Ari
Nostalgia, I play with that word in my head. These days I wonder so much in my mind that I find it unnecessary to leave my apartment. Preferring to stay indoors mulling over stuff and experiencing nos-tal-gia. Hahaha what is nostalgia to a common village girl? a brown hussy from a very dreary corner of the world.
Who allowed us to feel those things? All we are made to feel is Joy, and pain. Those mundane feelings that do not take much from the mind. I must admit that Joy is a rarity. I am sure millions of years ago our ancestors cursed us all into unhappiness. And then that’s the word again Us. The word that landed me right where I am. That collective word, used by selfish people to further their selfish interests you’re doing it for us. There is no us! Just Ari here, suffering, lost. No Mama, no Meda, no village boys to sing and cheer, nothing!
***
My left leg swings left and drops with a dusty thud just as the other leg flies into the air. My little arms swing to the left, to the right and Clap! The Ten Ten was in full swing. Elo moved her arms quickly trying to catch me and kick me out of the game but I was a master, an undefeated master. Everyone in the village knew me for my prowess in Ten Ten for my fast thinking brain that never failed me.
“Ari!” My mother’s voice stopped my arm mid swing and Elo duplicated my move and ran in circles squealing. I was very angry and was about to run after her and give her a few good knocks with the back of my hand when I remembered what my mother did to me the last time and ran home, grumbling about insensitive adults who would not let a girl play.
The last time, my mother had screamed just like she did just then but I hadn’t moved an inch. The fever of the game and my greed to win overshadowing the little sense I had. I was just about to clap my hands for the hundredth time when my play partner’s face changed and I looked back.
My mother’s hand whizzed past my ear and caught the side of my nose and mouth. The shock overshadowed the pain for a moment so when I fell I didn’t scream at first. Then she raised both arms and landed them palm first on my back and my scream caused the village birds to fly out of their trees.
My mother took me home that day in a peculiar style, she held me upside down with one leg as I dangled from her hand. I was small for my age so it wasn’t so much trouble for her. No one came to stop her, my mother was something of an oddity in the village. I would grow up and realized that some of her enemies called her a witch because my father died when I was very little and my younger sister Meda was just a baby. Leaving my mother to fend for us alone.
I attributed my mother’s hot temper to the trauma she faced watching her husband die before her eyes. Poor woman, she first began to cut grasses and get lands ready for planting for farmers before she could get enough money to rent her own farmland. In those days she would leave Meda who was still just a suckling child at home with me, a four year old girl at dawn and return at noon. By that time the baby would have cried her eyes out.
In the beginning I would hold her to me, crying along with her. Then I became thick skinned enough to leave her on the bed and go play in the corner, blocking my ears to her plaintive cries.
The short time my grandmother stayed with us, my life was easier. The old woman had left her own husband and come over to help her widowed daughter care for the children. Because of her Meda no longer cried when my mother left for the farm and I now had the luxury of going out in the evening to play moonlight games with my friends. A very popular one we played was the hand fortelling(or hand cursing) game played with hands, fortelling stones and luck.
Elo stretched out her hand towards a boy and he stared at it for a few seconds before he chose three numbers. Three, five and two. Elo thought for a minute and burst into laughter. Number ten! Elo’s assistant who would be sitting with his back to her produced the stone that her tenth finger had touched. It was a white brick, the boy would become a leper in the near future.
Then it was my turn. Before I chose, I looked into Elo’s face as if her scanty eyebrows or big nose would reveal which numbers held goodwill. Four, one, and one! I said in my characteristic over confident way. Elo looked at me seriously, a speculative look on her pudgy face. Her assistant handed her the sixth stone. It was the stone of banishment. I would be seperated from my roots, everyone stared at me, there was no greater curse.
If you looked closely at my grandmother you would realize that she was as hard headed as her daughter but her age allowed her to show hers in more subtle ways. One day we were outside in the bamboo walled kitchen when the trouble began.
