I, Who Have Been Stained by the Light of Women

A story by HUSSANI ABDULRAHIM

She is standing by the doorway of her room when she says, “Come give it to me, zaddy.”  But you know, even before you flee to check yourself in the mirror—all broomstick arms and spindly legs—you are nobody’s zaddy. You are an 11-year-old boy whose hands barely reach the top of your mother’s old Singer refrigerator, even on the tip of your toes. And your mother, whom you refer to simply as Mama, is a masquerade you don’t want to rile. 

But Adiyetu, the youngest of Mama’s siblings, doesn’t seem to worry about Mama’s temper. Adiyetu storms into Mama’s room, where you’ve gone to take refuge. There’s a telling frown on her face. “You’re ruining it, TJ. Didn’t you see how they did it in the video?”

Scenes from the video remain fresh in your memory. A long-legged, slim-hipped, blue-eyed blonde with jackfruit boobs straining against undersized cups of a black lace bra lies on an expansive bed. Flashing pink-painted nails, she beckons a Black, muscular guy who suddenly appears by the entrance of the room. His head is a clear screen for the chandelier overhead. He strides assuredly to the bed, pulls her by the legs towards himself, and buries his face between her thighs.

You know that you’re nothing like that man in the video. You prefer to fold your arms rather than act. You know that you can’t say things like Fuck or Gimme that pussy or Yo bitch, suck my dick! Your words are always soft. So, you don’t reply.

“Don’t you want to be a man?”

You stare at your fingers, nails digging into palms. Your heart thumps. 

“A strong man?”

An itch here. An itch there. You scratch. 

“Don’t you want people to respect you?”

She draws closer, each step increasing the heat under your arms. Something ugly twists inside your stomach. Your heart is loud in your ears, drowning the drone of the ceiling fan.

Don’t you want to be big and strong like that guy?”

You nod, not because you fully understand what this is all about, but because you think you’re expected to say yes in this kind of situation. You’re expected to say yes to an older person because they know more about life than you. And hell yes, which boy wouldn’t want to be that big, strong, and doted on? But when Adiyetu lets her wrapper fall, you begin to cry. Your heart drums so fast as she wills your trembling hands to feel her secret place. Her perfume fills your nostrils, and you can’t breathe.

*

You cannot say when or how Adiyetu’s friends slipped into the rhythm of your training. Maybe it began with the way Hibbatullah sometimes watched you, her eyes lingering. Or with how, on the afternoons they visited, something in their nearness held you a moment longer than it should, woven casually into their laughter and the ease with which they occupied Adiyetu’s room. You knew them before any of this took shape: Hibbatullah from the madrasa; soft-eyed Laraba from down the street; Teniola, called oyinbo because of her light skin. They teased you with names—“my small husband,” “my little boyfriend”—spoken lightly, like the prod of a blunt knife. And they are girls Mama trusts with errands, girls she would hand her shop keys without hesitation. 

So when Laraba’s hand lingers on you for too long, you don’t object.

When, once, you find her and Adiyetu folded into each other, legs tangled, you do not lose your breath. Their movements feel habitual. You watch long enough until you feel like a common component of the room.

Then one of them looks up. A lingering glance, as if you were expected to appear at that one moment, a missing piece of this union. A hand reaches out, tender but authoritative, and it is now that you lose your breath.

Their hands guide you like light in the dark, fitting you into the shape they’ve created. Your senses dull, narrowed by focus, by the pressure not to fail. Their breathing accelerates. Impatient hands find your head, urging you into usefulness.

They whisper questions, whose answers they already know.

It’s good, abi? It’s sweet.

They do not wait for you. Hands guide you back where they want you, words, tender but sharp, redirect you. You’re not expected to name what you notice. So you learn quickly what is needed: The echo of their questions as answers. Nods instead of your voice. They have enough language to supply you, to keep you going. Stopping would mean breaking the rhythm, and breaking the rhythm is prohibited. You remain busy and quiet. You no longer lose your breath.

