Brown-eyed girls do not cross my path very often. Girls with honeyed eyes and incredibly straight lashes, I do not often see. And so, when Hauwa and her uncle moved into the room next to ours, I was overly curious and sought to see if her eyes were real.
Hauwa was delicate, to describe her in a word. She stepped lightly, on the balls of her feet and never looked you in the eye. Her smile was quick, it vanished before you could appreciate the beauty of it, and her voice hardly rang with laughter.
The neighbours called me a lovestruck mumu. It was not hard to see why: I fetched water from the well in the compound at the same time that she did, I helped her carry her purchases from the market despite all her protests every time, and when she sat in the smoky kitchen that twelve families and three bachelors shared, I found some reason to go in there. Soon, she began to look forward to our visits, keeping an extra bucket in the line for me on the mornings that I did not wake up early, offering me masa that she made herself, and protesting halfheartedly on market days. It was a glorious August.
September 1997
School was resuming the next day, and Hauwa listened as I regaled her with tales of my antics at Igbobi College. She laughed loudly now, and her laughter rang through the kitchen in joyful peals. I was a senior in SS 2, and my jaw was starting to itch, I had also plucked a few hairs off my chest during the holiday. And I knew that Hauwa was the girl for me, the same way I knew that my father would throw a fit if my mother didn't cook starch and Banga soup twice a week. She shook her head in disbelief at my story, exaggerated in part for her benefit, the embarrassing bits left out, my friends would carry out that duty, I knew. And then, we heard shouts from the front of the compound, her uncle was back from his travels. Hauwa had said that he had gone to Kano, then Kaduna, then Jigawa and Zamfara before Nasarawa, and back to Lagos. Her hand shook slightly as she stirred the soup she was cooking, it was his favorite, she said. And then she asked me to leave. I was going to protest, but then the look in her eyes told me not to, and I extracted a promise to meet her by the well later.
She never came.
October 1997
Hauwa stopped looking at me, stopped talking to me, and no longer kept a bucket in line for me. My sisters said that she rarely spoke to them too, and she always covered her arms now, too. It was strange, and it was new and old and ugly at the same time. I tried to slip notes under the door to her uncle's apartment, I knocked sometimes when he wasn't home, but she would sit by the door and say nothing.
One day I snapped. I yelled, quite loudly for the neighbors to hear that I was done with her, and she'd never be my equal, and then I called her illiterate. I heard her gasp through the door, clear as day and full of shock, but I paid no mind, I was done.
November 1997
I returned from a school trip that had lasted a week and barely suppressed the urge to run to the kitchen to see if Hauwa was there. Instead, I greeted the neighbors and hugged my sisters and my mother. My father had a content look on his face, and that was all I needed to know, he was happy too. Mother made starch and Banga soup with dry fish for dinner, and everyone had full plates. Then, the noise started, it was a series of bangs, a raised voice, what sounded like kicks, and another bang. I raised my brows as if to ask what was going on, but everyone looked away, busying themselves with bone marrow and palm oil drippings. I shrugged but then I heard the scream. It was Hauwa, that I knew. I got up to go and see, but my father stopped me, he said that it was not my business and her uncle would not take kindly to any interference.
And so every night, Hauwa would be beaten and I would sit, helpless to do anything but listen, silently wishing for a world where I was bigger and stronger and wealthy.
January 1998
I came back from aunt Ufoma's house in Warri to a scene befitting a Nollywood movie. The entire compound was in chaos, there were people everywhere and two police vehicles were parked in the compound, along with armed police officers. The imam from the local mosque was there, as well as the Chairman of the CDA and some other members of the association. I frowned, Hauwa's uncle was in handcuffs and was sitting on the ground. Hauwa was nowhere that I could see. My sisters saw me and made shooing motions with their hands, but it was too late, her uncle had seen me and was trying to get up. There was a crazed look in his eyes and I slowly backed away, not wanting to find out what he would do, all the while wondering where Hauwa was. Everyone was talking at once and I tried to reach my mother and sisters, my father was shedding tears openly, and I grew alarmed. I started to run across to them, then I stumbled across a body. I fell, my feet entangled by a pink scarf, the body was headless and it was Hauwa's.
March 1998
Ahmad Bin Mustapha was Hauwa's husband.
The End.
My chest!
I cried at the end of this one.
This story was inspired by a girl with honeyed eyes I saw recently. She looked like an Hauwa.
And thank you to Yogendra Singh, on Pexels for providing me with a near perfect photo of my Hauwa.
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T for Tenks.
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