Hijabs of Death
THAT night Dikko was gentle with me. He showed me a side that was totally different from that of the infidels of an impure god. I believed him; I believed he was not one of them. If I had not met him in such terrible circumstances, I would have believed he was the man God sent my way as the only man deserving of my flower. He explained to me that he had to take my innocence as the only way not to put me in harm’s way with the infidels. He told me they had spies everywhere who saw and heard things. And that if they as much as hear or see that he was being too nice to me, they could hand me to another man or a group leader who could be cruel to me.
I didn’t like that prospect. Dikko seemed genuine. Unlike the other girls from our town, I was the only one who came out with a warm smile the next morning after our intimate encounter with these infidels of an impure god. My friend, Esther practically ran out of her hut naked, with her ‘husband’ chasing angrily after her. Other girls had tears in their eyes while yet others had scars of the night encounter.
Amina’s condition worried me. Would I be like that, too? How could one carry pregnancy in such horrid conditions? Where was the hospital to deliver one’s baby? How could anyone survive in this torrid place with pregnancy? I raised these issues with Dikko who assured me it would not happen. I looked at him with questions in my eyes.
“Did you not notice how I emptied myself outside?” he asked.
I looked at him again, more confused. I was too inexperienced to understand such things. I had just been made a woman in a jungle where Nigerian soldiers feared to enter because of these ruffians. But when Dikko explained further, I understood a little and silently prayed there was no trick in what he said, that it was not another way these ruffians misled girls. But I half trusted Dikko; almost everything he told me so far had come out true.
DIKKO came back from their fight with the soldiers one day and became withdrawn. He took the food I gave him and ate silently. He did not respond to the many questions I asked him. Knowing that he did not talk too much I let him be. He was fond of telling me how the battles went, how much they lost, how many soldiers they killed and so on. When I once told him how much I feared for his safety, he told me it was not his war and so he would not die in it.
Yet I feared daily for him. I had grown fond of him; he was the only friend I had in a world so unfamiliar apart from Amina, of course. The other girls simply resumed their ordinary lives, as if they were back in their respective villages. They competed for the attention of these evil men. Sometimes, they even fought, claiming that one eyed the other’s ‘husband!’ I felt so disgusted. How could they be so petty? How do you chase rodents when you carried an elephant on your head?
After Dikko ate and lay down for a while, he beckoned me to lie close to him. Then he held me close and offered a small prayer. It was the first time I heard him say a prayer. Fear gripped my stomach. I raised myself on an elbow and looked at him with many questions in my eyes, but I did not voice them. I just gazed at him for a long time. Then he started speaking gently but painfully.
“These people,” that was how he liked to call them, “have gone completely mad again!”
“What have they done now?” I asked.
“The soldiers are beating us badly,” he said slowly. “We don’t seem to have a chance against them as before. So, there is a new plan to use young girls like you and even younger ones to carry bombs to markets, mosques, churches, checkpoints and barracks!”
My heart leapt into my mouth. These ruffians had shown themselves to be capable of great evil. But this one seemed a new twist to the totality of their evil. The frightening part of the new plan was what concerned me and which made him depressed. It was that girls like me who were taking long to get pregnant would be the first to be sent to die along with their victims. That night I tossed and turned in my sleep and it seemed that day would never break. Next day I had puffed up eyelids and red eyes from sleeplessness. Dikko was gone before I woke up.
When he returned in the evening, he looked sadder than the day before. He did not touch me either. By now I knew better than to ask many questions. So, I kept my peace hoping he would tell me what there was to his foul mood. But he did not say anything. The next day also, he was out again before I woke up. This time he did not come back at nightfall, not even in the dead of night. And for four days my Dikko did not return. My fear became real. Perhaps, he had been shot and killed or captured or simply surrounded as some of them had begun to do, when the heat of the war became too much for them to bear.
I was in a pensive mood and could not eat or do anything useful with myself. Perhaps for the first time I knew I really liked him. In fact, it almost felt like love, love for one’s enemy, but a different kind of enemy. Dikko was the first man to open up my world to another possibility of life away from the madness these ruffians had inflicted on us. He was my first man and though it had not happened the way I dreamt it up in the innocence of my previous world, he came very close. Given the terrible circumstances, Dikko was a dream young man. Not even the difficult position he found himself made him behave madly like the rest. He was capable of being gentle in a very rough and tough world.
