Closer Than A Shadow

A story by RAFEEAT ALIYU

The screaming baby shocks the old man awake. Baba Mumuni jerks up from the thin mattress, his arms and feet sailing through the air. His left arm hits the solid wood of the bed his wife left behind. I’m almost sorry for Baba Mumuni as he cries out in pain. But then he grows more aware of his surroundings and I see his thoughts like countless pebbles smoothened by the weight of the clear river flowing above them. 

He thinks, Better a pail of icy water upturned over my head than this bastard screaming.

The path to anger is a short one for Baba Mumuni and this has increased with age. Lurking around the corner from any other emotion is irritation–– searing and ready to lash out at the closest target.

“Must I tell you to attend to a child, woman!” Baba Mumuni snaps at the dark room.

He shoves blindly at the side of the bed closest to the wall with his aching hand. It is the corner that she favours. The shaky wood of the bed frame rattles as much as Baba Mumuni’s heart did when he suddenly woke up. His hand seeks for Iya Mumuni and rather than the warmth of a sleeping body, Baba’s hand meets the air. Baba Mumuni begins blinking rapidly. His chest heaves with each inhale. In a short span, he has moved from shock to anger and now, desolation. 

A sliver of a door separates this room from the parlour where Baby continues to scream a tempest. Baba Mumuni swings his legs over the side of the bed and presses his elbows into his knees. He lowers his head into upturned hands. There is an aura about him, a suspended heaviness that slows each movement. 

I understand Baba Mumuni’s longing. Were she around, Iya Mumuni [would] have bathed the baby before the sun fully set, delaying her evening prayer. She’d have brought Baby to bed with her and Baba. Iya Mumuni always took her time as she dusted oil and powder on Baby’s skin and stuffed his arms in those tiny pyjamas. Iya Mumuni would have swaddled the boy in the blanket of knitted mint-green. That blanket with the perfectly-shaped eyelets that she crocheted with her own hands when she was pregnant for the first time thirty-four years ago. Once, that blanket was the green of the deepest forests, the kind that barred human’s entry with twisted roots and thorny branches. That colour faded with each child she carried. 

In the other rented rooms, our neighbours start grumbling. Once Baba would have thought of them, feeling and hearing their muttered complaints— the pounding of a long-handled broom against the wall, a pithy whisper to “attend to the weeping child, for goodness sake”. Baba Mumuni once tortured himself with unending imaginings of the people from the neighbourhood ascribing to his character what was not his. Now he does not even care that the landlord upstairs will shortly be forced to come knocking. 

When Baba Mumuni finally stands up, his movements are snail-like. He drags his feet to the thin door. He pauses. Baba Mumuni lights the hurricane lamp set atop the cabinet, striking one match, two, four. By the time he pushes through to the other room, Baby’s cries are muffled. Baba Mumuni takes in the scene cast in feeble lamp-light. Blue walls turn iodine where the lamp’s shadows touch. Curtains gather the season’s dust with acrid glee knowing no one would be washing them. Baby face down on the floor in the cramped space between the low coffee table and the sofa. 

Baba Mumuni squeezes in, lamp raised higher. He sees the length of the stained lappa that serves as Baby’s coverlet tangled around small limbs. The hair that Iya Mumuni scraped so the child resembled a bald elder sports roughly flattened curls. The child is so still and astagfirullah—God forgive Baba Mumuni, but relief floods his chest at the thought of death. He leans forward for a better look at Baby, the table between them his armour. Cold wind rises and stirs in the stuffy room. A flurry of cloth and he spots me. Baba Mumuni recognises the shape of me on the other side of the dusty curtains and stained windows. He lowers the lamp hastily, scrambles, one foot on the table, the other on the seat. Baba Mumuni snatches the curtain aside. 

We live on the ground floor, our parlour facing the street over a modest verandah. It’s early morning, long before the call to prayer and longer still before the sun remembers to awaken its light to the world. A power cut renders the lampposts useless. Yet Baba Mumuni sees me. And I see him as he sees me. The young woman with the sorrowful smile. Purity and pollution clashing on her face, her large eyes and smooth skin at odds with the arched line of pencilled-in eyebrows and red lips. It is the revealing clothes she wears that anger him the most. Her breasts and thighs exposed, squeezed in a petite dress tighter than a second skin. 

