Moments later the truck rumbled past, draping her in a chalky cloud. She was once again invisible.
CHAPTER 34
My Dear Henry,
Regarding the transfer of funds into your account.
I'm afraid there's been a problem...
CHAPTER 35
As she walked into Zaria, the traffic increased, with battered cars and wheezing buses funnelling into the city. On the outskirts, she made a hesitant foray into a motor park that was crowded under an overpass. Hawkers with wares stacked high on their heads were moving among the trucks and long-haul buses, singing out their offers, haggling with passengers.
She had to be mindful of former
almajiri,
the street boys who roamed the motor parks and flyovers of the north in feral packs. The youngest sons of indigent families, the
almajiri
began as beggars and foragers, but often grew into full-time thieves and freelance thugs. By the time they reached their teens, many of them were already part of an ad-hoc army-for-hire. Extortionists and vote-rigging politicians alike relied on them. And no sooner had the fear begun to rise inside her than she spotted several of these former
almajiri
prowling the perimeter, planks with nails driven through resting casually on their shoulders. She ducked away before they noticed her, choosing the busiest crowds of people to squeeze through, fighting down the panic. Street boys were territorial, and a bustling motor park like this would be clearly demarcated, right down to specific bus stalls and taxi stands.
She needed to get deeper into the city.
The main road ran through the Sabon Gari, "the strangers' quarters," a sprawling neighbourhood that housed the city's motley assortment of outsiders and unbelievers: southern Christians and members of smaller pagan clans, Yoruba traders and Tiv day labourers.
Rumours of dark magic haunted the Sabon Gari,
juju
spells that could make one mad with blood lust. In the Sabon Gari, the stalls served millet wine and back-tavern gin with a brazen disregard for sha'ria strictures. Banners beside the doors advertised Gulder Beer and Star Ale with hand-painted signs above that read
MERRY
YOURSELF GUEST SPOT!
and
REFRESH YOURSELF COOL SPOT.
Codes that even she could crack. Alcohol, although banned in the sha'ria states, was tolerated in the Sabon Gari enclaves. Though she was very much a stranger, she didn't belong in the Sabon Gari, and she knew it.
It was now late afternoon, and traffic was backed up, drivers blaring their horns in impotent anger. Queen Elizabeth II Road curved past the sha'ria courthouse, and her chest tightened as she went by, fighting the urge to run.
Directly across from the courts was the raucous clatter of a hotel bar. Sha'ria law on one side, Western sins on the other—each pretending the other didn't exist. She skirted the hotel grounds, where a muddle of foreign words leaked out from barroom doorways, punctuated with sudden bursts of laughter. These would be Nigerian businessmen from the Christian south, or traders from Ghana; there might even be a few pink-faced
batauri
, what other Nigerians called
oyibos.
She'd heard how these
batauri,
foolish and indiscriminate, would fling their money about as though it were dried petals. If she could find a
batauri
businessman basting in alcohol and blasphemy, she might be able to induce a few nairas' worth of pity money... She edged closer, but a security guard spotted her and cut across, his path intersecting hers, his voice yelling out in anger as she quickly withdrew.
Beyond the hotel grounds, a heavy-set woman minded a fruit stall at a small market. Wealthy, given the quality of her head scarf and bracelets. She scowled at the girl but allowed her to come nearer. The girl pleaded softly, speaking Hausa, her voice dry with dust, palms held outward in supplication.
"Faranta zuciya,"
she whispered.
"Faranta zuciya
..."
"Don' me?" the
woman demanded.
Why?
"
Don' me?"
said the girl. "
Don' me?"
In answer, she cupped her belly, looked back at the woman, eye to eye.
The market woman snorted at this, but then, with the slightest of movements, she gestured with her chin toward an overripe mango on the ground beside her stall. The fallen fruit, bloated with sweetness, was shrouded in a hover of tiny flies, and the market woman looked the other way as the girl retrieved its pulpy weight, water can balanced precariously as she knelt.
