Noorur-rahman

"No please, no please!"

My hand quickly went my throat, gasping for air, and I couldn't stop my tears. My body still shaking badly as I try to stabilize my breathe. Helpless I cry like a lost child. That's just too much, when will it ever stop? Even after many years, its hurt so much.  A lot.

It took me a while to gain my composure back. It's another nightmare yet again, and it sucks. With the presence of abbah's wife, my nightmare are getting out of hand. I barely got a good sleep since she came. Her presence is slowly taking me back in time. And right now my mind in stucked back in the dark ages of my life, reliving everything all over again. I closed my eyes and I was right there rooted.

Frightened!

Soaking in my own tears wasn't going to help, I have long known that. I have no salvation whatsoever. Her laughter alone was enough to scare the living hell out of me. So I do everything as she says. At that time, if she were to ask me to jump into the public well that was few feet away from house, I will have done it. That was how much Hadiza had terrorized me.  

Some months after she was married to abbah, the woman welcomed me into my personal hell as if I wasn't living one with Hajiya already. Abbah was already back to work, back then he used to travel between Abuja and Zaria. He will come to Zaria after every two weeks to see us and it only last a weekend.

When Hadiza came I thought my days as Hajiya's servant was over. I was six years old when Abbah start traveling back to Abuja, I was told he use to do that before I was born, but after my birth mother pulled her hand out of my life, Abbah was forced to stay back. He gave up his job in Abuja and stayed in Zaria to raise me, at that point he didn't trust anyone to do it.

However, when I turned six he got an offer he couldn't resist, it's a position of a manager at the bank he now owned seventy five percent of its shares. Perhaps, my personal hell started at that point when Hajiya first became my guardian. Then I run around Tudun wada to and fro, from this aunty's house to the next, I became the free errand girl of Hajiya and her married daughters around Tudun wada. I was smarter they said, that's where the manipulation began.

As if all that wasn't enough, some uncle advise abbah to get married again so I won't have to roam around like that. Of course Abbah didn't know I lived as some servant. It took a whole year for Abbah to agree to take a second wife. By then I was already seven and Hadiza was introduced in my life. At first she did everything and I was happy that someone other than my father was looking after me. And my stupid innocent mind fell in love with that woman like crazy, until one evening.

The evening that Hadiza beat the living day out of me, I was surprised, confused, hurt and scared. She made me do her own laundry the very next minute, and force me to iron the clothes. Of course even Hajiya made me do my laundry and Sa'a's, but I have never ironed anyone's clothes before, I was only seven. Hahh, that evening was just my lucky day when I end up burning one of her lace wrappers.

Oh God, how funny it sounds now. And since I had earlier received a beating, she punished me instead by making me do 'frog jump' and I jump like a frog out of water that evening.

By the end of the night I couldn't even stretch my legs properly much less stand on them. The next morning I came up with fever, which didn't do anything to saved me from the woman's wrath. And that's the very day she started throwing cold water on my poor body, "this will make your lazy bones to wake up." She had said after emptying a whole bucket of ice water. Then introduced me to a lot of dirty dishes she had used with her friends the previous afternoon.

Hadiza has thoroughly made sure I believed I was worthless, before then it's Hajiya and her gang saying all bunch of thing to make feel what Hadiza made me feel. Growing from a young age I always knew Hajiya and many of her kind doesn't like me. But Hadiza was different, she trapped me, open her arms for me, she made me trust her, accept her enough to confide in her and then she strikes, leaving her venom everywhere.