“Get out!” he shouts, rage bubbling in him. “I said, get out!”

He would kill me. I sense his anger and hatred. It means nothing. There is more than the glass of the window, the sturdy wall separating us and yet I’m closer to Baba than he will ever know. I shake my head and Baba Mumuni thinks he senses sadness lurking in my eyes. I’m not sad. I’m just as frustrated and as angry as he is.

It is a trick of the light, Baba Mumuni thinks. I know this woman is impure. I should never have offered my hand…

Baby lets out a strangled cry. The baby that Baba Mumuni should have attended to immediately, the same one that should have been sleeping next to him. He thinks he made a mistake, but Baba did the right thing bringing us here. 

This is where we belong.

*

“As-salamu aleikumu.”

A call of peace announced before Kudirat pulls the screen then pushes in the door. The iron netting rattles and both doors creak on their hinges. Kudirat coughs as she enters the house, her nose crinkling at the dust.

“Wa aleikumu salam,” Baba Mumuni replies from his seat opposite the entrance. The curtains have been pushed to the side to let in only a bit of the afternoon’s light but it is enough to render the state of filth in the house. His sister eyes the parlour in its dusty and distressed state from the piles of unwashed clothes to the cobwebs. The edge of her lace dress brushes the stacks of metallic plates bearing food turned crisp in the heat.

“Where is Brimah?” Kudirat asks as she crosses the room. She snaps the sealed windows open and shakes out the curtains raining dust sprinkles on her brother’s head.

Baba Mumuni thinks he heard Kudirat grumble but he does not demand clarification. He sneers as anger builds. “Brimah?”

She settles on the chair adjacent to him, adjusting the flowing veil wrapped around her shoulders.

“Your child.” Kudirat glares at him. 

Baba Mumuni casually waves a hand in the direction of the other room. There, Kudirat finds Brimah sweating in sleep. She screams out for God then mutters words that sound like curses to Baba Mumuni’s ears. Again, he ignores her whispers.

Kudirat returns carrying the baby in her outstretched hands like an offering. “Brother, what are you doing? This is no way to raise a child. When last did he eat? Look how his skin is covered in rashes.”

“Did you come here to lecture me?” Baba Mumuni says. “I sent you on a simple errand.” 

“Answer me first, are you the first man to be left alone with a child?”

“Where is my wife?” 

The same blood runs through their veins indeed. Kudirat is just as irate as Baba Mumuni. Her voice snaps like a whip. 

“Do you want to kill his boy? I swear if you do—”

“What will you do?”

“I will have you arrested!”

The baby, roused by their raised voices, begins to cry. Kudirat rubs gentle circles on his back and the contact agitates him further. 

“You will do nothing of the sort.”

“Just look at how you’re living,” Kudirat says. “Like a pig.”

Baba Mumuni leaps to his feet. “The woman is the one to maintain a home,” he says, stalking forward. “You were to return with Iya Mumuni,”

“Well she isn’t here.” Baba Mumuni towers over her but Kudirat doesn’t cower. Instead, she draws the baby close in a light embrace. “Won’t you go and fetch Aunty back?”

“Fetch?” Baba Mumuni chuckles mirthlessly. He raises a finger and points at his chest, “Me?”

“Yes. You” 

“I sent you to Itebu to bring Iya Mumuni back. It appears it was a vacation for you.”

“When I am not the one that drove her packing?”

“A woman must be submissive,” Baba Mumuni says. “By whose authority did she refuse to return? I did not divorce her.”

“You might as well have. At your age, chasing a small girl like that.”

The slap lands on Kudirat’s left cheek before she anticipates it. Her chin dips and she clamps her lips shut with her teeth. Kudirat’s free hand clenches and unclenches, as though she is holding back from fighting her brother. Baby’s cries intensify. When Kudirat lifts her gaze, her eyes are steel. Her dark bushy brows give her the look of an eagle.

“It is my right to marry four wives,” Baba Mumuni says, retreating to the far-placed sofa.

