UBAYD MALEEK(Wacce Aka Zaɓa) By Mamuh Gee complete

Description

It is the middle of the afternoon, somewhere between three and four, when Jamila comes out of the bathroom and finds her husband unloading a donkey in the yard. He is not due. He visits every two weeks and stays a night, and he left only six days ago. Now there is an iron trunk, a pile of bundles, and a man who tells her quietly that he is home for good. Then he says the rest. One of their daughters is to be given as negestati.

That is where Ubayd Maleek, subtitled Royalty versus love and written by Mamuh Gee, puts its weight, and the opening chapters hold nearly everything on that one word. The text itself spells out what a negestati is: the woman of a king, a prince or a king’s grandson, whose place with him is the bed and the bearing of children, and who is not a wife. Jamila has never imagined her own family touched by it. Her husband, whom the children call Abal, explains himself with care. His father served the delah from youth into old age and was released only when he gave his son in his place. Abal has now served for more than thirty years, and Jamila has spent nearly twenty of them without a husband at home. Had he had a son, he says, the service would have passed down again. He has three daughters, and he means to end it with them. The price of his freedom is one of the three.

He does not pretend the arrangement is cheap or cruel by nature. He says negestati live well, that they differ from royal wives only in the marriage, and that families have gone from poverty to wealth this way. He is not chasing riches, he tells her, only rest, and he adds that he would be glad of grandchildren who carry the delah’s blood. Jamila answers in their own language first, with a greeting, and later in a very small voice, asking “Neges?” when she is told what kind of freedom he has bought. She says she hoped to see each of her daughters married like any other woman’s child. Abal tells her not to apologise. The decision is his and it is made.

The daughters come home from the market in long dresses of the family’s own cloth. Padima walks in front: tall, chocolate brown, full figured, aware of her looks and proud of them. Nuru follows, holding the youngest, ten year old Meriyam, by the hand. She has a yellow brown Amhara complexion, large eyes and a plain, gentle face, and she is the sister who is easily frightened. The text places the family between two cultures. The girls have had religious schooling and Western schooling, and more than half of the latter was in their own customs, so that a stranger could not say at a glance whether they are Muslim or simply deeply rooted in their traditions. Their father is Amhara and their mother Hausa. The sisters love each other, and the narration notes that Padima does not tolerate being slighted, while Meriyam and Nuru are softer.

Abal studies his daughters at the evening meal. The text lays out his reasoning, and Jamila’s, and the week of argument that came before: Nuru is gentle and would be crushed in a house of power, and Padima wants more of the world than any other girl at that table. After a week of debate the choice settles on Padima, though both parents are shown still unsure. Padima learns of it from the young man she has been meeting in secret.

His name is Ahmed, and he is the son of a high official of the court at Gizah. Padima’s plan, as the narration gives it, is a grand wedding, two weeks of milk baths and camel milk, and a life at Gizah, where wealth and royalty truly sit. She tells him she does not want a rushed marriage. He tells her the certificate of exchange has been collected and the negestati is to be taken within thirty days. When she presses him to say whether she would be taken to the delah nearby or the one at Gizah, he does not answer directly. In his own thoughts he calculates how to keep her, and the text hints that each of them is using the other. Padima says she will not be handed to an old man, that she is worth more than that, and that Nuru or Meriyam can be given instead. She walks home in a state of fear. She has a secret that, by the law she believes in, can cost her and her parents everything.

The delah’s servants arrive soon after with loads of milk for her baths, and the neighbours gather and rejoice. For ten days Padima barely eats or sleeps. Nuru wakes one night to find her sister awake with a knife and nothing to say but that she will die. What follows is a quiet manipulation. Padima brings Ahmed’s idea home: Nuru is frightened of everything, so a sister’s tears and the thought of their parents’ lives at stake might be enough to make Nuru act. One morning Nuru wraps her face and goes to the milk bath in Padima’s place. Padima meets Ahmed in a banana grove. Later she tells Nuru the truth of her trouble, and Nuru is so shaken that she falls into a long fit of coughing and then into days of silence that no one in the family can break. The Nuru chapters end with her confronting Ahmed and coming home to find her parents standing in the doorway, a cup breaking at their feet.

A separate thread opens in New York. Afia, a girl of not quite nineteen, finds contract papers on her mother’s dressing table and demands to know what they mean. Her mother Lailah, composed and in no hurry to explain, is eating boiled vegetables and sipping black lemon tea. She tells Afia that the contract with Santrigo Tokyo is a dream she has held for over ten years, and that she will not give it up. Afia answers that it means leaving her husband, Ubayd Maleek of the delah at Gizah, and that no one there will take her back. Lailah was married young into royalty and, the text says, is almost a sister to her daughter in age. She is also the woman who met her husband at university in San Francisco and was accepted by his family only because an old king, Neges Muhammad Kaleeb, bent the rules for her. Ubayd Maleek does not appear in person in these chapters. Afia sees him as a man almost faultless, almost fastidious to a fault, who has kept to New York and to a single wife while other men of the delah took more. Lailah leaves in the end with five suitcases and her handbag, while Afia and the eight year old Farhat cry and cling to her. She tells them they will be proud when she is among the top twenty. Afia, out of options, resolves to call the old king.

What gives the book its character is how the two stories answer one another. In one, a family may be spared servitude only by giving up a daughter. In the other, a woman who has the wealth and standing the first family cannot imagine walks out of it for a contract in Tokyo. The prose often steps inside a character’s head to give the reasoning behind a decision, so that readers are told why a father chooses what he chooses and why a daughter plots what she plots. Characters move between Hausa and their own languages, and the text supplies a bracketed Hausa translation. The tone is serious and domestic, and the pace relies on conversations and private reckonings. It suits readers who like Hausa family drama with a royal setting and a moral knot, and who are comfortable with a story in which no one is simply right.

The excerpt leaves a good deal open. Who is the old man Padima is to be given to, and does Ahmed know more than he lets on? What did Abal and Jamila hear in that doorway, and what will they do with it? Is Nuru truly a pawn, or is she more resolute than the others take her to be? Will Lailah’s choice reach the delah at Gizah, and what does the old king do when Afia calls? And how, if at all, do the two households connect?

A father’s freedom is bought with a daughter, and the one chosen is already looking for a way out.

Ubayd Maleek is ready to read on Wikinovels.com. When a cup breaks in a doorway, how much has a father already heard?

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