Kano, 2015
On a chilly Friday evening, the earth still damp from the season’s first rains, my husband told me he was taking another wife.
Everything inside me dropped. My vision wavered. Then, stillness. I considered my response carefully, knowing I would have only one chance at a memorable initial reaction. The typical response of a well-brought-up Hausa woman – Allah ya sanya alkhairi, wish him well – never crossed my mind. Instead, I considered sarcasm: a biting I am happy for you. Or strangely enough, humour: haba, Suleiman, but you’re already married. With much more conviction, I considered the common response, histrionics: I would rather die than let you marry another wife. In the end, I chose the unconventional. My face betraying nothing, I walked out of the room without a word.
***
I first truly noticed Suleiman on Sallah day, 1983. I was eight and he was eleven. His family lived in Lagos as his father, Kawu Ahmed, was a stalwart of the National Party of Nigeria and a member of President Shagari’s cabinet. We were cousins, technically second cousins once removed; his father and my grandfather shared a grandfather. But Suleiman’s family had always been different from the rest of the extended family which had mostly remained in our ancestral home of Kano. Suleiman and his twin sister Hannatu, especially, seemed a different species: they spoke mostly English and little Hausa; they wore jeans, tops, face caps, and boots; they travelled to London during school holidays, only coming to Kano for Sallah or weddings.
That Sallah day, we gathered on the grounds of their father’s sprawling compound after the Eid prayer. In one corner of the large central courtyard, several sheep were at different stages of preparation. The freshly slaughtered were being skinned and butchered while those killed earlier were sizzling on makeshift grills and in huge oil-filled pans. Smoke and spice hung to the air and would cling to nostrils and clothes for the rest of the day.
Family members were spread across the courtyard in distinct demographic clusters. I glanced at the boys’ group and quickly looked away as my gaze met Suleiman’s. I felt a rush of confusion and excitement, as if my heart were trying to escape my chest. Chasing that feeling, I stole another look. His tightly coiled hair was split by his cap into quarter-circle afros on either side of his face, and his eyes reminded me of the butterscotch sweets Baba loved. His light skin was the type we called ja, warm with a reddish undertone like sunbaked clay.
Unlike his sister who stood at the centre of our group talking about squash at Ikoyi Club to a captivated but perplexed audience, Suleiman lingered at the edge of his boys’ group, drawing random shapes on the ground with the heel of his sandals. He caught me looking at him again and smiled before I could look away.
I did not know why I vividly remembered that Sallah day, over thirty years ago. Perhaps it was because, amidst bites of deep-fried mutton, stolen glances, and Hannatu’s animated stories of Buckingham Palace visits, something quietly shifted within me.
Perhaps it was the first time I felt something new, something like love.
***
My fledgling romantic awakening was crushed by Buhari’s coup d’état three short months later. One day Kawu Ahmed was a federal power, the next day he was a name on a phantom military list. Relief surged through me when he called Baba to say they were safe in London. Soon after a fellow London exile narrowly escaped being smuggled back into Nigeria in a crate, Kawu Ahmed and his family vanished from the UK, leaving only questions in their wake. It became a family pastime to speculate just how enormous his loot must have been to not only warrant, but sustain, nearly two decades on the run.
***
When Kawu Ahmed’s family returned in 2000, my parents, siblings, and I visited their house in Kano to welcome them back. They had returned without Hannatu, who had married an American and severed her ties of kinship. She answered to Hannah now – an echo of the name her father had given her, but with more than just the one syllable discarded. Her absence weighed heavier in that large living room than the ten people gathered within it. I could not picture Hannatu as an adult; only her high-pitched voice, bright eyes, and curly hair from that Sallah day remained. It had been seventeen years, seventeen whole years, since I had last seen her and Suleiman.
But Suleiman was there. I turned my gaze towards him, where he sat upright in an armchair next to his mother. His fair skin had deepened into a rich ochre, and he had filled out nicely. Yet beneath the now angular features and neatly trimmed beard, I saw the same eleven-year-old face I had remembered him by all these years. He looked at me then, long and deliberate. I did not tear my gaze away as I had before. Then he smiled. It was the same smile from that Sallah day – unbearably familiar.
I did not smile back, but my throat tightened. I knew with a painful certainty that it was over between me and Mahmoud.
