The Second Path

Chapter 1

My attention drifted away from my judgmental mind once I saw an NYSC dressed female corper entering the gate of Mallam Audu's house with her red handbag. Her name was Miss Rosey, a delta woman who was teaching English Studies as an NYSC corper in my school. She was an endowed and really fair woman, only because she bleached. She always carried a blonde weave on her hair, claiming she wanted to look like Etta James.

According to gossips on the street, she used to do "trade" with Mallam Audu. Nobody referred the man-to-woman action as "business" or "knacks" anymore because they didn't want it to be too obvious. If you know, you know.

After Miss Rosey shuts Mallam Audu's gate, I heard my house front door open and I looked through my window to see Kaka Mansur, my grandmother, walking out of the house with her large black sack-bag. Every time she carried that bag, it meant she was going for work.

Kaka was a cook. Not for an office or a school or a restaurant. She was a house cook for Alhaji Maitama, a man from Kano who moved in with his large family last year. She always left early in the morning and came back in the evening before dark. She worked in the Alhaji's house everyday except for Sundays and public holidays.

I got down from my bed and rushed to the living room. I wanted to follow her to work today, even though she never allowed me to. Not once. But I was on strike now and there was nothing else for me to do.

The house door was open when I got to the living room and this gave me the opportunity to call on her before she leaves the gate.

"Kaka!" I shouted but she didn't turn back and walked out of the gate door quickly before shutting it. I knew she heard me but pretended not to answer. She knew I would want to follow her to work now that my school was on strike.

Before I could run after her, I stopped once my eyes caught a sheet of paper, from kaka's everyday notepad, on the rectangular wooden centre table. Kaka often left notes for me whenever there was something urgent before she leaves the house.

Unlike most grandmother and granddaughter relationships, Kaka and I were not that close. Our communication was quite poor, mostly because she was mute. If she had something to tell me, she would write it down on a small pad that she carried in a small green purse bag that she carried everywhere. None of us understood or learnt the sign language for the dumb either. So we only communicated through paper.

I picked up the paper from the table and she wrote:
'Prepare masa for Alhaji Maitama and it will be collected this afternoon'.

*****

After taking a short nap, I began preparing Alhaji Maitama's masas from the tuwo rice Kaka soaked and grounded yesterday as I began to fry the first batch of 6 masas, waiting for the bottom parts to turn golden brown.

I was preparing it at the back of our house, which we called the big kitchen. We used firewood to cook outside as it made it way faster to cook big meals, while for the small meals, we made use of the kerosene stove in the small kitchen inside the house.

The back yard was quite small as the whole bungalow building of the house covered the whole view of the front compound. There was a big oak tree that took most of the space of the backyard and I have always wanted to cut it down for more space but kaka said it was our grandfather's favourite tree before he died.

As I sat down on a stool and watched the masas fry on top of the fire wood, I heard our house gate door swing open as there was a loud bang against the gate wall. From the sound of the loud bang, I knew who it was. It was not Kaka neither was it Alhaji Maitama.