The dusty street of Bathurst Lane nestled in the heart of Kaduna is the only home I have ever known. Forget the flamboyant cities that I later breezed through as my job required of me. They were more like poorly baked pastries glazed over with eggs- glossy on the outside and complete crap when you bite into it.
My street was more of a family than a neighbourhood. It mattered little that I belonged to one of the few Christian families in the area. Up the street on the left, the polytechnic lecturer lived behind the green gates with his numerous children and a wife no one ever saw. Opposite him was Iyagana’s family. Iyagana was tall and lanky, delicate the way girls that would grow up to be called ‘lady’ and not ‘madam’ were. Whenever she smiled, her perfect dentition peeked through her pink lips.
The light-skinned mischievous twins lived not too far up the street and closer to my home. It was always difficult to tell who was Hussain or Hassana, yet these mirthful twins would grow up to be a medical doctor and professor of biochemistry respectively.
Down the street was the brood of young guys living together. They could have been five or maybe six. I don’t recall now but they were quite a friendly bunch. I didn’t take too kindly to them when they first arrived. You see, my good friend Usman and his family had lived there before these strange guys arrived. So,naturally, it was my duty not to like them. However, Shehu, the shortest of them all soon won me over with his wholehearted smiles. He used to call me his wife and though my mother kept a hawk-eye watch over them, she allowed me to spend a few minutes with them in the evenings when the children came out to play football and hop excitedly over lines drawn on the ground.
Our house was on the end of the street, next to my best friendTerso’s house. Terso was four years older than me but it barely mattered as I matched him in wit and unfortunately height. Despite his mean streak, I loved spending time with him. I would watch him chain his dog to a post and slap it around. I was repulsed but that puppy always went back to him. Perhaps that is where my interesting choices in men began but that is a story for another day.
Living on Bathurst Lane was like an explosion of flavours, from the too-sweet taste of Sallah to the all too familiar bliss of Amarya’skuli-kuli. Amarya was the younger wife of the old Nupe man at the mouth of the street.
Considering the fact that we all called her ‘Amarya’, one would expect a young, supple woman but Amarya was at least 50 years old at the time, short and dark-skinned. Her flabby arms always quivered as she deftly moulded the groundnut into flattened shapes. Her face held beady eyes, a small nose and tribal marks on the sides of her mouth, much like whiskers but then her smile was what made her face memorable. It broke out like the beginnings of a flower in bloom and spread across her face, slowly chasing away all signs of the hard life she lived. The smile would then bunch up in crow’s feet, leaving a twinkle in her eyes. Whenever she saw me, she would stumble through English to impress me. The attempts always drew disapproving glances from the older wife who, in my childlike mind’s eye, was the spitting image of Cinderella’s step-mother.
I reckoned that the older wife had given Amarya a hard time as a young wife but others who had known the family before I was born swore that the older wife or UwarGida, as we called her, was a nice woman cursed with a hard face. As if to fan the embers of my imagination, in all the years that I knew Amarya, I never saw her outside her home. I convinced myself that she had been forbidden from ever leaving the house so I would try, without success, to code to her in broken Hausa that I could help her escape. How I would achieve that feat, I didn’t know.
The family hardly ever mixed with the rest of us but we trooped daily to buy the crunchy and peppery groundnut cakes. We were like a brainwashed mass that never dared go anywhere else to get kuli-kuli. Hers was so good that when my older siblings in boarding school wrote home, there was always a ‘PS: We need Amarya’s kuli-kuli’.
It was what bound us together, more than anything else on that street. Not even the communal frustration of trudging to Video Club’s well to fetch water whenever Water Board deemed us unworthy of having pipe-borne water (the family was so called because they rented out home videos for the paltry sum of 10 Naira) could compare.
One Monday afternoon, I was on my way home after buying Amarya’skuli-kuliso my sisters and I could soak some garri when I heard a distant noise. I tuned it out because I was trying to remember what exactly I had been asked to buy. For some reason the N20 kuli-kuli and N 10 sugar in my hands didn’t seem right. I halted, completely confused and lips already quivering. Only the previous day, I had been scolded harshly for buying the wrong thing.
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I tried to stay calm and remember but the noise just wouldn’t let me concentrate. Someone brushed hurriedly past me, screaming something, I looked up but the person had disappeared around a bend. I was about to run back home and apologize for my mistake when the noise sounded closer. I turned around to find people running towards me. My mother’s voice rang in my head that I should run but the fear etched on their faces kept my feet firmly planted on the ground. Save for this running bunch, the street was deserted. Their voices rang out like a crowd in a stadium, only that they were not cheering. I am not sure how long I stood there till someone grabbed me by the scruff of my neck violently. In shock, the contents of my hands fell to the ground.
I craned and found myself peering into my eldest sister’s face. Her face was grim as she wordlessly ran with me back home. It was on the news that Kaduna was not safe and my father had called on the landline from the office to ensure everyone was at home. He said he would get my mother from her shop on his way home.
The atmosphere around the house was tense and each time we heard the sound of a car, we all sat up, ready to dash to the gate. The only other excitement for the rest of the day, however, was my parents’ return. We heard of the carnage, saw it in the newspapers and on TV as it continued for days before the army was deployed. It was dubbed the Sharia riot but we never saw the violence firsthand in our neighbourhood. Instead, everywhere grew extremely quiet. Even the video game sounds we used to hear in Shehu’s house seized. We held prayers in church for “our brothers and sisters who had fallen”. Our Reverend always said that they were resting in the bosom of the Lord and that vengeance was for the Lord. Whenever we walked back home from church, Mummy would hold on tightly to my hand, almost cutting off the blood supply but I never complained. If a Muslim neighbour walked past us, they would only grunt pleasantries. Questions about the family were not asked anymore. It suddenly seemed rude to enquire about an ailing child’s health or a husband’s job.
From that time on, the mass exodus began in full swing. Many Christian families moved to Southern Kaduna where they felt safer. We didn’t move till 2008 when we built our house but in the interim eight years, we kept out of one another’s way and the taste of Amarya’s kuli-kuli was forgotten.
By Angela Umoru (AngieInspired),
Nigeira
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