***
Mahmoud – all aquiline nose, thick wavy hair, and light skin. The kind of man romance novels cast as an Arab sheikh. Mahmoud and I were engaged; his father had asked mine for my hand less than a month before Suleiman returned, and had paid the kudin gaisuwa. His love was as steady as his visits, as gentle as his manner. I had never known a single doubt with him.
And yet, there I was, so changed by a smile that I embraced a selfishness I had not thought myself capable of. I could not explain it, how something I felt as a child could resurge so loudly in an instant seventeen years later. Perhaps it was like the dry riverbed that sits cracked and silent through the longest drought, only to swell at the first sight of rain.
The evening I ended it, Mahmoud had come to me smiling. It was a different kind of smile than the one that had undone me, but it stopped me all the same. My voice wavered when I spoke. My tears flowed when his smile slackened with realisation. He accepted my decision – eyes glistening, voice rough – and left my life as quietly as he had entered it.
***
It was common, back when my friends and I were getting married, to secure the husband’s promise not to take another wife. Safiya’s fiancé had agreed. Nusaibah’s engagement had collapsed when hers refused. But even when would-be husbands agreed, a man’s word was rarely final. Savvy women knew there existed such things as breach of contract and force majeure.
What if he is ennobled and his Emir offers him a royal wife?
What if you turn out to be barren?
Or, most dangerously, what if he falls in love?
Savvy, I was not. I had no such fears. Suleiman had lived most of his life abroad and was British by birth, American by naturalization. Though it was never spoken of, he had a white American Christian brother-in-law. How much more westernized can a Hausa man get?
His mother was the only wife.
A second wife did not merit any thought; I would be Suleiman’s only wife, barring death or divorce.
I would be his only current wife.
***
The days that followed Suleiman’s announcement were stripped of words. I had asked the children to extend their stay at their grandparents’ so I could seclude myself in my room in an I’tikaf of sorts – not so much for the spiritual retreat but to avoid Suleiman. But even in my isolation, or perhaps because of it, I could think of nothing else. Whenever my mind tried to stray from his impending marriage, it was pulled back, as if by gravity. Sleep, when it came at all, was fractured. I marvelled that this calamity could befall me. It was not a tragedy in the grand scheme of things – but it was a tragedy, nonetheless.
In between endless thoughts, fragments of that evening surfaced with vivid clarity.
The rain petering out and the false tranquillity that followed.
His hands folded as if performing wudhu, cleansing his sins.
The time, almost maghrib, 6:32 on the oversized clock hanging on a loose bolt over Suleiman’s head.
And the sudden, dark wish that the clock should fall and end it all.
***
When Suleiman sought me and spoke, I listened. When he tried to explain, I blinked. He said things like, you know I love you, it wasn’t planned, and I never meant to hurt you. I said nothing, retreating into myself where he could not follow. One night, he came into my room and silently got into my bed. I remained on my prayer mat until his breathing evened. I then stood over him and watched him sleep, his chest rising and falling easily. I wondered what kind of man could rest so deeply in the bed of a woman he had wounded. I wanted to shake him awake, shout, and curse him. Instead, I folded my prayer mat and hijab, grabbed my phone, and slipped out of the room.
Suleiman found me in our eldest daughter’s room the following morning, lying in bed but awake as ever. He knelt beside the bed, eyes brimming, hands wringing. I turned away from him, and my eyes caught the family picture that sat on our daughter’s dresser, the gold frame reflecting the morning light. I let the silence stretch between us until it hardened enough to shake him.
He called it cruel. He called it unbearable. He called me unfair.
I looked at him then. The only son, and now only child, of the great Alhaji Ahmed Minjibir. His unlined face, his soft hands. The ease with which he moved through life, falling in love as he pleased. And this was unbearable? I was unfair?
I almost laughed. Oh Suleiman, how delicate you are.
***
The next time Suleiman spoke to me, it was to tell me he was officially engaged. He came into my room with a sigh, lingering momentarily on the threshold. He sat upright in the armchair by the dresser and rested his hands on his knees. His words were mechanical, as if he had rehearsed them, just like the evening he told me he was taking another wife. His father had paid the kudin gaisuwa that morning, he said; the marriage was as good as sealed.
That night, I finally responded. Not in words.
I packed an overnight bag and left.
***
Mahmoud’s sister Naja came to my parent’s house on a condolence visit. She was the one who introduced Mahmoud and me. Unlike my relationship with her brother which was long dead, ours was in its death throes. That afternoon though, Naja had come to kill it off.
“You wouldn’t be in this situation if you had married Mahmoud.”