She crouched in a doorway, ate greedily, right down to the rind.
The sweetness would get her through a few more steps, and as long as she always took that next step, she would never fall.
The day was seeping away. The clay and concrete of Zaria glowed rust-red in the light of a dying sun. People were flocking home, trying to beat the darkness, and she followed them over the rail tracks and across a girder bridge above the milk-tea waters of the Kubani River.
She had entered Tudun Wada, the colonial section of the city, built by the British, its regal facades now faded. As businesses emptied for the day, chophouse light bulbs flickered on.
It's not safe here.
She could feel this in her belly, and she began to look for a place to hide. She found it along the water's edge, by the marshy shoreline of the river: undeveloped and littered with rubbish and small plots of planted maize. She threaded her way along squelchy grass, avoided voices and well-trodden paths, sought refuge in the burned shell of a Peugeot taxi where she curled herself in, to once again wait out the night.
All through the evening she heard laughing male voices passing by and then—the laughter was upon her. Voices outside the taxi frame. A pause, followed by the sudden sound of piss hitting the side of the car. She cupped her belly to calm it, as though the flutter inside might somehow give her away, and she waited for the moment to pass. The voices grew fewer and farther away until all she heard were whispered winds and the sound of a nearby goat ripping up grass.
She fell into sleep, like a body down a well.
CHAPTER 36
She woke to beauty: the wailing cry of the
muezzin
calling out to the faithful from minaret heights.
She walked down to the water's edge and bathed in a hidden bend of river. Sifted through cobs of fallen maize along the shore.
No way to cook them, and no time to let them soak in water to soften, but she tucked several into the folded pockets of her robe anyway, would chew on the kernels later if she had to; it might fool her body into believing it had been fed.
A soft light had settled on the musky riverside, and she followed a path back to the bridge. The sleepy streets were filling with worshippers, men in white robes and embroidered prayer caps.
The dusty rasp of a rooster could be heard across rooftops. She entered the Old City, its walls catching the morning light, the sun bringing a texture and warmth to its surfaces. These city walls had stood for a thousand years. Crumbling, true, but formidable still.
Patched over and propped up, with goats now grazing atop and squatters perched in ragged tents along their mud-brown heights, the Zaria walls were more mounds than bastions. But they stood in testament to a past rich in war and trade. Amina, Queen of Zaria, whose walls these had been, had once controlled an empire that stretched as far as the Niger River. And wherever Queen Amina's armies moved, she had built walled cities,
ribat
fortresses,
birni
defenceworks.
"We were the reason they built these walls."
The voice of one of her aunts floated to the surface. The girl in indigo had been here before, at these walls, in this town. It would have been the farthest south her family had ever come, back when they were still trading and she was still a child.
It must have been on caravan.
From the flamingos of Bula Tura in the north to these crumbling clay walls encircling Zaria's Old City, the range of her clan's travels had been shrinking ever since.
She looked up at the walls, reached out, laid her hand against them. It surprised her, how cool they were to the touch. Powdery on the surface, but with a solid mass behind them. She remembered entering the Old City on the sway of camels, but it must have been horseback. The first daughter of a junior wife, she had been spoiled by the older wives, treated as a communal granddaughter.
She remembered metal wares and cooking pots clanking against animal flanks, the bundled rolls of cloth and the singsong laughter of her aunts calling out. Laughing as they entered the gates. "They built these walls to keep us out. But we are here. We are here."
There was a time when her people had wrested control of the salt trade from the Hausa and the Fulani, from the Kingdom of Sokoto itself, had controlled the Sahel trade as far as Timbuktu.
"The Sultans of Sokoto kept watch for the dust of our hooves."
Horse riders in a land of plodding camels. Lions of the Sahel.
We were raiders. Traders, unfettered and free. Walls cannot stop those who are free.
