Oceanof Part 1 Complete Novel

Ibrahim
 
Kaduna, 1998
 
I still remember the first day I met her. It was a Saturday afternoon and the
sun was scorching hot. She was outside, drying clothes on the cloth line by
the abandoned water tank, the one with the peeling paint and the barely
legible letters 'G' and 'P'. The tank had since been replaced by a well in the
middle of the compound, which served all the ten tenants in the three flats
since water stopped running through the pipes and taps years ago. The three
flats were built side by side with no space in between them, thin walls meant
you could hear when pots fell in your neighbor's kitchen.
 
I dropped the metal bucket I was holding to the ground and grabbed the
small yellow pail tied to meters of rope. Then I positioned myself by the well
so I could watch her, while fetching my water. She had her back to me, in a
black T-shirt over a yellow and black wrapper tied around her waist, and was
bending over a repurposed white paint bucket to pick up wrung pieces of
clothes, unroll them and flap them into the air, expelling droplets of water
with a force that was hard to believe her tiny frame could conjure. I watched as
her hands spread a navy blue fabric on the line, her henna-stained fingertips
moving it until it was symmetrical on both sides. It was a hijab. She reached
for two wooden pegs and clipped it in place, while humming quietly. She
might have heard the burbling of the water in the well, because, she stopped
humming but she didn't turn around; she continued drying her clothes on the
line, as I continued fetching water from the well.
 
I wouldn't have known her name if not for Hajiya Tani, the tenant who
lived in Flat 3 with her four children and a husband who visited once a week.
Her husband, Alhaji Sani, was a civil servant in Zaria, where his other wife