“Nah,” she said. “They’ll just chop off one of your hands.”
“Not funny,” I said, as I looked for a shirt. My room was tidy as I barely had use for it. I don’t like messes, either. My clothes were neatly folded on one of the beds. Four shirts, one caftan, three pants. I grabbed a semi-clean cotton shirt. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged and walked past me to my balcony. The scent of the incense she liked to burn in the shop touched my nose. Nag champa. I loved that scent, though when I bought some and burned it in my room, it didn’t smell as good. She stepped over the mat I’d been sleeping on and took in the view. She inhaled and exhaled. “Nice,” she said.
“Tumaki . . . ”
“You sleep out here?”
I sighed loudly. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I like to,” I said.
“You don’t like the indoors.”
“No.”
She looked back out. “Makes sense.”
There was a cool breeze. This was probably what allowed me to sleep so well. Despite her presence, my head still felt a little fuzzy. It had been while since I’d slept that deeply and to be ripped from that kind of sleep was jarring. “Tumaki, your parents are going to . . . ”
She laughed and whirled around, her eyes grabbing mine. “Let’s go to the desert!”
“Eh?”
“Just out of town,” she said. “For a little while. I never get to do anything.”
I opened my mouth to protest.
“I’m often in my library late into the night. Sometimes I sleep there,” she said. “They assume that’s where I am if I’m not in my bed. They can’t imagine me being anywhere else but alone in my library. Trust me.”
We could have taken her scooter but we walked. I didn’t know how to drive one and, even at this time of night, too many people would remember a woman driving a man on a scooter. It was always the other way around
For once, I was glad she was wearing her black burka. In the night, you could barely see her. But I didn’t have to see her to be aware of her close proximity. It was the first time we were completely alone together—no mother in the back room or customers looming. But it wasn’t the first time I felt this strong attraction to her. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t even know what she looked like! But the sound of her voice, the scent of her nag champa, the dance of her graceful hands, just being close to her, I’ve never felt anything so real.
Each time I stepped into that shop, my heart started hammering. I’d get all sweaty. My mouth dried up. When talking to her and she had to leave for one second, I’d feel so impatient. She was my last thought before I went to sleep and my first thought when I woke up. Tumaki, Tumaki, Tumaki. I hated feeling like this. No, I didn’t trust it.
I was sixteen with no experience with women. Well, there was Ejii. I definitely liked Ejii, who’d been a shadow speaker. But that had really never taken off. Two meta-humans? That probably would have been a little much. But this thing with Tumaki came out of nowhere. I didn’t like things that just came out of nowhere. I didn’t like surprises.
“I wanted to go see that spontaneous forest so badly,” she said as we walked in the moonlight.
I laughed and shook my head.
“I did,” she insisted. “But I didn’t have anyone to go with.”
Tumaki had told me that all of her friends had been married off. Now she barely ever heard from them except for baby announcements. It was as if they entered a different world. They had, in a way. The Married Woman World. In Timia, that world had no place for friends.
“Spontaneous forests can be dangerous as hell,” I said. “Especially when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Not all the time.”
“You want to take that risk?”
“Yep.”
I almost laughed. She sounded kind of like me. I was glad that damn forest was long gone. I think she’d have gone in there and I’d have had to go after her. As we passed the last building, a man on the camel slowly passed us on his way into town.
“As-salaamu Alaikum,” he said to me.
“Wa ’Alaykum As-Salām,” I responded, trying not to meet his eyes. Tumaki stayed quiet. Every part of my body was a sharp edge. How must we have looked heading into the desert with nothing but ourselves? Oh Allah, they are going to lynch me, o, I thought.
“Relax,” Tumaki said when the man was gone. “He didn’t know it was me.”
“You knew that guy?”
“He was my uncle.”
Before I could start cursing and going ballistic, she grabbed my hand. It was warm but not soft. I stared down at her hand in mine. I had no clue what to say or do. I considered snatching it away. She was the kind of girl who would slap the hell out of you if you did something to her that she didn’t like. Don’t let the burka fool you. I’d heard her tell off a man who’d tried to cheat her on the cost of an e-legba repair. She’d handed the man his masculinity on a silver platter.
“Dikéogu,” she said. The sound of my name on her lips . . . Let them cut off both my hands, I thought. I wasn’t letting go of her hand for anything. “Come on,” she said pulling me along. “No time for you to start losing it.”
We didn’t go out far. About a mile. Timia was still within shouting distance. Between the luminance of the half moon and the dim light from Timia, it wasn’t very dark here. By this time, the thought of having a foot or hand chopped off or being publicly whipped for fornication, attempted rape, or some other fabricated camelshit had faded completely. Tumaki filled my mind like a rainstorm.
And I knew she liked me, too.
The cool breeze was still blowing and she opened her arms as if to hug it. Her burka fluttered. She looked like a giant bat. I laughed at the thought.
“I love the wind,” she said, her eyes closed, at least I thought they were.
I suddenly had an idea. I focused on the breeze and the rhythm of my breathing. The breeze picked up. Tumaki laughed with glee, her burka flapping hard now.
