I wore my black dress today, the one with intricate gold embroidery down the front and on the cuffs. The one scented with sweet memories. The one Shamsu bought for me. I wore it for the first time since the tragedy and didn’t feel sad.
My friend, Hajara, called me aside and said, “Anisa, did you notice you are the only one wearing black to this wedding?”
It was her younger sister’s wedding. Her sister, who just turned 20, as if she wasn’t born before my eyes, as if I hadn’t carried her, strapped to my back, when she was a yowling baby. As if she hadn’t doused me in her pee and baby puke.
It was her wedding day, and I was the only one who wore black. Everyone else wore their brightly coloured African prints and their minted smiles. All young. Children born before my eyes.
“Well,” I said to Hajara, “what is wrong with wearing black to a wedding?”
She looked at me as if I had uttered some grave profanity. “Haba, Anisa, it is a wedding, not a mourning, you know. You should at least pretend to be happy for my sister.”
I asked her what she meant by that. Hajara, my friend, told me that not being married at 34 shouldn’t make me wear mourning garbs to weddings. That was what my friend told me, Mother. Then she laughed and said, “Oh, Anisa, I was only joking, wallahi.”
I said to her, “Hajara, don’t come here talking about marriage as if you are any happier than I am. As if your husband is not running around with those little girls in Nasarawa.”
I wore a black dress today, Mother. A black dress to a little girl’s wedding.
***
I bleed heavily sometimes. It gushes like a freshly commissioned borehole, with the gusto of newness. Newness is not a word to associate with me; for inside, I can feel my heart ageing as the clock ticks. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
I bleed and drench my pads within minutes. I changed to ultra to contain the spirited flow so it would stop seeping out and staining my skirts. All this blood. In Father’s house.
If he were here, he would have said, “Subhanallahi, Anisa, we need to find you a husband.” He would have said that some years ago if he had been around.
Sometimes, I need to see the photos to remember what he looked like. The ones he took before he came home one day and said that photographs were haram; the ones you hid in your commode when he was rummaging through drawers and collecting our photo albums and feeding them to the flames.
“These are things Iblis uses to deceive the faithful. May Allah curse him,” he said.
Then he went back in and ransacked the drawers. When he returned, the yellow-trimmed blue flames burned with the smell of Lawiza’s jean skirts, our makeup things, our CDs, and dresses he did not approve of. Your high heels, too, because they made clicking sounds when you went upstairs or walked on the pavements and men turned to look. That flame that exploded with your perfume. Allure Chanel. That sweet, tender scent was you, not this smell of malady: of drugs, of herbs and of piss.
When he fetched the radios and the TV, I said to him, “Father, what are you doing?”
“Shut up, you!” he said.“You are not supposed to be here. You are supposed to be married. I will find you a husband soon, in sha Allah.”
Then he cast these things, too, into the flame.
He turned to you and said, “Have you seen the kind of women they show dancing on TV these days? Naked women! Subhanallah!”
But you said nothing. You just cried.
I watched the flames devour the things we were; the things that were us. After it had sated itself on the remains of us and put itself out, escaping in a thin wisp of smoke that gave off a rubbery smell, I felt like a stranger in my own body. And when I looked at you, I thought I saw the same emptiness in your eyes.
But you turned your face away and said, “Anisa, sweep away this mess and come inside before the maghrib prayers.”
When America went to war in Afghanistan, Father came home and packed his things in the black rucksack with a red spider embroidered on it.
“Muslims are being killed,” he said. “I am going to jihad! Jihad, I tell you.”
We thought he was joking. But he walked out the door and said he would go, by foot, if necessary, to Afghanistan, to kill the infidels who were bombing Muslim babies in their cribs.
We waited for him to return, to walk in framed by the light of dusk. But the sun set many times, and his silhouette never darkened the door. We waited, but time went past and stretched into years.
I used to think he was dead. Sometimes, I wished he was. But the other day, our neighbour, Mustafa the cloth merchant, said, “Anisa, I saw your father in Kano.”
I asked him if he was sure, and he said, “Haba, as if I don’t know your father. I saw him with these two eyes kiri-kiri!”
“Well, what did he say?”
“Nothing. He just waved and walked away.”
I wonder what Father would say if he saw me now, if he knew how much I bleed under his roof. A woman my age shouldn’t be cleaning up this mess in her father’s house.
Sometimes, I worry; other times, I don’t. The state of my fertility is of little concern to me now. It is the fertility of my mind I worry about.
_
The Book of Remembered Things is an excerpt from Moonbeam, a collection of short stories published by Narrative Escape.