I had failed to fan the fire hard enough so the smoke was getting into my mother’s eyes.
“Ariiiii!!” My mother bellowed from her place in front of the mortar. I looked back at her fearfully, the steam from the boiled palm nuts in the mortar before her and the smoke from the fire made her look like a monster indeed. While I was still considering my mode of escape if my mother got up from her seat(either jump into the fire or disappear) my grandmother’s shrill voice rang with quiet venom.
“Enough of the shouting! You know what your problem is, stop taking it out on the little girl” she hissed.
I idly wondered since when my mother had a problem that wasn’t me because she never failed to remind me how much of a burden I was to her everyday. My mother, on the other hand was staring into space with so much pent up anger in her small body. If I had been a grown woman then I would have suggested that she cried it all out. It seemed that she needed to cry away the anger that was burning through her like snake venom.
“Get yourself a husband” was my grandmother’s daily mantra from when she woke up to when she lowered her aging body to sleep. My mother moved around the house like a caged animal because of those words. One night I was startled awake by a violent hiss coming from the corner of our room where the two women slept. They were having a conversation. From that distance and due to my sleep addled mind, I only got snatches of the conversation
….you don’t know what is good for you” my grandmother said.
“Mama, leave me alone,” my mother replied. Then their voices dropped and I could not hear them anymore.
“I do not know which God gave me a child like you” my grand mother’s voice rose again
“what do you want me to do ehn? Are these children not burden enough?” My mother replied, there were tears in her voice.
Their voices lowered again and stayed lowered for so long that I fell asleep without hearing the end of the conversation. As young as I was, even though I knew that my grandmother was talking about my mother’s remarriage because the whole village was talking about it. The tongue waggers were having a field day bad mouthing my mother and I had been involved in a few fights trying to defend her honor and save face.
I did not want my mother to get married, I was three years old when my father had died and was fast forgetting what it was to have a father. My friend Elo however told me how her father acted in the house, bossing her, her siblings and her mother around and beating them when he felt like it.
I did not want someone else to beat me, my mother was qualified enough and seemed to relish the job of putting her stubborn daughter in line. My skin bore marks of her discipline, scars, healed marks, and half healed bruises.
Just as she had come quietly, my grandmother left quietly, carrying with her a lot of my privileges. I remember myself standing outside our compound, crying as I watched my grandmother load her few belongings into the bicycle. My grandmother who had been my consolation hugged me one last time before getting on her bike and riding away.
Few minutes later, my mother had come out of the house to drag me forcefully inside. Who gave me the right to cry silly cries for my departing grandmother?
She never came back again and my mother never went to see her, until she died and we all had to go to my mother’s hometown to perform the burial rites. After the burial, my mother was given two rooms in my grandmother’s house as her inheritance but she was too proud to take it. Yes, we were living in a much less developed village and in a building that was not completed but my mother’s pride won over her common sense.
I was nine years old when I became so sick that my mother could not manage the illness with her own herbal concoctions and had to take me to the local herbalist. There I spent two weeks lying inert on the smelly mud bed in the herbalists hurt, drinking smelly mixtures and suffering through periods of bathing and washing up that took place every afternoon. The herbalist had many child patients who he left in his wife’s care. In the afternoon she would support those of us who could walk outside the hut.
Then under the sun she would pour water that was green with herbs on us and command us to wash our bodies. When she is tired of our feeble attempts she would do it herself and thoroughly. All through the bathing episodes we sick children (as she called us) would shiver uncontrollably, the hot sun doing nothing to make it any less cold.
When my body had recovered, it became obvious that my eyesight had become very poor indeed. I could no longer see very far or strain my eyes for very long. My mother lamented about it everyday. I knew she feared that she would have to spend more money trying to fix my eye problem. Luckily for me, help came miraculously and some hospital people who I now know belonged to an NGO came to our village to give free eye check up to everyone.