*

You can’t remember exactly when Adiyetu began living with you and Mama. There was a time—blurred now, like something seen through harmattan haze—when she vanished from your lives for a while, only to reappear as though she had simply stepped out for air. What you do know is this: she has been trying to get into Bayero University for years, but JAMB keeps jamming her. And you know this too: you love the little crinkle in her left eyebrow when she laughs, even if it can make her seem menacing when she’s angry. You love the shy, counterfeit dimple that appears beside her mouth, especially when it disappears momentarily as she chews her fingernails. You love how animated she becomes during Zee World dramas and Korean soaps, gasping and muttering to herself as though she’s part of the cast, even though it makes you worry for her sanity at times. You love the joy in her voice when she sings Dan Ozizi’s Ometere while cooking, her Ebira rolling out with that musical richness people from Kogi claim with pride. You love how she tends to you when you scrape your knee or cut yourself.

Sometimes you wish Adiyetu were your mother—she is the one who is around. Mama lives in her Yankaba Market shop and returns home only at night, except on Sundays. When Mama is around, Adiyetu mostly stays in her room. You feel a kind of coldness between them. Only on rare occasions do you see them talking. Mostly, Mama calls Adiyetu, passes instructions. Adiyetu obeys. Yet the pictures in the family album say otherwise. Some show Mama in a matching ready-made dress with Adiyetu. In one, Adiyetu is still a baby, wrapped in Mama’s arms. You cannot relate the current Mama to the smiling younger version in the photos.

And there is your late father, known to you only through photographs, especially the framed one of him in a honey-brown agbada, his bespectacled eyes forever fixed on you from the sitting room wall.

You also know this: you have grown to hate your bachelor neighbour Broda Lekan, who stares at Adiyetu too long. You hate Dahiru, the man with three wives who sells provisions down the street, for calling her mata na—his wife. You hate Korede Abiola, the NeoLife evangelist whose worn shoes squeal with every step, and who hangs his company ID around his neck like a passport to heaven. You hate the way Adiyetu laughs when he visits, slapping his shoulder playfully, her eyes bright as he spins big-city dreams about Paris and Dubai and climbing his company’s pyramid on the backs of expensive supplements he forces people to buy. You wish he would stop sitting on the verandah with her. You wish he would stop calling her his precious flower. You want to tell him she is an entire garden—wild, fragrant, alive—not a solitary stem for him to pluck.

Whenever Adiyetu stares at Baba’s picture in the sitting room, her eyes go distant, as though she’s preparing herself for something that has already happened. She carries memories she never speaks of— dark, tangled shadows from her childhood, tied to the man whose smile beams from that honey-brown frame. At night, those shadows return in her sleep, pulling her back into fears she learned far too young, prayers she once whispered into the darkness for protection that never came.

*

Today is Baba’s death anniversary. They said he was a driver, the kind who went on long journeys. He went on one and didn’t return. Later, people said his Station Wagon was found somewhere along the Abuja–Kaduna Expressway. After that, people said many things.

On the eve of the anniversary, Mama argued with Adiyetu. “Last year, you were not around. The other year, the same thing. Who will help with the food and the other things?”

Adiyetu stood by the wall, arms folded, looking everywhere except at Mama.

“If you have anything to say, say it now,” Mama said. “You’re not leaving this house tomorrow.”

Adiyetu walked away. A door slammed.

Mama’s voice followed her down the corridor. Then the house went quiet.

Today, Adiyetu barely speaks. Not even Laraba, who laughs at everything, can draw more than a word or two from her. They are by the fence, braving the smoke from the firewood. Hibbatullah watches the pot and tells Laraba to stay away from the egusi, saying no one wants to taste her spittle.

“I don’t even understand sef. Must you come everywhere with your face painted? We’re not doing a fashion parade here. We’re here to cook,” Hibbatullah says to Laraba.

Laraba cackles anyway. Adiyetu sits apart, her face closed. A small quarrel flares, then dies. You move between them, fetching water or being sent to buy Maggi and whatever else was forgotten.

In the afternoon, Alfa Kamoru arrives with some of the senior students from your Madrasa. They recite verses for the dead, then dig into wraps of pounded yam and gulp down bottles of Coke. Brother Lekan had gifted Mama a few packs of Coke and Fanta earlier.

Later, Suleiman and another classmate stop by. Suleiman says “Sorry,” then asks if you want to come play PES2. You hesitate. You wonder if this is a day for games at all.

