22 Guiwa. Here l was, hoping wed move closer towards school and Islamiyya. We moved further away instead...closer to Aminas school. The odds were not in my favour. The house we moved to was owned by one Alhaji Longman. He indeed was a tall Fulani man. May be why they called him Longman. I never got to know his real names. From the house, at night, we saw the almajiri bonfire and he could hear them chanting their surahs away. They went straw picking during the day. This they used for their fire at night. The fire was both for light and warmth. Now I wonder if they set there, in the open, for they chanted well into the night. Everybody chanted at once. How the malam got to know who said what amazed me. We had a malam like that once. Before we all got enrolled at DarulQuran. All of us studying there, so the school died, all at once. Anyway, Malam Na ki ganin bone would go round us with his cane also chanting jangai! Jangai! Jangai! And wed go ba sin, mim ara. Alif lan lan haaquri... We yelled as loud as we could, but his cane must land somewhere. Anywhere. On someone. Anyone. Most times on all of us, one at a time. Many years later wed get to know that all the time we spentt with Malam Na ki Ganin Bone, we were just learning the Bismillah. We never got to know Malams name too. But they say he got that name because he was always saying na ki Ganin bone whenever he was faced with anything unpleasant. In our house Zuwairah was always his reason for refusing doom. We heard that she gave up Islamiyya the very first day she got flogged...that was even before malamTukur set up Darul Quran, and Malam always came round to teach her and Maa at home, and us, wheeler we felt like showing off. Problem was evertytime he came, shed ask where they stopped previously. Malam wane surah ma nike? And Malam would go O ni Malam na ki ganin bone That was how we knew him. Forever. He was always rejecting doom I hope he never saw it. The house were in had no flowing water. Or light. I dont know if light was supposed to be rectified while we were there, but it never was. Water, we had to go fetch from a public tap close to the house. Problems sometimes we spent hours on queue for just a bucket, so we began to look forother places....our search took us to the outskirts of Guiwa, to a house owned by one Sidi Umar. I think. Alhaji Longman may have been a philanthropist, I am not sure, but whenever he visited his garken shanu to which we were neighbours, all the neighbourhood kids turned up in long queues for sadaka. He gave each kid a coin. Sometimes when I wasnt too ashamed to peep out, I got a note. A fifty kobo note.(I never joined the queues, Id stand at a distance and feign disinterest) Not long after we moved in, we had neighbours upstairs. Their toilet, when they flushed, emptied into ours. Maa spoke severally to the care taker who did nothing. Then she decided to see the Alhaji directly. Once. He promised do something. It wasnt done. The second time she saw him, she told him that she had taken care of the problem,( which was a lie) but thought it was nice to tell him that the leak was still there and that since she had blocked it from flowing into our toilet, it was flowing next door, into his garken shanu and directly into their harawa. The very next day of course, we saw someone on the toilet roof...
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 13:13:45 +0000
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