His Scandalous Bride

1: Then

AISHA WAS CERTAIN HER MOTHER wouldn't have married him if she knew a devil loiter just beneath his skin. Aisha was certain her mother wouldn't have married her murderer if she knew. Yet if that's true, why did she remain married to him?

Mamman Shehu, her father, had a temper. The feisty kind of rage constantly simmering, loitering, like an avalanche and growing up, she was made to understand this fixture didn't make him a bad person even if it made him do terrible things like hitting her mum to mere edges of death whenever the monstrosity snuck out, which unfortunately, was all the time.

An expression of happiness. Lingering melancholia. Her father was triggered by many such irrationalities. It were as if he couldn't stomach any form of emotion except perhaps pain her mother wears and thus the contempt. There were moments she would have settled for his ravaging contempt instead of the blind indifference he accorded to her person.  But to him, she merely doesn't exist. And she knew why.

She was born out of wedlock and for her father's nemesis.

Her mother cheated on him a week to their wedding and like a fool, he had to find out when she was born nine months later when she had given birth to her;

"How dare you think I wouldn't know?" He'd raged in one of his stuporous moments, "I knew the moment I held her in my arms that September morning a few minutes after her birth. How can I not? She has his eyes. AK. The same wicked amber eyes he had inherited from his whore of a mother." He never forgave her.

Who is AK? Aisha had no idea until her mother's demise a year ago and she read her letters to him. Letters she'd written every year on the same date, December 12th, for nineteen years. Letters which were stamped 'RETURN TO SENDER' in red but which for some reason had kept writing anyway. Of course, she had been curious about her birth father but whenever she'd found the courage to ask questions, her mother gets defensive and there was no one who knew her parents before their marriage. There was no one who knew her parents period.

According to the letters, Ansar Khalid aka AK was her mother's first love. Her father knew. Everyone knew. No one understands why she had chosen to marry his best friend twenty years ago out of the blue. But it wasn't out of the blue. AK had been oblivious of Mamman's manic obsession and trusted him with his everything but she knew. She knew Mamman's usurpation. She knew his ravenous envy. What she didn't know was AK's secret which he had confide in confidence to his supposed best friend and the price she would be forced to pay for it.

"I would keep my tongue only if you marry me, Jiddah." Her father had supposedly deadpanned when she'd gotten on her knees and begged, frightened out of her wits for what would happen if the secret were ever let to see the light "It's only fair he loses someone he loves just like his whore of a mother had done to my mother when she married my father."

AK had confided in Mamman that he was born out of wedlock after he'd overhead his parents talking when he was seventeen. What he didn't know was that his stepfather was his real father but Mamman knew. His mother had spent years poisoning his mind about the woman his father had met on his business trip a month before their wedding in Niger and had tried calling off the wedding over only to marry three years later who had come to her husband's house with a boy whom might share no resemblance to him but anyone who knew Alh. Shehu Danliti could see the boy has his temperaments. The official story was her son from her first husband who is late. Hajiya Aishatou, Mamman's mother, know otherwise. He is her husband's beloved bastard. She never let her son forget, or forgive.

Just as much as he never forgot or forgave her mother's betrayal.

. . .I got scared, AK, and that's why, I ran, only for me to end on your doorstep. It was like a reflex action. Finding you when I needed an oasis from my life's desert. And like always, you had let me in. I had shattered your heart and was days away from marrying your brother but you gave me shelter. I never understood why. I never understood why you loved me as much as you did. I'm sorry I disappeared in the morning without saying goodbye.

Aisha is a hoarder. Of pain. Of hatred. Of sadness. Yet nothing it would seem held a candle to her mother. If it weren't for the obvious scars and that she grew up, she would swear her mother lived a happy life. There was so much light in her it burns that sometimes Aisha scared to look into them. There's just too much love and too much hate in her not to cower beneath such excellence. It floored her, and now, it traps her.

She stares in obvious loathing at the sickly man shaking on the floor next to the little they owned. An old mattress with reeks of urine. A medium-sized Ghana must go. An old, tattered, medium-sized trolley whose zips hangs open in the middle revealing bits of the rags that lay beneath. A cooking stove. A pot with two plates, two cups covered inside. And wonders, only for the billionth time what offense has she committed to be given such a shitty fate. How was it fair that she gets to care for a murderer, the murderer?

Her mother clearly thinks high of her for reasons she finds unreasonable—the only 'high' she has, if she was being honest, is her height. Aisha has, never for once in her entire life, being remotely reasonable. She is mean, and vindictive, and even if she loves her mother to pieces, she'd also hated her beyond words; she'd always had a nagging suspicion of her mother been aware of her rather complicated feelings in their relationship. Why, then, was she shackled, for life it would seem, with him? She can leave him. She should leave him. But she can't. She couldn't.

"Promise me—

God, she hated promises.

"He's your family."

Her family? What family? Who needs family like him? Not once, not even in his throes of undeniable pain has she felt anything akin to pity for him. He was a chore, and she treated him as such. What more could he expect after all?

"I'm going to hate you for as long as I live so let's never pretend to like each other," he'd told her in obvious contempt those naive days when she had kept longing and working for his love and acceptance.

Should she just abandon him? She owed him nothing. He is just dead weight. But even as she thought and plotted, she knew she wouldn't even if she was twenty, penniless, and as of this moment, homeless.

Should she blame fate or karma? She would but Aisha isn't exactly high on faith. God abandoned her a long time ago and if she has any say, she doesn't care. How can she believe in a God which allowed a woman like her mother die in the hands of trash like this man? Not after she'd begged and begged for a miracle. No! As far as she was concerned, God doesn't exist. If He does, he would strike the whimpering man clinging hopelessly to life with such an alacrity, dead. Or at the very least make her disappear. Not when she has absolutely no idea what to do or where to go.

They'd lost their home and everything. They needed money for the mountaineering bills he'd incurred in the hospital and with no one to ask for help, she'd sold everything of value. The house was the last to go. It was seized by the bank and auctioned. She'd gone begging earlier today, like always, only to return to this hallowed sight. She had thought they would be given more time so she could at least get enough to rent a room. Apparently not! What was she suppose to do with the two thousand three hundred and twenty five naira she has tied on the lapel of her faded green Ankara wrapper covered beneath her long jilbab, which though faded and old, hasn't torn and by far, the only clothing she had of value?

No home. No food. No medicine. No job. No nothing. Her life was a breeding ground for a rather hellish existence and there was nothing she can do to stop it. It would be a stretch to expect anything from her, wouldn't it? She's already stretched too thin from a charity she doesn't particularly want; Aisha is fairly certain she isn't the charitable kind, but it would seem fate has decided and she'd be damned if she'd let it ride her as it pleases ever again.