When Mama’s friends fill the house with their voices, you follow Suleiman out.

Suleiman is the only person you tell about what Adiyetu has been doing. You tell him because he’s your best friend, and he has sworn by Allah not to tell anyone. You are playing PES2 in his father’s parlour, the lazy ceiling fan stirring the air above rich-blue furniture that Suleiman claims came from Italy. You suspect it came from Matilda Rozi on Hadejia Road, or some other Lebanese-owned showroom scattered across Kano, most of which source their furniture locally but swear it’s imported.

When Suleiman asks, “Do you like it?” you hesitate too long. You stare at him, and it hits you how far you’ve come from that day in Mama’s room, trembling like a rain-drenched puppy as Adiyetu stood before you. Suleiman watches your indecision with bewilderment. He tells you you’re lucky to have an adult giving you this kind of attention. He says you’re enjoying it. He even says he wishes he were in your shoes.

He talks about Okene, his hometown, where little boys get small girls pregnant. The whole place, he says, is a rotten, unholy society. Allah will punish them. You’ve never been to Okene; you don’t know if he’s telling the truth. And you don’t understand how this relates to what you’ve just confessed. He adds that here in Kano, people do unholy things too, but mostly behind closed doors. In public, everyone is Allah’s faithful servant, chaste and upright.

It strikes you one day that in all these two years, you have never thought to tell Mama. Perhaps her constant irritation—the dishes never clean enough, the house never tidy enough, her sharp words when she is home, as though she longs to be elsewhere—has kept you from trying. Maybe that is why the desire to tell her has never fully bloomed.

*

Lekan, your single neighbour, is every woman’s dream guy. You’ve come to this knowledge because you’ve seen how Adiyetu looks at him as if he were a bowl of pounded yam and egusi soup she wants to devour. There’s a shimmer in her eyes whenever she mentions him. You wonder if it’s because he wakes up every morning and jogs to the road or because he has Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body. You’re not surprised when, once, in the act, frustrated, Adiyetu pushes you away, and says, “You’re doing it all wrong. I told you, just curve your fingers into a V, don’t push in too far, you’ll hit the spot. Why can’t you just do it like Lekan does?”

It’s then you know you’ve got a formidable adversary. You see it that way because you’ve told yourself— no, you’ve convinced yourself that you’re Adiyetu’s and Adiyetu is yours. Isn’t that how love should be, even if this love wears the skin of a different entity?

Now, you stand beside his backyard window peeping through a crack, watching the way he pins down Adiyetu, pumping into her like crazy, while she moans and screams, “Yes, yes, yes! Just like that!” Envy and hate, a gust of steam rising in your chest, clamour for exits. Those muscular arms, those contoured thighs, those broad shoulders, that stamina— you’re no match. You feel like punching something. An empty can of malt protests as you shift your weight. 

“Who’s there?” Lekan demands. 

You duck and leave the window. As you’re about to hurry past his door, it cracks open. An iron hand grabs you by the collar, leads you into the bedroom, and shoves you onto a plastic chair, forcing you to play audience to this live performance. Adiyetu is surprised at first, then she laughs off Lekan’s what if he tells? with “Never. He is my boy.”

Her boy, that’s what you are. Just that. The revelation saddens you. Has all your worship been in vain? Have you not revered enough the goddess she is? Elevated her to a status no one else can dream of?

This is your humiliation: Lekan and Adiyetu continue where they left off. He positions himself deliberately in your line of sight. He has a grin you wish you could wipe off with a hot slap. Adiyetu slips off the bed and kneels before him. Just before she goes any further, she looks at you intently. That is when you turn away. 

“You must watch o.” Her voice is cool yet authoritative.

He grabs Adiyetu’s head and as she gucks, gucks, gucks, her eyes dart towards you, as if to make sure you are taking in every inch of this torture. And when her face and chest are all slime and sleek with her own spittle, you’ll realise that there’s just so much you can take. You’ll bolt away from the room, anguish assuming dry air in your throat, tears streaking down your face, their rumbustious laughter a hound tailing you.