“When I was a little girl, before I had to start wearing this thing, I used to run outside on windy days,” she said. “There was this one day in the school yard where suddenly this giant dust devil whipped up! Everyone went running away from it. I went running to it.”
She laughed and whooped, whirling around. I increased the breeze to a wind.
“I managed to get in the middle of it,” she said, raising her voice over the wind. “It twirled me around and around and around. I felt as if it would suck me into the sky! My skirt lifted way up and everything.” She turned to me, her burka billowing around her. “My father beat the hell out of me that day. For shaming Allah. I have a scar on my face from it.”
A ripple of anger swept through me at the thought of this. And I lost control of the wind. Whooosh! It swept from the desert floor to her ankles and blasted upwards, taking her burka with it.
We both stood there watching it flutter back down many yards away. Then slowly our eyes fell on each other.
Almond shaped eyes. Skin dark like the night. Lips like two orange segments. The African nose of a warrior queen. She was taller than me and lanky in her red t-shirt with a yellow flower in the center and an orange patterned skirt that went past her knees. She wore her thick hair in two long cornrowed braids, the moon made it black but I suspected it was closer to brownish red. She had a long scar on her left cheek. Her hand went right to it.
Now she knew what I was and I knew what she looked like.
There was a flash of lightning from above. I could feel it in every part of my body and soul. It started to rain. We were soaked. But we didn’t care. We ran around in the sandy mud and lightning and rain. We threw mud at the sky. We laughed and screamed and it rained and rained. Was it because or me of the will of the skies? Both, I’d say.
I grabbed her wet hand and pulled her to me. The first time I ever kissed a girl was accompanied by a chorus of simultaneous lightning, thunder, and a torrential rain and tast
ed like the wind and aquatic roses.
The moment was poetry.
Glow Lily
Tumaki wore her brown-red hair cornrowed at the shop or at school. Basically whenever it was under a burka. When she was at home or with me, she let it out into the big bushy tangled afro that it wanted to be. I liked it best when it was out. So did she.
Her parents knew little about us. They only saw me in their shop, when I’d come around. I wasn’t stupid. Her parents were progressive but they were still Muslim. I was lucky that they allowed me in the store at all.
Her parents named her well. “Tumaki” meant “books” in Hausa, which her father was extremely fond of. During those wonderful six months, I spent most of my time in two places, in Tumaki’s arms and in her library, which I learned was an underground room behind their house. It was a place that she had made hers. Her space. That was the only reason I could stand being in a small underground room. The room was like Tumaki’s soul.
She’d even reinforced the walls with concrete all by herself three years ago. She’d also installed a winding metal staircase. She said she hired some guys to help with it, so I guess the library wasn’t completely secret. “About four years ago, this room just appeared,” she told me. “My mother believes it was made by one of those giant underground worms. It might have dug the hole for eggs and then decided that it didn’t like the land or being too close to humans.”
“I believe it,” I said. Ejii had once told me about “reading” the mind of one of those weird giant worms. She said it was obsessed with the number eight or something. The creatures definitely had strong opinions about stuff.
Tumaki had tons of books stacked down there. Books on physics, geometry, geology, biomimicry, African history, nuclear weapons, novels, biographies, how-to books, old magazines. She didn’t discriminate. She loved information. She had an old beat-up couch and two tables and gold satiny pillows with tassels. Glow lilies that she’d cultivated lit the room. The place was always cool even during the day. It smelled like the nag champa she loved to burn and the curry she liked to eat. And there was always soft Arabic music playing.
We didn’t go back out to the desert but we did explore the more progressive parts of Timia. We went to late night tea shops where people spoke freely, tea cups in hand, about whatever was on their minds. Once in a while people talked about meta-humans, mostly as if they were the scourge of the earth.
Usually when there was meta-human bashing, we’d stay for a long while. I really wanted to understand the root of their hatred of people like myself. Fear, arrogance, ignorance, you take your pick, those people suffered from all those. But eventually, I’d start getting really steamed. The way those guys would talk (always guys, women never spoke in the tea shop discussions), it was like they weren’t on earth during the Great Change. Like they were untouched by it. They thought they were so “pure.” It was ridiculous. More than once, Tumaki had to drag me out before I threw hot tea in someone’s face. The last thing I needed was for people to know I was a meta-human.
Tumaki and I were quiet as I walked her home on these nights. After that night in the desert, we didn’t speak of my abilities. She didn’t ask about them and I didn’t really want to talk about them. She knew I was a rainmaker, what more did we need to discuss?
We went to secret poetry slams held by students, usually in empty or abandoned buildings. Here I heard some of the worst poetry ever. But Tumaki seemed to enjoy it and none of these people bashed meta-humans. So, though I made it a point to tell her the poets stunk, we kept going to them. She knew most of the students here and again her burka protected her, as it did the identity of most of the women there. If word ever got back to her father about her being out at night and with me, she’d have more than just a scar to show for it.
“But my father isn’t the monster you’re imagining,” she insisted during one of our conversations about her scar.
“Any father who puts a mark on his child is a monster,” I said. “I don’t care if he’s an imam.”