My mother dressed me up that morning and took me to our delabitatated health center at the other end of the village. When we got there, the patients(I and the others) were taken inside the health center while my mother and other villagers were told to wait outside.
I sat quietly in my chair, trying not to squint too hard as I watched the people in white look inside Papa Musor’s eye. A young woman squatted in front of me. I looked at her and she smiled.
“ how are you?” She asked me
“Fine” I replied. She raised her eyebrows. She had not expected that I would speak English.
“You’re one intelligent little girl, aren’t you?” She said to herself. Then she told me to open my eyes. Later, she called my mother and gave her something. She told my mother that they were glasses and that I was to wear them all the time except when I was sleeping and bathing. Then she told my mother to take good care of me and make sure nothing else happened to my eyes or I could lose my eyesight. My mother took my hand and was quiet on the way home.
I was seventeen years old when my mother developed severe back and waist pain and could no longer go to the farm with I and my younger sister. We would return from the farm to see her lying on the bed, pain twisting her lips to the left so that she looked very old indeed. I would send Meda to prepare dinner while I got her herbal back rub and massaged her body from neck to waist. My mother would curse her lot, curse us and curse our dead father throughout the exercise.
While I rubbed her back I would notice that she was getting thinner everyday. Her formerly supple body was giving way to bones and I felt very sorry for her. Her temper had also increased ten fold and on good days when she could stand she would yell and throw things around cursing I and my sister for being so useless.
Then the news spread around the village, Elo had sent her parents money from abroad. Abroad? Everyone was dumbfounded, Elo that had suddenly disappeared one day. So her parents had been hiding this information from all of us? Soon her family bought a plot of land and began to build a house. Everyone was envious of them, including my mother but only I knew the truth. Two years ago when we were both fifteen Elo had come running to me.
Her father the tyrant was no longer just beating her, he had taken to molesting her. She told me that day, sitting on the dirt floor with tears flowing down her cheeks that her father would beat her outside, than take her into the house and rape her. I was shocked. I asked her if her mother knew about it and she said yes, her father had threatened to kill them both if word got out. She begged me to be quiet about it. She drank the cup of water that I had offered, dried her tears and went away. Two weeks later Elo went missing and no one knew where to find her.
Soon Elo’s house was completed and roofed with corrugated iron sheets. Her family moved out of their mud house and went to live there. The whole community went wild, they wanted to know how Elo had done it, they wanted their daughters to do it too. My mother was no exception. Her back pain had lessened so she could now go out. She could still not go with us to the farm but would come back every evening from the tongue waggers association meeting fuming in anger.
She called me her greatest mistake in life. She told me that if my father was alive he would have been ashamed of me. She lamented that she was the unluckiest woman alive. Every evening she would call I and my sister and tell us the stories of her suffering for us over and over again. I knew what was fueling her, other women had sent their daughters abroad. Even Okpu’s family had started receiving money from her. My mother wanted me to go abroad but I was unsure about why I would do such a thing.
Then one day I burnt soup on the fire by mistake. My mother came into the kitchen with a big stick and hit me. In shock I hit the pot, pouring the remains of the soup on my legs. While I cried she cursed and cursed, swearing that if I continued my stupid behavior she would kill me one day. It was then that I knew I had overstayed my welcome and it would be better for me to go as far away as possible. What further place from my mother than abroad?
The night before I left with the woman who my mother called Mrs Sami. My mother called me to her side and began to admonish me on how I should behave when I reached my new place of work. She told me not to worry about anything that Mrs Sami would take care of me. Then lastly she told me that I should always remember that I was doing it for Us. Her, myself and Meda. I cried my tears that night in my mother’s arms.
Later I would remember her telling me these words you are doing it for Us and I would laugh bitterly. There is no us, only Ari here, lost and suffering, just like my friend Elo predicted that night under the silvery light of the moon.
*All images are sponsored by pixabay, free for commercial use and no attribution required.
What's Your Reaction?