That night, you’ll go on your knees and beg Adiyetu for forgiveness. She’ll look at you, confused. And honestly, you don’t know why you’re begging for her forgiveness. Maybe it’s because beyond this world, beyond Adiyetu, you’ve come to reckon there’s nothing out there except emptiness. The possibility of finding something else worthwhile seems so alien that you hate to entertain the thought. You want to bask in Adiyetu’s light because it’s the only light you know. It’s the only light you want to know. 

She’ll say nothing, the book she’s reading rising between you and her face. The next morning, she’ll hug you unexpectedly as you leave for school, saying, “I just wanted you to learn. I was teaching you.” She’ll hug you so tightly, calling you her baby, and your heart will thump so fast that you’d think it’d explode. Your eyes would water. The gloom would disappear instantly. All will be well with the world again. Your world.

And one day, she whispers in your ear, “You have to go all in.” She looks at you and repeats all in lasciviously, as if you’re supposed to understand and take it up from there. You nod quickly, fearing that this is another big test on the road to becoming a man, fearing that she’d think you ignorant, and may suddenly decide that you’re not worth teaching, not worth holding your hand on this steep stretch of discovery. But she smiles, reassuringly, and the world is illumined. 

You’re enraptured by the feeling of being inside her for the first time. It feels like something is trying to suck the life out of you. Adiyetu tells you to hold steady. She gasps and yelps every now and then. You don’t wonder if she’s only acting to make you feel good. You tell yourself that you’re the causative organism spreading this infection, making her eyes mist with desire. It makes you feel important, desired. Above all, it makes you feel loved. 

You are running out of breath, yet you’re able to say, “I want to pee.”

She locks her legs around you to prevent you from fleeing to the bathroom. “Damn it! Just pee inside jor.”

The rapture happens. You’re in nirvana. It’s like glowing lights. Like smiling faces. It’s like the caramel gold of sunshine on the face of a lake. It’s the wave of Adiyetu’s throaty laughter swirling around you. It’s the heat between you both, her hug, and soft, soft kisses. 

She says you need to learn to hold it in longer. That no woman would appreciate a one-minute man. You don’t want to be a one-minute man. It sounds horrendous. Even more so, coming from Adiyetu. You ask her, “How?”

“Next time,” she says.

Next time, Adiyetu tells you to think of anything else—anything—so you push your mind into the rush of the road leading to school. You summon signboards and storefronts whizzing past an imaginary car window: Ostrich Bakery, Hadiza Bulongu Restaurant, The Noodle Bar by Chef Halimaz, Sha Fearless Ba Shi Da Na Biyu, a bright billboard of Nancy Isime holding a bag of Viva detergent. You jumble them together until the names lose meaning—Bulongu Bakery, Ostrich Viva, Nancy’s Noodle Bar—everything collapsing into one long smear of colour.

Then the landscape begins to warp. Suddenly, there are a hundred Nancys smiling down at you, each holding the same bright-blue detergent. Logos stretch, words melt, the world blurs into a frantic montage—

“Good boy. Good boy,” Adiyetu says.

On other days, when the signs no longer work, you count animals grazing in a vast field—sheep, goats, cattle—so many that they bleed into the horizon until you can’t tell one from the other. And when those grow tiresome, you replace them with clouds of white egrets that lift in a single breath, filling the sky. You whisper their names under your breath—leke-leke one, leke-leke two, leke-leke three—feeling the phantom brush of wings on your face. And when even the animals fail, you turn to a football pitch in your head. The match is frantic: coaches gesticulating, players shouting, the crowd roaring as the ball pings from one foot to another. A shot grazes the post; a free kick bends beautifully into the net; a striker slides on his knees in triumph beneath a storm of banners.

You jerk away from the vision as your own body reaches its inevitable end.

*

There are days when you do not think of Adiyetu or her friends, yet your mind still feels blurred, as though a massive convex screen has lowered between you and the sun, muting everything into a soft, confusing dusk. In class, you drift, Teacher Ade’s voice swelling and fading like something heard underwater, until it jolts you back without warning. At play, you suddenly stop mid-run, frozen in place as if a shape has materialised before you—something only you can see. At the madrasa, your mouth moves with the others in steady recitation, but your mind wanders elsewhere, humming with the restless static of wind caught within a cluster of trees. And sometimes, when you stand by the roadside watching boys play football, your thoughts slip far from the dust, and the shouts—toward some imagined mountain, perhaps—where strange birds cry from a place you cannot point to, and a lone, brittle chirp reminds you that you are still here.