The words echoed in her as she walked through the Old City. But she knew as well as anyone that the lions of the northern savannah were long gone, lingering now only in folk songs and protected game reserves far distant. Her kinsmen had moved farther and farther away from the past, until the past itself was only a story, a distant murmur, like voices on the other side of a wall.
We count our wealth in cattle. But there was a time we counted it in gold.
Children chased a soccer ball across a vacant lot, robes flying, as grandmothers beat the night's dust from caked rugs. Mothers and daughters were hand-wringing washing in backyards as the
muezzin
call to prayer continued.
She followed the flow of white-clad men into a vast courtyard. These were the grounds of the Emir's Palace. A grand slab of prestige, the surface of the Emir's Gate was embedded with ceramic tiles—she remembered that, too, the intricate interwoven patterns as familiar to her as a dream. The lower courtyard was still in shade, but the slant of the sun had caught the upper mosaic, making the ceramics glow like illuminated embroidery. Like jewels embedded in a scabbard.
"Forward! Move forward!"
The emir's guards, leathery men in scarlet robes and turbans, stood at the gate keeping watch on the crowds. She was jostled from behind by young men hurrying past, and she steadied her jerry can, forced herself to become calm, took comfort in her own lack of significance. Swallows darted through as the crowds pushed toward the mosque. The mosque was directly across from the palace, and the minarets and dome were catching the light now as well.
She hadn't chosen this site by chance; she had followed the worshippers with intent. Keeping back from the main entrance, not wanting to overstep her bounds, she stopped at an alleyway instead, where footsteps and bodies were forced to slow down. She put her jerry can on the ground and stood, hands together, palms out, whispering a reminder to those who passed that almsgiving was as much a pillar of faith as prayer.
"Zakat
," she whispered.
"Faranta zuciya. Zakat. "
The men who streamed by in billowing pants and flowing vests, the cloth pristine and white, were wearing their finest caps, snug on head. Most ignored her pleas or pretended not to hear. Some were annoyed, others irritated. But a few good souls dug into pouchlike pockets to hand her a few kobo or crumpled naira as they passed, careful not to touch her hand.
The sound of trumpets. A stir in the far court. The emir himself was making his way across from the palace to the mosque, a weekly walk through the crowded courtyard, his black turban seeming to float above the crowds. A cannon was fired to herald his appearance, a single reverberating boom. As a retinue of scarlet-turbaned guards forced a path in front of him, the emir clasped hands, accepted wishes of good health and longevity, nodded patiently at hurried accounts of matters personal and pressing, smiled in benevolence.
For one mad moment she considered pushing through the throng of bodies and throwing herself on the emir's mercy—but the crowds were too thick and her body too weak. The courtyard of worshippers now emptied into the mosque, and she hoisted her half-empty jerry can back onto her head and moved on.
With Friday prayers came Friday classes. At a schoolyard in the Old City, boys in short sleeves and short pants and girls in long dresses, impeccably clean, gathered under a nearby tree, tablets in hand, laughing and pushing while their teacher peered at them over half-lens reading glasses, frowning them into silence.
"Ina kwana,"
he said.
"Ina kwana!"
they chimed back.
Fulani girls, wrapped in head scarves as all girls were once they reached the walking age, hung back, shyer than the others, but the Hausa boys were boisterous and full of boasts. One of their classmates was struggling at the front, writing out a passage of scripture with grave determination. The others laughed at his efforts, and he grinned sheepishly until the teacher finally rose and waved the student away amid more laughter. As the girl in indigo passed, she heard the furious scratch of chalk on board, and the teacher saying
S"ee? As such."
This was followed by the sound of recitation, the children chanting out the words, the lessons growing fainter with every step.
Memories of her own tablet school instructions. Of wooden boards and Arabic scripture in outdoor schools. The various
malams
who had led the lessons, some gentle, some stern, all now fading as well. Geometry class and the laws of intersecting lines. The
malam
using a wooden compass, drawing a perfect circle on the chalkboard, and then using a measuring stick to slice across it, as clean as a razor.
