Ga Cikakken Bayanin Labarin

There is a moment in every long trial when the waiting ends, and for  most people that is the worst moment of all. For Shanono, it is the opposite. The judge’s gavel comes down, the   court rises, and she reaches for the dread that has sat on her chest since the day before. It is not there. In its place, to her own surprise, is something steady. That is how Na Faɗo Daga Bene Na Zarce Rijiya Book 2, the Hausa novel by Badi’at Ibrahim (Mrs Bukhari), begins. It opens with a woman discovering that the worst has already happened and that she is still standing.

She does not use her calm to protest. She uses it to give orders. A small child, Salis, is pressed into the arms of Sabira, and Shanono tells her to look after him and to pray for them. Twenty days in prison, she says, is not death, and there may be a lesson waiting there. Her  older children are with Yaya Use, who is being taken away beside her, and she asks Sabira to keep the rest close so they can return to school. She thanks Habiba Bala. She says all of this with the police already at her wrists, and it sounds less like a defendant’s plea than like a mother arranging the house before she leaves for a long journey.

Then she looks across the room and sees Kaila, and Kaila is smiling.

The novel does not rush past that smile, and neither does Shanono. She tells   herself quietly that people will be surprised when she comes out, and the line works as a promise, a warning, or both. Around her the courtroom is breaking up into its separate noises. Hajiyayye is talking sharply, egged on by her relatives. The lawyer keeps repeating that everything will be set right. Yaya Use is shaking, clearly lost in the shock of it, and keeps saying that she is dead and finished. Shanono answers all of it with one word, Alhamdulillah. She says she has no grand prayers left, only thanks, and she wonders whether the trials of her marriage have been arriving in stages for a reason.

What gives her narration its edge is that she refuses the comfort the lawyer offers. He wants to tell her it will all be settled. She would rather it were not, because in her own judgment a prison cell holds more freedom than Kaila’s house does. The only thing that truly frightens her is what her children will go through while she is gone. Everything else, she says, she could have faced alone. The question that keeps returning to her, and which the story seems set to chase, is why Hajiyayye is doing this. It cannot be about Kaila, she reasons, because Hajiyayye knows Shanono barely spares him a glance. So what is it about? She puts the question to the reader directly, and the novel has not yet answered it.

The charge itself is a hard one. The court has held Shanono and Yaya Use over the loss of the child Hajiyayye was carrying, and the case is set for a final sitting on the twentieth of the coming month. The story does not ask readers to take that charge on trust. In another part of the house, a different woman says plainly that she does not see how anyone could have caused such a loss, because nobody touched Hajiyayye’s stomach. She also reminds the room that the quarrel that started everything was not even with the person now being accused. Readers are left holding two versions of one event, and only one of them has been through a court.

Then the story takes Shanono through the gate, and it does not look away. She is led into a long hall where each woman states her name and the offence that brought her. She is placed in a waiting room for those whose cases have not been decided, among women of every age, and she weeps when she sees how many of them there are. It had not occurred to her that so many women end up here. The first night, she says, felt like a night in her own grave. The food is bad enough that some inmates pay the guards to buy seasoning for them. She says, with a bitterness that is almost funny, that Kaila’s house now seems to have held a little mercy after all.

Her body suffers as well. She is nursing, and the pain and swelling bring on a fever so high that the visitors who find her are frightened. Habiba Bala and the lawyer arrange for her to be taken to the prison clinic, where she is given medicine. She goes ten days without washing, and she describes the discomfort without decoration, including the blood and the smell and the shame that came with them. When she finally gets cold water on the eleventh day, the other women have already begun to complain. She says she cannot describe prison life, and then goes on to describe enough of it that the reader understands. She would not wish the place on her worst enemy, she says, and yet it has woken her up. A woman who walked in clinging to a marriage walks around inside it with open eyes.

The news that reaches her through the lawyer is mixed, and the novel handles it with care. There is, he says, a trace of success in the investigation. Her baby is being given formula by Sabira. Her school-age children have been excused from their classes with a story about a sudden trip. But Kaila has gone to Sabira’s house and taken the children back under his own roof, and the lawyer cannot soften what that means. It is his family’s house, he says. If Hajiyayye wanted harm to come to them, he would let her. He says this and then is cut off by a guard calling time. That interrupted warning is one of the strongest hooks in the opening, because it leaves her, and the reader, with a fear that cannot be argued down.

The people outside are not idle, but they are not allowed in. Baffa and Inno arrive, led by Yaya Karime, and are turned away at the gate. They can only leave their names, and Shanono listens for one name in particular and never hears it. Kaila does not come. By the time the story reaches the eleventh day, she has stopped waiting for him.

