LAURA

CHAPTER ONE

               
                                                                                                  

‘Yar mahaukaciya [Mad woman daughter] where are you or are you deaf don’t you hear me calling you’ shouted my stepmother anty zainab.

I quickly came out of the room telling her I was praying. Anty just hissed and said’ that is how you will be praying all the time without doing house chores’.

I just kept quiet and bend my head down because she can claim I have just insulted her by looking into her eyes while she was scolding me.

She threw a 500 naira note at me instructing me to go to the market to get soup ingredient and should be back as soon as possible to cook. I put on my shoe and left the house. .

I quickly walked to my grandmothers house who was already waiting for me

  ‘ Yawwa laure zo ki dauki abincin ki kaimata [come and take the food to her] I have been waiting for you all day’said my grandmother that I also call Inna . 

    ‘inna anty did not allow me to leave the house until now shiyasa [that’s why]. I told her.

I  picked the food in the black nylon bag and said goodbye to inna and left her house.

The food was my mothers which either I or inna take to her where she stays in the market stall [rumfar kasuwa]

most of the time I don’t see her there I have to go look for her to give her the food, sometimes I find her on the dumpsite [bola] picking things from it or pursuing children who sing ladidi  mahaukaciyar kan bola [ladidi mad woman  of the dumpsite] a song they made up to tease her which ends up in her chasing after the kids.

I try to stop the kids anytime I see them but they never stop instead they start calling me Yar mahaukaciya .

I was lucky today I met her in her permanent stall where she put different garbage there.

Immediately she saw me she started calling my name ummina that’s the name  she use to call me when she was still sane. She snatched the nylon containing the food from me before I could even give her and started eating immediately.

I sat down on a stone at the coner looking at her thinking what would my life had been now if my mother was still sane and ok.

Maybe I would have been in my husbands house now because all of my age mates in the village are already married. With three or two children .

At 19 years I am considered as too old to not be married because most girls get married at 14 years but my mother insisted I must finish my secondary school before marriage.

I was in SS1 when my father Abba married anty zainab as a second wife, ever since he married her my father who was a loving husband changed to his wife.

Anytime I come back from the boarding school my mother looked depressed and has lost weight and if I ask her she will say she was ok.

I started noticing the changes in my father too but couldn’t do anything but pray with my mother [Umma].

After two years my father changed completely he never acknowledge me or my mother in the house only anty.

Inna was the one how gives me money from her masa business to buy wathever I need when going back to school. My mother was a stay home wife right from day one Abba was against her selling anything because he always provides for us and now Inna did everything she could from her business for us.

And one day I came back home finally after finishing my SS3 exams happily that I was done with my secondary school and will now marry my suitor who we have been dating ever since I was 12 years .

Only to meet my mothers room empty and all her kayan daki [furnitures] gone. I was very surprised I asked anty zainab because she was the only person I met at home.

She rolled her eyes at me and said ‘ your mother has been divorced and is now mad so stop asking me stupid questions’. I could not believe her so I left for Innas house to look for my mother