wish to hear gruesome stories. ‘Nothing negative … nothing negative,’ she kept whispering in my ear.

We were driven to the President’s residence early so as to avoid the crowds and any intrusion from press or cameras. When we got there we were led directly to our seats. A carpet of the same intricate design led from the hallway into the reception room, where the flags of the neighbouring states were furled on poles, inside the bay of the window. Pink curtains were drawn to shut out the glare of the sun. Chairs were placed on either side of the central aisle and different chairs at the very top in a semicircle where the President and his entourage would sit. They were covered in a peach-coloured satin and there was not a stain on them. Everything was perfect, the chalk-white mouldings of the ceiling, the shining wooden columns, the exact folding of the curtains and yet it felt cheerless. I smelt flowers but there were none. I reckoned that the room had been sprayed earlier to give a semblance of nature. We sat stiffly. I could hear Mama’s gigantic sighs. Maybe her dress was too tight. An urge overcame me to slip away to wherever Babby was. I felt she needed me.

Mothers who had been invited were arriving in batches, the dust of their journey on their feet and on their ragged clothing. They recognised me at once. Their eyes settled on me and I saw those craven expressions, all reaching for news of their own. How could I tell them the truth, that some girls had died in childbirth, others in different bombardments, some sent to more remote camps, and most bafflingly of all, some had chosen to stay in the camp, where they were thankful to have at least one meal a day.

Nothing negative … nothing negative … was spinning through my mind.

There was a fanfare as the President and his entourage were announced. It was a cavalcade of government ministers, their aides and military men with badges and medals emblazoned on their chests. The ministers wore richly embroidered hulas, and the President himself, the tallest among them, wore a chaste white one with a wide gold band. He was like a man in a sphere of his own. The women were too afraid to clap loudly and almost too afraid to breathe. Instead, they craned forward to be that bit nearer to him. A woman in a blue dress took her time to sit comfortably and then gathered the folds of silk around her ankles coquettishly, all the time smiling.

The President wore a half-smile of accomplishment and slight disdain.

The first to speak was a governor from a nearby state. He veered from joy to grief, mopping his face with a large spotted handkerchief. He said he spoke for the entire nation when he welcomed me home, calling me a beacon for all, saying that an emotional tsunami swept the country once the news was announced. Then, with an unctuousness, he thanked the President, who had cancelled a trip that very morning to be with his own people. This was not a president flying around in jets, or skulking in state rooms, this was a president who cared for all entrusted to his leadership. Every child mattered to them. He cited the millions of naira allocated for school fees, for the feeding of students in public schools, for books and pencils, transport and all the other necessities that are a growing child’s birthright. To the mothers hoping he might have a magic wand, instead he had to ask for patience, forbearance, but in his heart, he believed the national catastrophe would soon end.

‘Our country will hold its head high again,’ he said, and again dabbing his forehead, tears welling up in his eyes, he said unashamedly, ‘If I had not had a Western education, I would still be herding goats.’ The crowd loved it, they clapped unrestrainedly. Then, gathering his composure, he pointed to the President and said, ‘When you have the real, you scorn the shadow,’ and the President stood up to speak.

The President was more incisive and damning – ‘Visibility. Candour. Power.’ Each utterance of his was like an arrow. The audience knew they were in the presence of greatness, of the man who held the key to their shorn lives and the little piece of ground they subsisted on. He looked around, saw their apprehension and in a more humorous voice said, ‘We shall dare our enemies to a warring duet.’ His cohorts smiled at the human touch.

Then, he spoke of his determination to bring the reign of terror to a halt, reminding them that it could not happen in the twinkling of an eye but with cunning, know-how and strategy. Then, barely consulting his notes, he spoke fluently and with passion – ‘I ask you to dispel all doubt, conjecture and fictive reporting. We are fighting this war. Our enemies are everywhere. They seek martyrdom but they are not martyrs. How shall I name them. Hyenas. Yes, hyenas. You not only have the known fighters, but you have others in association with them, exploiting the unrest, operating under their rubric. They are waging a war against us, against our institutions and our rule of law. They are intolerant of everyone and of everything. Just think of the numbers they have taken down, policemen, prison warders, civil servants, leaders, schoolteachers and innocent children. They are against Christian and Muslim. They detest religious pluralism. They are rapacious. But make no mistake, we are winning, we have seized back territory and swathes of land that they have stolen. Our top military brass is equal to any country in the world, even the United States. A vast amount of our national budget is spent fighting this war. We are upgrading weapons and machinery to wipe them out and they know it. We will not accept canards as truth. We will stymie their actions in every way. We will disarm them. We will impotise them. We will wipe them out. We have taken cognisance of their glaring acts, of their pathology of lying and killing, of their infection in our body politic, but we are at the helm. They will disappear. They will burn in the crucible of our might. They will be the hunting dogs that failed to obey the whistle of the master.’

When he stopped talking there was a hushed silence. The fact that they had been within reach of him had given them something, a sprig of hope. But I wanted to speak, to say, Sir, you are only a few feet away from me, but you are aeons from them in their cruel captivity. You have not been there. You cannot know what was done to us. You live by power and we by powerlessness. I thought of my friends at that very moment, under the tamarind tree, some maimed from the bombardment, some newly pregnant, insects feeding feverishly on them, mouthing the same prescribed prayers. My aide guessed my agitation and was telling me to sit still and show good behaviour.

Having concluded, the President was moving slowly up the aisle, basking in the awed admiration, his underlings ahead of him, while the mothers, with tears in their eyes, clutched one another’s hands, knowing they would never live so august a moment again in their lives.