The story’s second voice belongs to the house she has left behind, and it is the novel’s cleverest choice. Bilkisa returns from work and finds the children huddled in the parlour, crying. She feeds them, quietly, before anyone can stop her. When Kaila walks in and shouts at the children to get out, she does not let it pass. She tells him that one day he will do the same to her own children. She says she is tired of the marriage and asks him to let her go home to her town. Kaila’s first answer is to try to hold her with his stare, which he knows has worked on every woman he has married. When that fails, he reaches for a story, and it is a cruel one. He describes the absent woman as unclean and claims he can hardly bear to come near her.

Bilkisa does not buy it. She asks whether he ever treated the problem, whether he took his wife to a hospital, whether he gave her any medicine at all, or whether he simply settled for insulting her. She sees, and the narration makes us see, that he has done none of what she lists. His reply is the polished kind of excuse that sounds more reasonable than it is: she lives under his roof, he does not starve her or the children. From that day on, the story says, Kaila could not get Bilkisa to look at him. She feeds the children herself. She has the housemaid bathe them and wash their clothes, and the children, who had looked grey with neglect, begin to glow again.

The scene is a good example of what Mrs Bukhari’s writing does best. A marriage is never shown as a single quarrel between husband and wife. It is a household with several women inside it, each watching the others and keeping her own accounts. Bilkisa’s anger is half about Shanono and half about her own future, and she knows it. When she says the line about her own children, she is describing a fear she has not yet found the courage to act on.

Meanwhile Kaila does what he seems to do when a house goes wrong. He leaves. He travels to Port Harcourt, where he opens a large business that seems to sell grilled meat, leaves staff to run it, and later goes back to supervise. The narration observes that southern customers have a taste for it and that the business is doing well. It is a small detail, but it carries weight. While two women sit in a prison cell for a charge that others in his own home doubt, the man at the centre of their marriage is counting money in another city.

In the second week of the imprisonment, Sabira, Habiba Bala and Yaya Karime turn up at the house and redo Shanono’s room. They bring a full set of chairs, a carpet, a long sofa, new curtains and an air conditioner, and the children are so thrilled that they jump with joy. Hajiyayye, watching from the main parlour, grinds her teeth and wonders how anyone she has humiliated could end up with furniture finer than her own. It is the novel’s one warm act of defiance, and it lands because it is practical. These women cannot free Shanono, but they can make her return less bleak.

Her own relatives are far less composed. When Baffa and Inno hear what happened from Yaya Use’s husband, they are devastated. They are refused entry when they try to see the children. Baffa lashes out at Use for ever going to that house and spoiling the marriage the family had worked so hard to keep together. Inno goes to Hajiyayye’s parents to apologise on the family’s behalf and is met with taunts. She still goes on to the house, still waits for an answer that never comes, and leaves with her body worn out, but only after she has gone inside to see the children. There is no villain in this part of the story who is not also someone’s relative, and almost everyone is acting out of a tangled mix of fear, shame, and love.

By the time the story reaches the day of the final sitting, the reader has seen the case from three sides. It has been told by the accused, by a wife in the same house, and by the relatives scrambling outside. When the prison van delivers Shanono to court, Inno and Baffa are the first faces she recognises. Habiba Bala, Sabira, Yaya Karime, Yaya Use’s husband and her daughter Hajara are there too. Her tears start before she can stop them, and Yaya Use cries aloud. Female guards stand on each side of them. Across the room, Kaila sits among Hajiyayye’s relatives. Bilkisa sees Shanono and gets to her feet. The excerpt ends there, with Bilkisa moving toward her.

It is a book best suited to readers who like family drama that stays close to the kitchen, the parlour and the women who run them. The voice is plain, direct, and often sharply funny, even when the subject is bleak, and it addresses the reader as though it expects to be answered. It speaks of marriage, the rivalry between wives, the weight of an accusation, and the quiet bravery of women who take sides when no one asked them to. It is not a romance in the usual sense, and it makes no attempt to pass as one.

Some questions remain unanswered after these pages. No one has yet explained why Hajiyayye is so determined, and Shanono’s own question to the reader hangs in the air. The lawyer has said there is some chance, but not what it depends on. Bilkisa has said she wants to leave, but she has not left. And the twentieth of the month is coming, with Kaila still in the room and Shanono promising that people will be surprised.

Some women are locked out of their own homes long before anyone locks them in a cell, and the cell is where one of them finally gets to hear her own thoughts.

Open Na Faɗo Daga Bene Na Zarce Rijiya Book 2 on Booktoknovels.com and see what Shanono does with the twenty days, and who is standing beside her when the gavel falls again: https://booktoknovels.com/