“Brother. My brother. Oh, Brother,” she says. Baba Mumuni cannot comprehend how each alphabet Kudirat utters carries enough venom to sting. “You men, always spouting on your right to women. Were that the case, couldn’t you have conferred with Aunty first? She is the senior wife after all. Is that lady even Muslim? Ah! There is she, I wondered…”

Summoned, I sit on the arm of the seat that Baba Mumuni occupies. He draws back in alarm while his sister shakes her head.

Isn’t this evidence enough? Baba Mumuni thinks. She wasn’t there a moment ago and now she has appeared from thin air. There is only one door in and out of this place. This woman is unnatural!

But Kudirat only tuts. “At least tell her to take proper care of this innocent child.” 

“Listen here.” Baba Mumuni’s unaffected veneer cracks. His chin quivers and his voice breaks as he begins to explain, “I don’t know who that woman is. It was a small act of kindness—”

“Your accounts are being noted, Brother. Only you can solve the mess you’ve put yourself in and you better do it fast before you face the Almighty.”

Baba Mumuni appears to deflate. He sinks against the worn fabric of the sofa, his arms limply folded on his lap. The side of his body closest to me shudders as it grazes the coldness that permanently surrounds me. 

Kudirat storms out with the baby. I want to object but cannot, my lips have been sealed since this debacle started. Later a timid voice sounds at the door. Baba Mumuni barks at young Sidi, one of the many daughters of our neighbour, Mama Chris. Sidi keeps her gaze lowered as she begins to clean the space. Her meek and demure countenance irritates Baba Mumuni because it further reminds him of what he is missing. Baba leaves for outside. He returns with droplets of water covering the grey hairs on his head and forearms. In the other room, he spreads the goat skin that he prays on. His moment with God is full of distractions, of Iya Mumuni, of me, of Kudirat’s visit.

At the end of the day, his sister is a woman. Despite her distasteful mannerisms, she thought of the child and the house. Undoubtedly she thought of her brother too but Baba Mumuni couldn’t make sense of her demands. Why would she tell him to go and beg his estranged wife to return? If their years together meant nothing to Iya Mumuni, Baba was willing to accept it. It was just a pity that the child would suffer for it.

*

I have only ever heard about winter from the men that used to visit me. There was one elite boy with a curled moustache and a stiff hat, who fished an ice cube from his drink and placed it in the crook of my elbow. 

“Imagine feeling this all over, all at once,” he said, referring to his first winter at Oxford.

I am a traveller of sorts, I believe. This is the duty assigned to me. After I died, I awakened as if from slumber. As with sleep, my memories reached me in trickles as I wandered through Lagos. I rest in an in-between space where the cold takes over me. It expands and becomes my entire world. These are the moments I am stuck there in that cold place, weightless. At other times, I might find myself at the bus stop near L-town where I wander and wait for that man. I had to find someone. I do not know who he is but I am certain that I will recognise him once we cross paths. Then Baba Mumuni looked straight at me, he saw me in that crowded bus For so long, no one else had noticed me. I’d forgotten what it meant to be regarded. He offered to cover my fare when I sat frozen while the conductor called for payments. I said nothing. I followed him home.

Once in a while, I intrude into Baba Mumuni’s dreams. 

He is back in his homestead in Isale-Eko with its serpentine streets. He is a young boy playing hide and seek in the cramped quarters of his ancestral home. He is a boy, not as young but not yet a man, learning to craft jewellery under the tutelage of a goldsmith. 

One dream repeats itself. In it, the afternoon is orange-tinged, the sky bright like soda. He walks to the smithy passing by faceless boys riding bicycles. Behind them is a white man wearing a military uniform. He begins to chase after this white man and just as he is about to catch up with them—the boys and the white man—Baba Mumuni wakes up.

There are times I return to the apartment, aware of all that has transpired as if I have never left. Baby appears less neglected, sleeping on Sidi’s back as she serves Baba Mumuni lunch. He scoops balls of amala with his fingers before dipping them into the bowl of ewedu and bright-red stew. Baba Mumuni swallows with relish and pretends not to notice the dip in temperature. When the call to evening prayer resounds unhindered by the walls or the doors, Baba Mumuni does not stiffen like he used to. I would be touched at my converting Baba Mumuni into a homebody but it is a change I numbly accept. He was prominent in this community due to his skill as a jeweller and even had the privilege of calling the faithful to prayer. All this has been lost since my arrival. 