Glares from other friends who had come to commiserate did nothing to dampen her delight at my comeuppance. She sat across from me; her gaze fixed on me as if looking for the crack that would validate her efforts. We were best friends once; she had been so happy about
Mahmoud and me. We would be sisters, imagine that. Perhaps she was more crushed than Mahmoud was when it ended.
I watched her now and felt something close to pity even as she tried to inflict wounds she thought I deserved. I sat quietly as she did what she came to do, and hoped that once she was done, the weight would be lifted off us both.
***
Naja’s was one of a million other opinions, whispered and spoken, that I had to contend with.
But her mother is not an only wife. Why does she think she can’t share a man? Is she better than her mother? That was a common refrain.
How can you leave your house and husband for another woman? I heard that one quite often too.
Offers of charms capable of dissuading Suleiman from marrying again were not uncommon either. But one such offer raised a few eyebrows when it came from an aunt whose husband had married three more wives after her, the full quota allowed under Islamic law.
“Why didn’t it work for you?” My sister Salamatu asked, her lack of restraint shaped by the immunity held by last-born children.
The woman’s hands stiffened mid-air and her mouth hung open. She re-tied her scarf with jerky movements. “I have no need for the medicine,” she said. “I am content with three co-wives.”
***
Living at home was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, and Mama was the primary source of that discomfort. At first, she sympathized, telling me stories of my own father’s betrayal when he married our second Mama and the cold indifference she felt when he married our third and, for now, last Mama.
Sometimes, she would recount a particularly egregious offence, like when Baba took his second wife for Umrah and then Hajj in the same year, breaking the unspoken rule of one pilgrimage per wife annually. She would shake her head, pain flickering across her face before delivering her favourite male-bashing proverb: if a woman elevates her husband to the position of a father, she is bound to die an orphan.
When a month passed with me still under her roof, Mama began to cajole. Eventually, she began to ignore me, which would have been fine had she not shown her impatience in other ways. She lectured the unmarried and perpetually inattentive Salamatu on how to be a good wife in my presence. She began to run the backup generator behind my room with alarming frequency. She even instructed her housegirl to burn turaren wuta in the corridor outside my room despite my asthma.
“I haven’t burned incense in weeks because of her and my house is musty,” she snapped, when I sent the girl away with the offending pot of hot coal and perfumed sandalwood. “Besides, she hasn’t had an attack in years!”
I needed to escape – but where to? My only other option was not an option. So, I remained locked in a cold war with Mama, a war I was desperately losing.
***
Suleiman’s family frequently contacted mine with the hope of reconciliation. But instead of the non-apologies excusing a man’s behaviour that typically formed these sessions,
I was scolded outright. He was just a Muslim man exercising his God-given right, after all.
How dared I defy that?
Suleiman’s mother did not say much the one time she came to visit, over a month into my exile. Mama apologised profusely while Mummy and I sat quietly on opposite ends of the same settee. She was still as stunning as in those halcyon days before their exile, though time and loss had irrevocably dimmed something in her.
Before she left, she looked directly at me for the first time since she came and offered me a prayer – “may Allah choose the best path for you.”
***
Three months later, one of two things happened: either Allah did not accept my mother-in-law’s prayer, or He did – and the best path for me was to have a co-wife.
Suleiman came to Baba’s house the morning of his wedding. I did not want to see him, but the capillaries in Mama’s eyes were strained so I went to meet him in the main parlour. I had not seen him since the night I walked out of his house, though he tried, in those early days of my exile, to see me. I had refused each time. I did not look at him when I entered, but I saw from the corner of my eye that he had stood up, as if waiting for judgment, or for an embrace I would not give.
I sat in the farthest chair, Baba’s Aljazeera chair. Suleiman walked the few steps to sit across from me. I could not help but glance at him when he called my name. He said it the way he always had, so softly, almost reverent, the way he said it even seconds before he broke my heart.
He clenched and unclenched his hands, his mouth opening and closing without a word. I had to look away. Against my will, my heart had begun to stir. Was that all it took? The sting in my eyes was sudden. I reeled the tears back in, the shield I had put up against Suleiman now turning inward.
“Leave.”
The word came out of me as soon as he found his tongue.
“Please.” He stood up again, stepping towards me.
I left the room before he reached me.
***
Suleiman married the daughter of the Kano state governor. With Suleiman also the child of a prominent man, their wedding was an extravaganza funded by taxpayer money. I could not avoid the spectacle, so I indulged. I reactivated my Facebook account.