I’d never spoken to her father. Tumaki had tried to introduce me once but I wasn’t up for it. He was one of those “big chief” men in Timia. The kind that struts around followed by guys who will admire even the toilet paper he wipes his ass with. His expensive embroidered thick cotton robes were always a heavenly white—how do you keep your clothes that white in a place where there is so much dust, eh? His long beard was bushy and dark black, his hair cut short, not one grey hair on his head. You could tell he was a proud proud man. I didn’t like him.
“You don’t know him,” Tumaki said.
“I beg to differ,” I mumbled. I’d known many like him, including Chief Ette, including my father.
That afternoon, she asked her mother if she could take the day off from the shop. Then she took me to the market square to see her father speak. We stood out of his sight, beside the booth of a man selling dried grasshoppers. The seller absentmindedly munched at a grasshopper leg as he listened to Tumaki’s father speak.
Her father sat on a table before about a hundred young men who sat on the ground. He had their full attention. Every single one. I wished I could command that kind of attention . . . in a positive way.
Around them, the market went about its business, but people were obviously preoccupied, listening to Tumaki’s father. I spotted her mother on the other side of the square. She was trying to be inconspicuous as she stood, fully veiled, in the shade of a cloth shop. Even the shadows couldn’t hide the pride in her stance.
“And then whoooosh! the sweetest smelling wind ever imaginable,” her father said. “Everyone agrees the smell of the Great Change was like billions of blooming roses. It made your skin feel new, soft like a baby’s backside. Allah is great, quo. If you were not there to witness the Great Change you will never be able to fully imagine it. The Great Change was Allah’s return. All its results are Allah’s will.”
He paused dramatically, then his eyes widened and he pointed his index finger up beside his head. “Now you have these foreigners who know nothing about us. Who do not respect local traditions. They slaughter cows indiscriminately. They consume goat milk.” He spat to the side; several men in the audience did the same. “And have you ever shared tea with these people? They take one cup and then get up and leave when there is a whole pot left! What kind of nonsense is that?” Several people in the audience sucked their teeth and grumbled. I noticed more, however, were starting to look around, uncomfortable.
“They openly disrespect Islamic tradition. Look at all the addicts addicted to that . . . that drug, that mystic moss they brought with them. How many die from eating other people’s personal peppers? A whole family died from them a month ago when a woman mistook one for a normal pepper and used it to make stew.”
“And the worst thing,” he stressed, his voice rising. “The worst thing is that they come here from their world and think they can tell us that we have gone wrong. They say the Great Change has made the earth and its people unnatural. They doubt the will of Allah. They take their own lives for granted.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at his audience and then around the market. “You know who you are. You know who you are.”
My mouth practically hung open. Beside me, Tumaki gave me a small smile and nodded. Tumaki had insisted that her scar had been an accident. A stupid mistake of an overprotective father. I’d scoffed. “Why do you protect him?” I’d asked. I was sure he’d done it on purpose, because he didn’t want her to be too beautiful. I assumed he was the usual non-progressive ego-driven type of guy that I was used to seeing. Okay, so I had to revise how I felt about Tumaki’s father.
He was a traditional imam, certainly, but this man was open-minded. And the man had balls. The “foreigners” he was griping about were Ginenians, people from the world of Ginen. No one did that! The people of Timia practically worshipped Ginenians. And though he didn’t openly say it, the meaning was clear: he was defending meta-humans. Can you imagine? In a town where meta-humans where
treated like, well, cockroaches, here he was saying that meta-humans were the “will of Allah.” Maybe Tumaki’s scar was an accident caused by the hand of a scared father. Maybe. Even people who do good things can still do terrible things once in a while. He should have never scarred his daughter’s face. I don’t care what was going through his damn head.
More people gathered. Women, veiled, unveiled, gathered at the periphery of the all male audience. There was a young girl standing not far from me whom I think was a metal worker, as Tumaki’s necklace was softly pulled in the girl’s direction.
There was some booing. A few Ginenians had come to listen, too, and some local people simply didn’t like what they were hearing. But mostly there was silence and attention and a deep sense of fear. His words were obviously inflammatory but many agreed with him. He was tapping into Timia’s quietly festering disease. That thing that was on everyone’s mind that no one dared to speak of.
He spoke with a casual eloquence that made you listen, consider, and fear for his life and your own for being there. You could see where Tumaki got her humanity. I felt my heart in my throat when I glanced at her as she looked at her father. I knew I had to deal with my parents eventually, my parents who had sold me into slavery because I was a meta-human. Not yet, I thought. I couldn’t imagine leaving Tumaki. Will she come with me? I couldn’t imagine that, either.
When her father finished speaking, I still refused to meet him. No one wants to meet that kind of man while knowing you’ve more than kissed his daughter. No way.
Not long after that, invigorated by his speech, Tumaki and I went into the part of Timia where drugs deals, prostitution, and other illegal transactions took place. It was her idea. I’d seen such places plenty of times since escaping the cocoa farms. I knew damn well that they existed and thrived. But I guess Tumaki was pretty sheltered.