Baba Mumuni is convinced that everything will improve. He is optimistic. I pry into his thoughts without meaning to. Once he brings Iya Mumuni back, his glory will be restored.

The woman I married, Baba Mumuni thinks, Iya Mumuni is the mother of my children. How inconceivable. I will drag her back here myself. Let’s see if she dares tell me to my face that she won’t be returning.

*

Liberty Street is a tumble of houses where residents are heaped onto each other. Number 4, the first door that stands to the left of the grille opening to the street belongs to Baba and Iya Mumuni. Their grandchild was deposited right there in the hallway five months after they buried their son. The baby was yet new to this world. His tiny naked form was wrapped in a shiny lappa. Iya Mumuni found a folded letter under the baby. Chris, their neighbour’s son, read the short missive.

“Na Banke pikin. Make you love am as him papa love me.”

Those sentences painted a picture of the kind of woman that was Baby’s mother. It was common knowledge that Banke mingled with delinquents and prostitutes, killing time by throwing dice and committing petty crimes. It was the destiny he selected that killed him. Baba and Iya Mumuni accepted the baby that was the image of the son they’d lost. Banke was taken into the earth and Baby emerged from the body of one of the many lovers they never knew their son had. Babatunde or ‘father has returned’ made a suitable name, but there was no reincarnation in the tenets of their faith. Baba Mumuni selected the name Brimah himself, after the prophet burdened with the demand to sacrifice his own son.

An older draft of the letter, unsent and crumpled up in a corner of my old room, had one more sentence. “I go soon die.”

They heard about Banke’s lovers. Many young women were like that these days. So many who couldn’t be called ladies. The ubiquitous clubs around the city were their habitat. Each night, they smoked and accepted drinks from the same strange men they shook their hips in front of. We wore blouses sewn of velvet, soft on our skin and dresses of sheer satin that clung to our curves like possessive lovers. We shouted at the big screen in cinemas and cursed so much that we were thrown out. We drew our faces on in the mornings and ironed our hair straight before stepping out into the night to dance, drink and smoke.

It was for his son that Baba Mumuni took pity on me in that bus. That is what he tells himself. He saw me unable to pay my transport fare and thought, She could be my dead son’s wife. It didn’t matter that meetings between families were never arranged, that they did not pay a bride price and hired drummers to usher the new addition into their family. The birth of a child cements divine bonds between ancestral lineages. So Baba Mumuni paid and I stayed. I followed him home. I entered the mosque with him, my presence causing an uproar. He crossed the bridge then took a bus heading in the opposite direction when he saw I was coming with him to his family home. 

A peculiar alchemy ensued in this home where a grandchild became a son, the result of an old man’s illicit affair with a wayward lady obsessed with Western ways. The community’s eyes turned on Baba Mumuni, accusing and casting judgement. See the greys on his head and chin, the neighbours gossiped, only for him to father a child, that’s men for you. Baba Mumuni the adulterer, children teased. Did he not lie and say that baby was his grandchild when it was in fact his own child? Those were the kinds of words that nipped at Iya Mumuni’s heels as she boarded a mammy lorry to Itebu, disappearing under the pretext of buying ingredients for supper at the night market. And so, we became three. 

Baba Mumuni tried at first. Convinced that Iya would return, there were mornings when he paced, patting the baby on his back. Baba Mumumi used to feed Baby the softest yams mashed into a pulp with a touch of palm oil rendering the paste yellow. There were evenings when he set a basin in the front yard and unspooled dirty diapers, immersing his hands in waste water until the cloth was clean. His efforts decreased with each day spent in Iya Mumuni’s absence. The anger brewing in him towards her redirected at me. The blows that didn’t land confirmed that I was unnatural in more ways than Baba Mumuni fathomed. Then came the days when he used to search for me in everything, catching a glimpse of the sharp edges of my skirt in every corner, sneezing at the bothersome scent of my perfume, shrinking at the clammy coldness that affects everywhere I linger. I am an anchor of silence. My presence is like the red harmattan dust that sneaks up his nose leaving fine granules in his nostrils.

