SAFIYYAH (Karyayyar zuciya )by Maman Maama

Description

Muhammad Gidado dials the same number again and again, reciting a prayer he could not name if asked, and each time a recorded voice tells him the line is not available. Only minutes earlier, the woman he calls Piya stood in his office, visibly pregnant, and told him she had been married for years. Now he says it aloud to the empty room: she has blocked him. Safiyyah by Maman Maama opens its first episode, titled “Bon appetite!”, on this exact wound. The author borrows the social media joke that calls heartbreak “breakfast”, a joke Muhammad is in no state to find funny.

Before the story settles into that office, it slips back into a parked car. In Muhammad’s memory, Piya holds her phone up to his face and demands that he say he loves her. She says the recording will be evidence for a “lovers’ court” if he ever changes his mind. He shields his face, laughs, blushes and refuses, so she finishes his sentences for him and wins anyway. He asks when she will take him to meet her Daddy. She falls quiet and studies her hands, as she always does when marriage comes up, then says the earth cannot have an end because it is round. When he asks how she always knows what he is about to say, she answers that she is his soulmate. The scene is warm and teasing, and its placement right before the office confession makes every joke in it hurt.

In the present, Muhammad’s grief is physical. His head burns, and his chest aches with something like an itch he cannot scratch because the heart sits beneath the ribs. For years he had never pictured a future without her. The house was ready, the children were already imagined, and he was only waiting for her green light. He tells himself he hates her, and a few minutes later wants nothing in the world more than to see her. He wonders whether madness might be a mercy, with a hospital bed and sedatives and no more missing her smile. Then a small, stubborn hope surfaces: perhaps this was only another of her teases. The dead phone line says otherwise.

The second section, labelled “Her”, follows Safiyya, the young woman whose name the novel carries. Her hands shake too hard to press the ignition. She drives out of the school at a crawl while other drivers sound their horns and swerve around her, telling herself it is the last time she will see the place, just as she has seen Muhammad for the last time. She passes the restaurant where she once celebrated his birthday with him, and remembers the promise he made there: that another year would not come round without her in his room. She has been crying since she left the school and only finds out when someone asks. In her room, she watches Gidado’s name flash on her screen under the contact name “Pyar”, then blocks both of his numbers, because she knows he will keep calling and that she might answer. She believes she is giving him the simplest way out. He will heal, she reasons, marry and have the children he wants, while she faces her demons alone. Her hand rests on her belly, which she names as the cause of everything. Telling him the truth about it, she thinks, might ease him for a moment and torment him for life.

Home brings a different kind of pressure. She hopes to reach her room without meeting anyone, but Yaya Mustapha is parking beside her and notices her face. Esther, who works in the house, asks if she is all right, and Safiyya tells her to let no one into her room. Her sister Safina knocks and accuses her of rudeness, and says Daddy has been looking for her all day. Safiyya goes to his part of the house and finds him waiting, visibly unwell, with Mommy beside him. Both look at her belly. Daddy asks what he is going to do with her. His eyes drift to a photograph of a smiling woman, and Safiyya feels a surge of anger toward her, convinced that this woman is the source of everything, though she has no evidence to give anyone.

The questioning that follows has clearly been repeated for months. Mommy asks again who the man is, and Daddy says Safiyya will never tell them. He says that if he knew, he would do to the man what the man did to him, and the thought leaves him struggling for breath. Safiyya’s fear is not for Gidado’s body, since she doubts Daddy could do much, but for his name. Tracing him would bring in his parents and the school management, and she cannot bear that. When Daddy sends Mustapha to check the dashboard camera in her car, she realizes she never thought of it. The camera would show the building where staff offices sit, on a weekend, with few people inside. Mustapha comes back and says she switched it off before she left. Daddy marvels that she has always been two steps ahead of girls her age. Safiyya looks at Mustapha, and he looks away. She cannot tell why he would lie to Daddy for her, only that he must want something.

She has told her father she will accept whatever he decides, and she expects the decision to be a marriage within the family. In her mind that narrows his choices to three men. None of them loves her and she loves none of them. One helped to damage her relationship with her father, and another had a direct hand in the state she is in now. She cannot say which is which, and she has no proof to show anyone. She repeats a thought to herself about finding “the fork” and its marks, which the excerpt does not explain. Mommy forbids her to leave even the parlour until the family leaves the house. Safiyya thinks that she is finished with what brought her to Abuja, and with Nigeria altogether.

Episode Two, “The Young Passengers”, is largely a pressure scene. Safiyya finds her room searched, her bag emptied across the bed and her phone showing signs that someone tried to open it. Its screen saver is a photograph she once took of Gidado’s hand on his steering wheel, silver rings on his fingers and a watch on his wrist. It sends her into another flashback, in which he admits he feels insecure about her. She confesses that she chose this university because of him, and that she threw a tantrum in front of Daddy to get her way. In the present, Mustapha walks in, announces that he has just saved her and her “precious love” from Daddy, and asks for a little gratitude. He calls himself her Yaya and says he loves her with all his heart. He also mentions the parents’ decision to join them in marriage, and Safiyya concludes that Daddy has chosen him, and that he is the worst of the three. Then he snatches her phone, studies the photograph, guesses the owner of the hand is rich and probably Arab, and asks whether he is a lecturer, a student or non-academic staff. She says nothing. As he leaves, she mutters that they are all hypocrites.

What makes Safiyyah distinctive in this opening is its voice. The Hausa narration slides in and out of English in dialogue, in thought, sometimes inside a single sentence, the way these characters would plausibly think and speak. The humour of the flirtation sits right beside a grief described almost as a bodily illness. The alternation between “Him” and “Her” lets the reader see both lovers on the same afternoon. Muhammad believes he was deceived for years, while Safiyya believes that being cruel is the kindest thing she can do for him. The author’s note admits “it is going to be rough” and promises “a smooth landing”. The tone is emotional and tense, closer to romance and family drama with a mystery running underneath than to a light love story. It suits readers who enjoy secrets that unfold slowly, and who are comfortable with the Hausa-English mix of modern speech.

The excerpt leaves several questions open. What exactly did Safiyya deceive Gidado about? What is the truth about the pregnancy that she wishes she could tell him? Who is the man Daddy wants to punish, and what did that man do to Daddy? Which of the three men in her mind can be trusted, if any? Why did Mustapha lie about the camera, and how much does he already guess? Who is the woman in the photograph, and why does Safiyya blame her? And what will Gidado do now that his calls cannot reach her?

Between a love she will not explain and a family that demands a name, Safiyya has only her silence to spend.

Safiyya and Gidado’s story is available to read on Wikinovels.com. If she keeps her silence, whose name will be spoken in the end? [https://wikinovels.com.ng/]