Although he belonged to the same faith or faithlessness as these infidels, he showed me that he had a heart and soul and was only doing what he did because he was forced to. I trusted in his assurance that he would not die in other people’s senseless war. I prayed that he would not be disappointed in his wish. For me, it was mixed hope and despair. Hope that he would somehow return to me; despair that he might have fallen like so many of them.
“But God, you know Dikko’s heart,” I prayed in earnest yet again even though it appeared we were out of favour with our God and He had decided not to answer our prayers just yet. “You can’t allow him to die like that!”
Exactly five days after he went to fight, my Dikko returned with a heavily bandaged left arm. I held him tight and tears of joy poured down my face. I had never been so happy since I entered the devils’ den months ago. He was the only consolation I had in our difficult situation; I had become so used to him and even grown fond of him. I didn’t know what I would have done in his absence or how I would have coped with another of these devil’s sons if they were to allocate me to another of their evil kind.
My happiness spilled over and surprised Dikko, too. He didn’t know I was also capable of such tenderness towards him. Our relationship was a reasonably tolerable one until that moment. We lived like victims of unforgiving madmen and were determined to survive no matter what. For the life of one of us to be so close to being lost was an unbearable thought. He came close to losing his life but miraculously came back to me. A small celebration of the gift of life and being given a second chance was not a bad idea.
Inside our tent, Dikko also showed me how much I meant to him, too. He held me close and called me ‘Mother’ and told me what happened in their last outing. They had encountered the military earlier than their lookout had warned them. It became every man to himself, as they tried to shoot their way through to get away. It was in the heat of battle that he got shot in the arm; he said he was lucky to have escaped alive. Many of his fellow Boko Haram combatants were shot dead in their numbers. He became lost in the forest and wandered for many days before he could find his way back.
He also told me how the infidels sent young girls to bomb markets and mosques in Maiduguri and Gombe just before their last operation. He feared that I might soon be sent out too although he didn’t know when that would be. He was sorrowful about losing me to their terrible plan. He blamed himself for what might happen to me. He said he was sorry he had put me in harm’s way by not making me pregnant as the infidels expected. He begged me for forgiveness for what he called his foolish action. What had it amounted to in the end? He could not forgive himself. At a point he broke down and cried and said he had betrayed his ‘Mother’ by his foolish action.
The Mission
FOR my 13 years of life, I felt myself in a new kind of place. For a man to actually cry for what he thought would befall me was new. I had no experience of men and did not know how they thought or felt. I was close to my father before these infidels of an impure god came with their death and madness. Well, it was not the sort of closeness we see in the movies we watched. But I could never have suspected that a man was capable of being that soft. Dikko, an unwilling soldier for evil, showed his soft side when he cried and blamed himself for the deadly mission that awaited me.
I soaked everything in; I did not know what to say. I did not need to say anything. Dikko usually spoke so little. But this night, he had so much to tell me. It was on the night he returned from a deadly mission that almost claimed his life. Perhaps, his being so close to death gave him a voice as never before.
He started talking slowly, almost painfully, the memory of his mother seemed too heavy on his lips, as he recalled the horrible life he lived in his other life.
“We are what you call the outcasts,” he said. “Nobody cared about us. My mother married too young; that is our custom, as you know and my father did not wait for her to grow up properly. He was in a hurry. His other wives failed to give him children. But my mother immediately became pregnant. When she had me, her body was not ready for a child. You know those women who live on the outskirts of town, who carry the curse of smell? That is where she used to live until these people came.
“My father’s wives told me these stories, you know, out of spite, to let me know I was nobody and that my mother was evil and cursed. I was badly treated. My father was not always there. As the imam my father was too busy to care for me; he left me to his wicked wives. He was always going out, travelling and didn’t know much about what happened in his household. The wives were in control and I was at their mercy. Whatever they decided was what happened.
“They did not have children of their own, you know. And my mother was a cursed witch, according to them. So, why should they bother so much about the child of a cursed witch? When I grew old enough, I went looking for my mother on the outskirts where women like her were condemned to live. I couldn’t stay; the stench was too much for my young mind. But I saw my mother. She was a beautiful woman, even in that condition, and you look so much like her. When these people attacked our town, they burnt the place down along with the people there. And I was also taken prisoner to fight for them. I had no time to even cry for my mother; it was so cruel. It has been a very hard life since. Your coming has been the only difference.