Everything will be fine because Baba Mumuni declares it so. We set off before dawn. The journey takes us through the creeks adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean. When I’m not sitting next to Baba, I’m with Baby in the rooms allocated to Kudirat at the family home in Isale-Eko. I return to Baba Mumuni’s side like a pointer seeking north. His head bobs with the motion of the ferry as he dreams. In his sleep, it is a canoe that cuts through the streets of Isale Eko, taking Baba Mumuni to his homestead. 

When Baba Mumuni alights, his sandals are coated in rusty dust. He approaches the front door and notices a church in the compound. It is modest but newly built with cement bricks and a shiny corrugated roof. The wheels of a bicycle creak as a faceless man in a smock alights. The man calls out a name. Baba Mumuni starts walking. He is suddenly on a path winding next to the lagoon. The jingle of a bicycle’s bell rises. The man calls out a name. 

Baba Mumuni wakes up. He wrestles with his consciousness to remember the dream. He thinks of how his parents forbade him from attending Western school, of the other boys who won scholarships to study in England. His mother, Iya Tayo would gloat at how fragmented families became once their children disappeared into the school halls.

“The child you send to school is not the child that returns,” she used to say. 

Iya Tayo kept her children under her wings like a duck would her chicks. Her efforts were useless, look at us now. Our family is broken. Whoever isn’t dead and interred is dead inside and walking above ground. Some of us straddle both. 

The memory of the dream falls into the cracks of Baba Mumuni’s mind. He does not recall why he’s thinking of his mother and childhood friends when we alight at Itebu. We navigate earthen roads that Baba Mumuni traversed once, long ago. He was a young bachelor seeking the hand of the most practical woman he knew. She was submissive, ample-bodied and enterprising— a promising wife. In her hometown, he met his bride shielded in the walls of her family home. 

Today, we find her among women of varying ages. They laugh as they stroll, the younger ones with straightened spines balancing empty pans on their heads. Behind the women is the market and behind us, in the distance is the family house that saw Iya Mumuni born and held her as she grew from a girl to a lady. Few there had seen her since she left for Lagos almost forty years ago to trade. Forty years later, Itebu has welcomed her daughter back and Iya Mumuni is resplendent as she leads her fellow traders home. 

At first Baba Mumuni does not recognise his wife. More accurately, the woman he sees is not the Iya Mumuni that he has married for three and a half decades. This woman is Bintu—the woman Iya Mumuni was before parenthood claimed both their names. Bintu laughs without restraint, her skin is a glossy black unaffected by the ashy tone ubiquitous with the season. The cloth wrapped around her head is a feat of architectural marvel. Her demeanour announces her as the madam that owns the shop, not a petty trader. A line of scooters rumbles past the palm trees where Baba Mumuni and I sought shade from the sun. They form a queue and each woman begins to mount her ride.

“Iya Mumuni.” 

And even though the words are a whisper of Baba’s disbelief, she hears them.

Iya Mumumi stiffens, one leg propped on the vehicle. She looks left and right before seeing us. Then a transformation; the smile vanishes, wrinkles reappear, folds tumble below her chin. The mere sight of Baba casting a dimness within her. It is so profound that Baba Mumuni shrinks away, the scuffed soles of his sandals dragging the dry earth.

“Sister Bintu,” one of the traders calls. “I hope nothing.”

Iya Mumumi shakes her head. She touches the trader’s shoulder, keeping her eyes on us. Iya Mumuni dismisses the women before joining us under the fan of palm leaves. The motor bikes troop past bearing women that mumble greetings, curious eyes lowered as they sketch hasty bows.

“Iya Mumuni.” This time there is no wonderment in his voice. “Enough.”

Words pronounced, Baba Mumuni turns. He expects his wife to follow behind but the air at his back is unmoving. He turns and meets her steel gaze.

“Did Kudi not tell you?” She crosses her arms over her chest.

“Tell me what?” 

“I have no place to return to. My home is here.”

Belatedly, Baba Mumuni realises that his wife no longer refers to him politely as she used to. He stalks towards her. She sets her jaw and waits. I have seen this before. From the market place, a crowd begins to gather in anticipation, watching.

