Auren Huce Haushi (Amaryar da Ba Ta San Mijinta Ba) Book 2 by Maman Fateemah Latest Hausa Novel

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Zahra waits until the house is too full of guests to notice her. Women are carrying in the bridal gifts, neighbours are crowding the courtyard, and no one is watching the hall. She slips into the entrance passage, takes a face mask and a pair of glasses from her bag, puts both on and walks out. A tricycle taxi stops for her, and she tells the rider “Janbulo zaka Kaini”. That is the moment Auren Huce Haushi, by Maman Fateemah, holds the reader on in these pages: a young wife who walks out of a family house in Kano, and a whole family who cannot find her.

She had not been well. Zahra suffers from a recurring pain in the lower belly, and a doctor has already spoken of an operation for a growth in the womb. Hajiya, the elderly grandmother of Sameer, the man hosting her in Kano, has other ideas. She sends for herbs at the market, grinds them herself and presses a tub of the powder into Zahra’s hands, with exact instructions on dose and how long to steep it. She also tells her to put up with a husband’s wandering eye, keep her sugar in check and honour his relatives. Zahra thanks her politely. Behind the thanks she is nursing a hurt of her own. She has heard that the doctor who examined her was an old admirer of her husband, and she keeps her phone in airplane mode because she does not want to talk to him.

The household discovers her absence slowly. Sameer’s sister Rukayya checks the toilet, then the neighbours, while Mommy sends the younger ones from house to house. Hajiya complains that the girl has done this to her on purpose. A man selling oil at the gate says he saw Zahra leave in a mask and glasses, and Sameer, standing in the street, realises she did it deliberately. She has no phone with her and, as far as he knows, no one in the city. He cannot reach his employer either, whose number returns the same message every time.

Zahra, meanwhile, has reached her friend Sajida’s house, where the housekeeper welcomes her as a bride and feeds her. She had thought of this as a quiet exit. The text hints that she had imagined going much further, since she thinks about her passport, which is in her bag. The comfort does not last. Sajida’s mother sees Zahra, thinks something is wrong and rings Ammah, the older woman who looks after Zahra. The phone call spreads outward through the family: Ammah calls her son, who calls Sameer, and by midnight Sameer, Rukayya and Mommy are at the gate in a car. Sajida’s father and brother arrive at the same moment, and there is a short, formal exchange in the dark about a young wife found sleeping at another family’s house without her husband’s knowledge. Zahra is woken and told to come. She says no, and then she goes, because she has no real choice.

Sameer does not take her back to the old quarters. He drives to a newer part of the same compound, beautiful and strange, where doors open to a pattern pressed on a hidden panel and lights come on at a touch. Rukayya shows her to a room and gives her half serious advice: be strong, keep her husband, respect his parents. Zahra, who does not know whose house this is, asks Rukayya to stay. She does not stay. Zahra locks herself in with a code she works out by trial and goes to sleep.

Her husband lands at half past one in the morning, a man in a plain grey shirt and black jeans, carrying only a laptop bag. He refuses the driver and takes the keys himself. At the gate the watchman, Malam Musa, praises him in a long string of salutations, and staff come out from all sides to greet him. Mahmud Muhammad Dange is clearly someone this household answers to, and Sameer, whom Zahra took for the person in charge, calls him “oga”. What happens when Mahmud finds his wife is told mostly from Zahra’s side. She wakes frightened and ashamed, he teases her about calling him “Yaya”, and she lets slip something about modern ways that she did not intend to say. The night’s closeness is uneasy as well as warm, and the narration stays with her shyness. When it is over, he goes to the mosque for the dawn prayer, and Zahra stands in front of a wardrobe of women’s clothes and wonders whose they are.

The morning brings the reckoning she has been dreading. Mahmud wants to know why she disappeared and why her phone has been off. She, in turn, bursts out about the doctor, about being sent to his friend, about the idea of surgery, and about being treated like someone with no worth. He says he only asked her to tell him what happened. Sameer arrives at the door and then Hajiya, and the scene turns into a family scolding. Hajiya tells Mahmud everything, from the herbs to the missing hours. Mahmud, who has been all authority until now, sits like a boy.

Hajiya also tells Zahra things she did not know. The house is Mahmud’s, as are others in Sokoto and Abuja. Sameer has been at his side since secondary school, and the family’s good fortune has followed Mahmud’s. He is also on bad terms with his own people. He left home in anger, his mother has been in tears over it, and when his grandmother and an aunt came to visit he refused to see them. Hajiya asks Zahra, as a favour done for God, to try to soften him. Zahra nods and does not say much. A new question is added to her own: she asks Hajiya who actually owns this house, and the answer is not what she had assumed.

Three small threads run beneath all this. Mahmud sends a staff member, Safwan, to watch a woman who keeps coming near a place and then going away. Somewhere else, a mother called Ammi is troubled by dreams in which a son appears with a girl who looks Indian and fights unseen creatures, while her husband, a general, tries to reassure her. The text does not say how, or whether, these are linked to Zahra’s story.

What marks out this stretch is its mix of tones. The searching of Kano’s lanes, the stern tenderness of Hajiya and the staff’s comic ceremony are lively and often funny, while Zahra’s feelings keep coming back to a plain question: she has married a man she does not understand, and the people around her seem to understand him very well. The novel is a good fit for readers of Hausa romance and family drama who like a heroine with a sharp tongue, a wealthy and secretive husband, and a household full of talkative relatives. The text itself carries intimate scenes between husband and wife.

The pages leave a good deal unanswered. Who is Mahmud really, and what happened between him and his family? Was the doctor a rival, or has Zahra read the whole matter wrongly? What was Zahra planning when she thought of her passport? Who is the woman Safwan is watching, and who is the girl in Ammi’s dream?

She married a man she cannot place, in a house where everyone but her seems to know his name.

Auren Huce Haushi is ready to read on Wikinovels.com. When Zahra learns the full truth about the man she married, will she stay to soften him or leave?

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