The lady in blue was all smiles, citing my courage, my determination, my pluck, my poise. A wild forest was no place for a girl alone and yet I survived, I persisted, I came through. She made no mention of my incarceration and did not speak of Babby. She stretched out the hand of friendship and said that by returning I had given a seedling of hope to all the other mothers. She felt about me as if I were her very own daughter, who had been taken in the dead of night and miraculously restored at dawn. The people were so stirred by her sincerity, by her candour, that presently they were standing, surging towards her, chanting ‘Mama, Mama,’ and she thanking them effusively. They were her people, she prayed for them morning and night and apart from a fondness for a particular football team, they were her family, as were all the stranded mothers in remote villages, not having the means or the privilege to be in these rarefied surroundings.

Then, in a more muted voice, she asked for leniency. She knew how each one of them would like a time alone with me, but it was too soon and emotions were still raw. Would they be kind to me. Would they not deluge me with questions, because, despite my poise and my beautiful dress, I was fragile. Put simply, she said, they should think of me as someone taking baby steps back to life.

‘We aim for a soft landing,’ she said, still smiling, and gesturing to Mama she led us towards a marquee, saying it was time to party, to welcome a heroine home.

*

The music was deafening. People talking, eating, dancing. All their mad hopes squeezed into this one day. I moved aside, so as to be alone for a little while.

A tall girl in a white veil came towards me. The veil was decorated with gold crescents and yet she was like someone in mourning. She did not speak at first and then, when she did, it was in a sudden burst, as if she had not spoken to anyone in a long time. Not until she said my name did I recognise her. It was Rebeka, who had jumped that first evening, as the truck lurched its way around a belt of trees.

‘I prayed … I asked of God if these were bad men … to please help us to escape. God answered for me. I whispered to you to jump with me.’

It was as if we both relived the same moment, the truck slowing down, other trucks behind and Rebeka standing up to grip an overhanging branch, then risking the jump, thinking that I was following, because she had entreated me so earnestly. I heard her fall with a soft thud because of the ground being so loamy. She went on to describe herself lying there, alone, certain that the trucks would follow, and see her white blouse very clearly under the bright moon. Except they didn’t. When they had all passed, she stood, but found she could barely walk. She hid in the upper branches of some of the trees and stayed there until the first sight of dawn.

She was certain as she walked along that she would see the smoke from the school, except she didn’t, because it was too far away. She met a farmer, who asked if she was one of the captured ‘schoolgirls’, then fled in terror when she said that she was. Further along she met another man who was dragging firewood in a cart, pulling the shafts of the cart with a rope, and seeing her stumble, he took pity on her, even though he guessed who she was. She sat on that pile of wood until they came within sight of a village and then she was told to get down. He said to keep to the tracks no matter how indistinct they became, because much of the undergrowth was mined.

The smoke from the school had almost died down, but the smell hovered in the air. The grounds were covered in a layer of grey-white ash, with charred books and burnt satchels. The place was mayhem, children with mothers, parents demanding news and teachers being castigated for not having done more to protect the innocent girls.

A woman brought her a pan of water to wash her feet in. Her parents, she was told, would arrive the next day. So overwhelmed were they that none of them could speak. They wept, they just wept and clung to one another. They wept in the bus going home and when it got to be known that she was the girl who escaped, there was impromptu applause.

At the welcoming party a few days later, people had pooled together to buy food and gifts. She was given combs for her hair. Yet, within weeks, trouble started.

Infidels … Infidels was daubed on walls and everyone knew the significance of it. Someone had informed. The Jihadis would come, not just for her, but for her whole family and the entire village. She had to leave. It was with deep emotion she stressed to me how her family had prayed and mourned. They assured her of the depth of their love and gave her apples for the journey. She was packed in a lorry with sacks of corn, squeezed into one of those hemp sacks, almost smothered, as the lorry had to go across country, on a far longer journey, in order not to be seen.

In the city an American woman, who ran a charity organisation, took her in and helped her to rebuild. She encouraged her to read and to write out the words she did not understand. She was given a series of English stories that concerned the dippy adventures of a dog, and though it was a nice story it was not for her, it did not touch her heart.

After six months she had to move, and she lived now in a hostel with ten other displaced girls. Luckily, she had found work. She took care of the altars in several churches, waxing the furniture, washing the linen and arranging the few flowers that were donated. It was this, perhaps, that made me think at first that she had joined some religious order.

All of a sudden, she was shaking, and asked if we could go and sit somewhere quieter.

‘I will never forgive myself,’ she said, quietly, and I could see the shame she carried at having left us.

‘I have sickness,’ she said, whispered it.

‘What sickness?’

‘The Jihadis will take me. They have powers over me.’

‘They don’t. They can’t.’ She was trembling so badly she had to hold on to a pillar. She refuses a drink of water.

‘I want to be normal,’ she says, the voice urgent.

‘You are normal,’ I say, although I too am jangled.

‘Maybe we can meet up,’ she said and for the first time, she smiled.

‘I am going home, Rebeka.’ I blurted it out, I had to.

‘They will reject you … They will turn you out,’ her voice ugly and spiteful.

‘I have a baby,’ I said, thinking it wiser to tell her.

‘A baby!’ She was aghast. It was all she wanted. A baby of her own, its heartbeat next to hers, a little companion through life.

Suddenly she announces that she must leave.

I saw her hurry, alone, a fugitive, in and out between the crowds, the sun picking up the glints of gold on her veil. She could not get away from that firmament of power quick enough. I had shattered her one hope.