The first photo that loaded was of Suleiman and his bride. I clicked to view the likes and my heart twisted. Suleiman’s cousins – our cousins – making their loyalties clear.
And Naja.
Her profile picture was one of those staged family portraits: her at the centre, three children in matching shadda surrounding her, her admiring husband smiling like a man content with his portion. I knew what I would find when I clicked her profile, but I did it anyway: Mahmoud, dignified and laughing on his wedding ten years ago, no trace of the heartbreak I had once caused. The feeling was hard to name but should not have been sharp enough to sting, should have been as pixelated as the photo itself. I tried to imagine myself standing there beside Mahmoud, but I could not, even now.
Then the full wedding album captioned officially married loaded, pulling me away from Naja’s feed. I scrolled through the pictures as one possessed, pressing the wound often and hard, never sure if it was to diffuse the pain or deepen it. In the cover photo, Suleiman, in his blinding white babban riga, was gazing at his bride, the corners of his eyes crinkled and his smile wide.
If there had been any doubt, this was proof that the man in the photo was no longer mine.
What could the Suleiman I knew possibly see in this slight girl beyond her polished beauty? What could he see in someone weighed down with gold layered from neck to chest, wrists to elbows? Her narrow chest could never house the kind of laughter mine held, a laugh Suleiman once described as robust and claimed to love. She did not know the eleven-year-old boy from that Sallah day and would never recognise his smile in Suleiman.
Looking at those photos, I felt the finality of my loss settle over me like a white shroud. For the first time since that cold Friday evening, I wept.
***
A few days after the wedding, Mama came into my room and sat on the bed near my feet. She broke her silence, firmly urging me to go back to Suleiman – it is done, you have lost, she seemed to say. Met with silence, she raised her palms skyward in a weary entreaty to Allah to grant me wisdom. I whispered Aameen, loud enough to hear but low enough for plausible deniability. She looked at me, shoulders slumped, eyes heavy, the lines on her face more pronounced. I watched her rise and shuffle out of the room. Tears threatened again but did not spill; I had already cried myself dry.
But Mama’s exit was not defeat; it was a retreat. Later that evening, Mama sent Salamatu to tell me she had decided to repurpose my room. I told her to tell Mama to save her strength and Baba’s money.
I got up from the bed shortly after Salamatu left and made my way to Mama’s room. NEPA took light as soon as I opened the door to my room. I thought of waiting for the generator to come on but decided to go ahead before I lost my nerve. It was dark, but I had made this journey so many times, down the corridor that straddled the girls’ rooms, across the women’s living room, past the anteroom of Mama’s bedroom, and into her room. I had walked those steps over the years, to report my sisters, to tell Mama she had guests, to relay a message from Baba, to confess, to apologize, to seek comfort from fear, pain. I walked the same path now, not entirely certain why.
The generator was switched on, the main one this time, and my path was suddenly flooded with light. I found Mama on her prayer mat, doing dhikr on her tasbih. She raised her head to look at me, standing in the doorway, on the threshold. When she raised her eyebrows in question, the words came out.
“You have won.”
The silence stretched as she contemplated her response, so much so that I thought she had not heard me. She eventually broke it, only to offer platitudes: Suleiman, single or married, was best for me. She went through the same thing and stayed, she said, and it had been thirty years and she was still here.
Thirty years and she was still here. But it had been thirty years of warfare, of counting hajjs and umrahs per wife per year, of battles over territory that even when won, could not be held for long.
I continued to look at Mama as her justifications became fevered, as she repeated I am still here or some variant of it, like a mantra, like a reassurance. When she eventually quieted down, she was looking at her folded hands, the tasbih cradled within.
The many times I had made the walk to Mama’s room, I had always left with something.
Tonight, I left with an answer – just not the one I came for.
***
They say in the absence of choices, a thing previously overlooked becomes enticing. That may be so, but there is always a choice, even when the world offers none. I once chose Suleiman blindly. Now, I am clear-eyed.
I did not wait for the elders to escort me back, or to negotiate the new shape my marriage would take. I had nothing left for ceremony. I packed the overnight bag I had left with, now grown to three suitcases, and returned to my husband’s house.
About the Author:
R. Makama lives in Abuja, Nigeria. “His Only Current Wife” is her first published work of fiction.
Photo by Steven Erixon on Unsplash