*

Where Adiyetu handles you with so much tenderness, Hibbatullah is the epitome of impatience. This afternoon, she straddles you after working you up with saliva-greased palms; there’s a practised urgency in the way she works you up to a frenzy, commandeering the whole act as if you’re a toy. Her toy. 

Lie on your back.

Are you trying to moan? Boys don’t do that. Please, just stay quiet.

Don’t touch my breasts. Just wrap your hands around my waist.

You love it. This complete dominion she wields. It sickens you that you love it. Does it? Truly? You love it all the same.

Before now, you saw Hibbatullah as the girl whose hijab always sweeps the floor, whose hands are hidden in gloves, who is first to reach the madrasa, sweep it clean before others arrive, and make sure that every kettle is filled with water for ablution. But here she is, perfect as a mannequin in the nude, almond-shaped eyes, coffee-brown, jasmine-perfumed skin, and mango-sized breasts bouncing atop you. She bends forward to cushion her movement, her small nipples grazing your chest. Then she flings back her head as if seized by something otherworldly. Her body vibrates. Her fingers claw into the bedding, her gyrations never braking. Your hands remain on her waist as instructed.

“Ya Allah! Ya Allah! Subhanallah! Subhanallah!” She chants, then collapses on you, her face buried in the space between your face and your left shoulder. Her breathing is an urgent song in your ears. She sobs and mutters things you can’t understand.

Your voice is a whisper when you say, “Are you hurt? Did I hurt you?” 

She stops sobbing, lifts her head from the nook, and stares at you with watery, curious eyes. As her face hovers above yours, you realise that her beauty is truly remarkable, and to think that you’ve hurt her breaks your heart. You say you’re sorry even though you don’t know why. She lifts herself from the bed and puts on her hijab—the only thing she came with. 

After Hibbatullah leaves, you ask Adiyetu if she would be okay. She looks at you curiously, “Why?”

“She was crying. I didn’t know what I did wrong.”

Adiyetu laughs. “That naughty girl. Don’t mind her jare. Na yeye dey worry her.”

She laughs again, and you laugh with her.

*

It is a Sunday, and you are racing through the dusty streets toward Kasuwar Yankaba, the spare key to Mama’s shop clutched in your fist. Adiyetu has sent you to fetch the ground egusi Mama forgot to bring home the night before. The market is mostly deserted—Sundays are for meetings, weddings, naming ceremonies—so it surprises you to find Mama’s shop unlocked.

Even though the shop sees more of her than you do, even though her life has been tied to it since your father died—a man you remember only through other people’s stories—you know she shouldn’t be here today.

Beyond the iron bars, her goods sit in their usual ragged piles: plastic buckets stacked in lopsided towers, kettles with clashing colours, everything crowding the entrance except for a narrow path leading to the main door. You pause, wondering if someone has broken in. But nothing is disturbed.

The door gives way easily when you push it. A rush of warm, stale air slips out—along with voices. You freeze.

Mama is on the worn mattress. The same Mama who usually returns late at night, too tired to even touch her food after counting her money. A man is with her. Their bodies move in a way you have never seen from her, a way you do not want to understand. You recognise his voice before his face: Alfa Kamoru, the madrasa instructor who flogs you for stumbling over your recitations, who says your tongue is too heavy with wa ma, wa ma, as if you are dragging your own shame behind you.

Your heart clenches, not because of Mama. Not yet. But because something inside you has shifted without warning. Mama had said she was going to her monthly women’s meeting, then to Mama Sadiyya’s daughter’s walimat. She left in such a hurry she barely touched her pap, saying she would be fined for lateness.

And now she is here, like this. You don’t want to think about her. You don’t want to think at all.

Something inside you breaks open, like a hurricane tearing through a field with nothing to hold it back. 

You turn and run. You run as if distance could erase what you saw, as if the air outside could wash your eyes clean. Tears sting your face. When you reach the road, you fling the key into the gutter and watch it disappear.

