If there is an eternity, Iya Farouk will stand discombobulated in it.
Perhaps she will gaze around and wonder why she isn’t on the road anymore. Perhaps they will let her peer down so she can see her body, garbed in the sunshine-coloured dress, bent like a swastika.
Years ago, she was the stupid tomato girl who wheedled and begged and told stories so you could see reason with her: she had to roll in the mud to get her customer to buy at the price he did or tell fake stories that her neighbour stole whole baskets of tomatoes and pepper from her room. “If I lie,” she would touch her lips with her finger, pointing to heaven, “let me die.”
Lots of times, after a bargain was not going my way, I would start to walk away from her corner—it was all I could call it, her little space on the culvert with a dirty tarpaulin shade—and she would plead with me to come back.
Her desperation gave me a perverse joy.
A year ago, before I moved to my apartment, I watched her tie stalks of verdant efo for another customer. It was from this customer I got to know her name. Her identity is hinged on her child’s. Was. I wondered then how many people ever called her by her real name, the name I will never know. Her mother, perhaps, but only when she was cross with her. Her husband too, but only when they made love.
I imagined time as a potter, its aged hands slowly and methodically turning her until her hips broadened and her cheeks stretched as if there were pleasant half-apples under them. Her business had expanded: she sold eggs and baking butter and vegetables and onions and canned food and cloudy groundnut oil. There was a new regality about her, a calm awareness of self. I wondered what was happening in my own life while she morphed. As she shed her desperate naïveté, what was I shedding? As her corner expanded, what changes were going on under my skin? What was I doing when she married Baba Farouk? Kissing for the first time? Writing my Post UTME? Sleeping with a lazy-eyed lecturer with a river for a belly?
Now that she’s dead, now that everyone’s shouting and wailing, now that the street’s been cordoned off with firewood and piles of solid granite so that honking vehicles have to turn back, now that a traffic warden is directing people away from the supermarket that Iya Farouk’s head points towards, now that the red under her is seeping like palm oil across the road and her slipper is so close to my right foot I could pick it up in two brisk steps and run, I think of how thoroughly ordinary my life is.
Comments
Post a Comment