“You have decided to take a page from Kudirat’s book,” Baba says. “She is divorced and childless. You are a mother.”

“Beat me then. Hit this grandmother in public.”

Baba Mumuni points. He clenches his fists. His eyes are red, hot as the frost on Iya Mumuni’s features layers with sadness. Iya sidesteps, turning to the horizon focusing on where the treetops meet the sky. 

“Coming back here,” Iya begins, pauses. “Being back home,I understand.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t stand the rumours anymore, you know. I raised all our children—”

“As was your duty.”

“Nine times I was pregnant. I buried five children when they were babies, one as an adult. Worked from daybreak to sundown at Oyingbo market. I’m the one that sent them to school, that fed them and cared for them—”

“As—”

Iya Mumuni lifts a hand, silencing her husband. “If a child is good, it is due to the father and if the child is bad, it is the mother’s fault, so our people say. I celebrated when Mumuni got that scholarship but he climbed into that plane and never looked back. Banke…when Banke started pickpocketing, it was my fault. Silifa fell for the sleek Lagos life and took Awawu with her. Banke died in that awful way and then Brimah appeared,and I thought, ‘It’s time to right my wrongs as a mother, this one will be raised properly.’ But you had to bring that girl home.”

It is the most Iya Mumuni has said in years. 

Baba Mumuni is shocked silent until she makes reference to me. “Don’t you dare.”

“You brought that girl into our house.”

“You’re not listening.”

“That girl, your shadow.” Iya Mumuni looks away from the horizon at me. Her gaze is kind, unlike before. She truly understands! I want to kneel down and thank her. I wish it was her that I was sent to visit. Were that the case, we’d both be freed.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Baba Mumuni runs his hands over his bushy hair. “She stalked me after I helped her with her transport fare.”

Iya Mumuni doesn’t care. “You let her under our roof. All our neighbours believed she was your mistress. I couldn’t stand the rumours, so I left and now I see.”

“What is it that you see?” Baba Mumuni asks, his tone now desperate. “Bintu, tell me.”

This is the first time he has called her name in decades.

“You are cursed,” Iya Mumuni says. “That girl’s family is seeking answers. She was their breadwinner and now she’s dead.”

“What rubbish are you spewing?”

“They just want answers to help them. A wayward child is as much the father’s fault. You need to accept Banke, forgive his mistakes, right his wrongs…”

“Why—?”

“I asked those who know of yesterday,” Iya Mumuni begins.

Baba Mumuni’s face darkens. “Soothsayers.”

His wife might have as well announced that she consorted with the Devil. The chance for Iya to elaborate further is over. Baba shouts. He accuses her of betraying their religion and seeking diabolical idols. He reaches for her but Iya Mumuni dodges. A scooter from earlier roars towards us as if on cue. Iya Mumuni climbs behind the driver. They speed off before Baba Mumuni can reach her. 

Bintu has left him again. Baba Mumuni is shaking. He thinks of storming up to her family home and dragging his wife back to Lagos. He thinks of demanding the return of the bride price he paid. Then he imagines Bintu tossing the shillings at him. When did she become so proud? he thinks.The community here in Itebu is watching him and he is not ready to let go of all his pride yetBaba Mumuni embraces resignation.

“Let her not come home if she likes,” he decides, words delivered like a threat or a curse.

Curse. I was buried and then resurrected. A relative, my aunt or my grandmother captured me, ordered me to seek vengeance. Life is a theatre and death is the same. My estranged family cared more about the cash gifts I sent them than the reality that my own choices led to my death. Here is the truth; I died because of Banke. Banke died because he lived by the sword knowing he would die by it too. We both died because of the lives we elected to live. Live fast, die young. We did it!

Yet without Banke, the cause of my death lies with his father. Death seals my lips and ignorance renders Baba Mumuni blind and deaf. If he refused to listen to his own wife, what power do I hold? My presence reveals itself with a heady mixture of cigarette smoke and gaudy perfume.  Baba Mumuni grows aware of me as the temperature drops. He flees from the market, staggers through the dusty streets. Baba runs and runs, like he did that first day we met, when he got down from the bus and noticed me trailing behind. I keep up, closer than his shadow. 

None of us ever free. 

We are family and together is where we belong.