We met on one rainy day in May. The day started with some heavy clouds in the sky. I looked up and said, “I better go to town and come before this rain starts.”
I hurriedly went to town but before I could finish what I was doing, it started drizzling. I tried getting to the station before it rains harder but in between the station and the market, I got caught by the rain. My hair was new. I wanted to keep it for another week or two. I couldn’t stand to watch it get soggy so I rushed to a shop and stood in front of it.
That’s where I met Razak. He was in the shop when he saw me taking shelter. He came and asked me to take a seat inside the shop and I did. His first question was, “Are you a Muslim?” I nodded. He looked like a muslim himself looking at how he was dressed. He started speaking Hausa to me and I responded.
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The shop belongs to him. He told me the stories of how he came to own a shop like that and what he had gone through in life. He looked younger than the stories he was telling me but I listened as I could relate to some portions of the story. It’s like something that happens in every Muslim home. By the time I realized, we were laughing as if we were not strangers. As if it wasn’t the rain that brought us together.
We exchanged contacts and I left when the rain stopped. He called in the evening. We continued the storytelling. I was the one telling him about my family, work and what I intended to do in the future. I yawned. He told me, “Let me leave you to sleep., We’ll talk tomorrow.”
A week later he proposed. I said yes. It was May 13th. I marked the date because it was my mother’s birthday. On the June 5th, he asked me to marry him.
“Razak, if that’s a joke then come off it. We just met. We are not even a month old. Was it not only yesterday when the rain forced me into your shop? No, it’s not funny.”
He was serious. He talked about it every night and day. I told him I wasn’t ready. I begged him to give me enough time to see the foundation of what we were building first. I wasn’t sure about my emotions because somehow, I couldn’t connect with him on a deeper level. I knew I loved him. I knew we had a lot in common. He belongs to my religion too and that makes things easier but something wasn’t right with me emotionally.
I visited his home often but he was just happy to see me. He didn’t do anything to show we were lovers. He won’t sit next to me on the sofa and won’t try to make a move on me. He would give me food he said he had cooked because of me and sit three meters across the room and talk to me.
“Razak, are you sure of your feelings for me, to the extent that you want us to marry?”
He nodded with a smile. He told me, “I’m a man. I don’t joke with such things.”
I told him to take me home to meet his family. It was still June when I told him that. Our relationship was still loitering around the month zone. He needed free time so we could travel to see his family. I wasn’t counting the days but he gave me updates every day, telling me why we couldn’t go on a certain day and how his family travelled to their hometown and all that.
I was just waiting, hoping the whole thing wasn’t a dream that ended with a tap on the shoulder.
“We can go on Saturday if you can,” He sent me a message. I responded, “I’m free on Saturday. I will get ready for you.”
We travelled an hour and a half before we entered a big house that looked like a hotel. Looking at the activities going on there and the kind of people going in and out of the house, I was sure it wasn’t a hotel. We entered a hall and he asked me to sit down.
A few seconds later, a boy rushed from the inside of the room and hugged him. He was shouting “Daddy.” A few seconds later, a girl followed. Her voice was as shrill as the voice of a girl her age. She kept repeating, “Daddy…daddy…daddy.” She hugged him and another boy followed. They were all screaming daddy.
“Daddy? As in, he’s the real father or they call him daddy out of respect?”
He entered the chamber with the kids and for about fifteen minutes, I was sitting alone in the hall, forcing myself to watch the cartoon on the TV. A woman walked into the hall and sat in the chair directly opposite of me. She wasn’t smiling. When I greeted she only nodded and sat down while looking at me without blinking.
She didn’t look like someone who could be his mother. “His sister? Why is she looking at me this way? She doesn’t like me already? Or is about the colour of my dress? She doesn’t like black?”
My mind was saying anything just to make sense of the look in the lady’s eyes. Razak joined us. He said to the woman, “This is the lady I was talking to you about. Her name is Selma.” She buried her face in her palm when I was being introduced to her. After the intro, Razak said to me, “This is my wife. She’ll be the senior wife and you’ll be the junior wife when we finally marry.”
It felt like a prank or a joke without a punchline. I was speechless. I sat there smiling to myself like a fool who had eaten her words at a moment when she needed them the most. This woman was looking sternly at me waiting for what I would say but words eluded me. When I finally pulled myself together, I asked, “Razak, are you serious? We came here to meet your family. You didn’t tell me you had a wife? What’s going on here? Is she your brother’s wife or your own wife? What’s happening?”
The lady smiled. The first smile I’d seen on her face since we visited. She tried saying something but Razak stopped her from talking. He said, “From here, I will take you to meet my parents. They are not far from here.” I repeated, “But you never told me you were married? What’s going on here? Is that a joke? You carried me all the way to this place to show me your wife and kids? Are you alright?”
The lady got up and left. She wore a smile while leaving. Maybe she couldn’t sit and watch while I insult her husband. When she left, Razak joined me in my seat, trying to speak in whispers, “Don’t worry, my dad will explain everything to you when we get there. Yeah, she’s my wife. I want a second wife so I discussed it with her and she agreed. I brought you here to meet her so my dad will do the rest.”
He sounded like a boy who didn’t know his way back home. I said, “It’s like something is wrong with your head. Is that how you go about things of this nature? You told her about me and didn’t see the need to tell me about her? And who even gave you the confidence that I might be interested in being a second wife? You got it all wrong. Take me back home.”
On second thought, I figured I couldn’t sit next to him for another hour and a half while going home. I was so angry I might strangle him while he was on the steering wheel so both of us fall into a ditch and die. I told him to deal with his family while I went home by myself. He tried to stop me. He insisted I should at least meet his father. He was so sure his father could get me to agree to marry him. I pulled myself away and left the room.
The whole thing felt like the universe was pulling a prank on me. It just didn’t make sense. I told my mom about it and she laughed at me. She said, “Is that an Ananse story or it really happened?” My dad simply said, “That boy should have his head checked. Something is wrong up there.” For days, I kept thinking about the what-ifs—“What if his wife attacked me?” “What if we had an accident while going? I would have died because of this?”
He called a day later telling me his dad wanted to talk to me. I told him I wasn’t interested in any conversation with his dad. He insisted. I cut the line. He sent a long message begging me not to embarrass him because of what happened, “Everyone knows I’m coming home with a wife. Don’t do this to me.” I blocked his line to save my heart from the angst and the turmoil.
The relationship didn’t last long. It was hovering around two to three months but the impact it had on me is greater than any relationship I’ve ever been in. I learnt a thing or two. That, when a man asks you to meet his family, you have to ask the kind of family he’s talking about because his wife and kids are also his family.