*

The night after your discovery, a fever clamps onto you like a living thing. Inside the heat, your mind turns against you. Grunts and whispers coil together, forming shapes you don’t want to see. Mama appears in the dark of your mind, calling your name, but her face keeps slipping away. Alfa Kamoru stands behind her, his head warped into something horned and furious, his whip flickering like a tongue of fire. Verses rise from his mouth, distorted, echoing in a world where everything is ink-black and trembling.

You beg the visions to stop, but they thicken, multiplying.

Mama and Adiyetu pin you down on the bed, one on each side, trying to quiet your thrashing limbs. Their voices sound far away. You feel their fear before you understand it. Your body shakes although you are burning.

Later, Mama will say the fever reminds her of the one you had when your father died. You were only a toddler then. She’ll say your body was so hot she could have boiled water to make eba on your skin. She won’t know this time it isn’t a person who died—it’s something in you.

Days pass. Your classmates visit. One boy tells you about the coming football match between JSS1C and JSS2B. He boasts about the firepower in your class’s team and complains about your absence, as if you were ever needed on the pitch. You listen and nod, unable to place yourself in the world he’s describing.

One afternoon, the house is quiet. Adiyetu sits beside you and says she can make the fever go away. Her voice is soft, too soft.  She mounts you, and a strange warmth floods through you. You shut your eyes, trying to grasp the feeling, only to open them to the horror on Mama’s face, hand over her mouth.

The moment shatters. Adiyetu jerks back from you. Mama lets out a strangled sound, something between a gasp and a cry. You don’t understand how she is home at this hour, or why her arrival feels like the sky breaking open.

Your heart is a galloping horse.

The quarrel erupts instantly—raw, loud, jagged. Even through the fever-haze, you can sense this thing has roots that go deeper than you.

Adiyetu’s voice cracks: “Do you remember what he did to me? I was nine. I told you and you called me a liar. You threw me out. Do you know how it hurt? How it still hurts?”

Mama’s voice is a blade: “You evil girl. Adi TJ could never do such a thing.”

“He was a monster. And you knew. Pretending was easier for you. Pretending kept your house intact.”

“If you say one more word about him, wallahi, I will break that dirty thing you call a mouth.”

A silence follows—thick, trembling. They stare at each other, chests heaving. A cockroach, unafraid of the tension, darts across the floor.

Then Adiyetu says something low, too soft for you to catch.

Mama slaps her so hard the sound cracks through the room.

“You’re leaving my house today,” she says, breath uneven. “I won’t let you ruin my life twice.”

Your stomach clenches. If she leaves, what will become of you? You can’t remember the world before her. It feels carved out of her hands, everything she is.

Adiyetu doesn’t plead. She only laughs once— a short, wounded sound, then storms into her room. You want to follow, to comfort her, to tell her Mama didn’t mean it. But your legs won’t move. You stand beside the Toshiba TV, rooted like a small tree in the harmattan.

Mama mutters to herself as she sits, shaking one foot over the other. Adiyetu reappears moments later, dragging her sea-green box. She doesn’t look at you.

When she reaches the doorway, your body finally remembers movement. You rush toward her, but Mama catches you mid-stride, gripping you tight. You scream, you twist, you cry until your throat burns. Mama holds you firmly, whispering something you cannot hear.

You want to tell her you hate her. That she has no right. That the glass house she built around the two of you is already full of cracks. But the words stay trapped in your chest.

For a moment, you consider leaving too. Just walking out, following Adiyetu into whatever world waits for her. But the thought collapses under its own weight: where would you go? How would you return? Who would you be without these walls?

Mama’s arms stay tight around you. Eventually, the fight drains out of your limbs. A heavy, nameless sadness settles in your chest. You tell yourself it will fade. Everything fades if you wait long enough.

You imagine Adiyetu disappearing down the road in a taxi, smoke curling behind her like an end in itself.

Later, you lie on her empty bed. The hangers on her rack clink softly as the wind nudges them. Outside, the dogon yaro sways, its leaves clapping in a drunken rhythm. The room smells like her absence—thin, sharp, hollow.

You cry yourself to sleep to the melody of the hangers, unceasing—an unassuming lullaby against this gentle heartbreak swirling within your chest.