CLAY HEARTS - When Power, Betrayal, and Desire Collide

Chapter 5 – Strings and Sculptures

Rukayat

I’ve been in boardrooms all my life, but nothing prepared me for that compound in Kofar Ruwa.

The drive back to the office is a blur of horns, sand, and memory. I can still feel the clay dust on my palms from when I shook his hand, rough, textured, alive. Everything about him felt like that: unpolished, deliberate, maddeningly real.

“Madam, are we heading straight to the Towers?” my driver asks.

“No,” I say before I can think. “Take me to Unguwar Dawa.”

He glances at me through the mirror, surprised. “Unguwar Dawa? That area ”

“I know where it is,” I cut in. My voice comes out sharper than intended.

The car hums along the narrow roads that lead to the older part of the city, where the buildings lean close together like gossiping aunts. Dust seeps through the open window, and with it, a strange calm.

It’s been years since I came here.

Zainab’s compound is smaller than I remember, but the neem tree still stands proud in the center, shading her open-air workshop. A cluster of clay pots, half-formed and drying in the sun, gives the air that familiar earthy smell of wet soil, heat, and something ancient.

When I step out of the car, she looks up from her stool, squinting.

“Eh! Rukayya?” she calls, her Hausa lilt wrapping around my name like a hug.

I smile, the kind I haven’t worn in months. “Aunty Zainab.”

She laughs, wiping her hands on her wrapper before pulling me into an embrace that smells of smoke and soap. “Kai, the city princess remembers us small people today?”

“I’ve missed you,” I say softly.

She tilts her head, studying me. “No one visits the clay unless something heavy is sitting on their chest. What’s troubling you, child?”

I look around her workshop, the wooden bench where I first learned to mold clay at twelve, the cracked pot that still sits near the well. “Do you ever think,” I begin slowly, “that when you’ve spent your whole life being shaped by others… maybe you forget how to shape yourself?”

Zainab chuckles, picking up a lump of wet clay and pressing it into my hand. “The clay never forgets,” she says. “Even when you abandon it, it waits.”

I sink onto the bench beside her. The coolness of the clay seeps into my fingers as I start to knead it. My manicure is ruined within seconds, but I don’t care.

“Your hands are stiff,” she says. “You’re thinking too much. Clay doesn’t like pride. It listens only to surrender.”

Her words settle deep, heavy, and familiar.

I shape a rough curve too rigid. I try again, too thin. Finally, I close my eyes and let my hands move without thought. When I open them, there’s something there: not perfect, not even beautiful, but mine.

Zainab nods, approving. “Aha. Now you remember.”

The afternoon light glows gold against the clay, and for the first time in a long while, I feel something like peace.

Until my phone buzzes.

A message from Ken:

Dinner tonight. Father wants to finalize the engagement date.

My chest tightens. I look at the little figure in my hands, fragile, unfinished, covered in fingerprints.

Zainab watches me quietly. “Whatever you’re building, Rukayya, don’t let anyone else decide when it’s done.”

I nod, setting the clay figure down gently. “Thank you, Aunty.”

But as I walk back to the car, my thoughts drift to another pair of hands, rough, steady, patient, and guiding the clay like it was alive.

Dayo Adebayo.

Something in me stirs. Not an attraction exactly. Something deeper. Like recognition.

Like the clay whispering: He understands.