How it started….
It was one of those slow
Sunday mornings and I felt like lazing around again. By starting my day at this
pace, I had unknowingly combined a perfect recipe for a disastrous day because
before that day folded up, I was already bathed with my own blood.
My uncle stormed into the
overcrowded room I shared with my Grandma and other cousins, basically, family
relations with whom I share no intimate bond because we were all living in a
different world. He kept yelling our names, Sekina!, Kabirat!, Zikru! Why are
you not in Asalatu yet? While the others scrambled and scurried out of the room
like scared little rats, I just rolled my eyes and went rummaging through my
Ghana-must-go bag of clothes for an outfit that befits a routine gathering
located in a mosque built within my compound.
Usually, he would use his
menacing voice to command obedience when he feared we were no longer falling in
line or acting as he desired. It is not as if my cousins and I were not
practising Muslims but according to him, we are not 'authentic' ones that
marched his new reputation of freshly minted Arabic graduate and soon-to-be
Alfa. Anyway, there was something different in his voice on this particular
day; he sounded like a wounded bear who would mete out punishment to anyone not
smart enough to follow orders and seated at the mosque in time. I was one of
those and God did not intervene with what came next....
0 Comments