Love over Religion

The breaking point 3

The dinner was a negotiation conducted in her presence without her participation. Alhaji Lami sat on the best cushion, accepted the best food, spoke of his properties in Zaria and Kano, his connections to government, his piety and generosity. Her father listened with the hungry attention of a man who had never possessed enough. Her mother served in silence, her eyes downcast, her movements mechanical.

"She is young," her father said, glancing at Halima as if she were a cow at market. "Untrained in the duties of a wealthy household."

"She will learn. I have staff for the labor. I require only her presence, her compliance, her womb." Alhaji Lami drank his tea, watching Halima over the rim of his cup. "She is pretty enough. Prettier than my first wife was at her age. And intelligent, I am told. She reads."

"She reads," her father confirmed, as if this were a defect he had failed to correct.

"Good. I require intelligent children. Sons who can manage my businesses. Daughters who can marry into better families than I found for myself." He set down his cup. "The bride price will be twenty cattle, fifty thousand naira, and a house in Zaria for your retirement. This is generous. I am not a patient man, but I am a fair one."

Her father stammered gratitude. Her mother dropped a plate, which shattered on the concrete floor. No one looked at her as she knelt to collect the pieces, her fingers bleeding from the shards.

"I will need time," Halima heard herself say. "To prepare. To say goodbye to my friends."

Alhaji Lami studied her with the dispassionate assessment of a merchant evaluating goods. "Two weeks. No more. I have already waited longer than I prefer."

He left. Her father embraced her, weeping with joy or relief or the sudden release of anxiety, she could not tell. Her mother bandaged her fingers in silence, her eyes empty of everything, even tears.

That night, Halima climbed to the roof and waited. Sam came, as she had known he would, drawn by some instinct of disaster. She told him everything, her voice flat, her body still, as if she had already died and was only describing the circumstances to an interested ghost.

"Run," he said. "Tonight. Now."

"And go where? With what? I have no money, no skills, no family who would shelter me. You have nothing but your uncle's workshop, which would burn the moment we were discovered."

"I will find work. I will build. I will do anything."

"And my family? When Alhaji discovers I am gone, when my father must return the bride price he has already spent in his mind, who will suffer? My mother, who already bleeds? My sisters, who have done nothing?"

Sam gripped her shoulders, forcing her to face him. "Then we suffer together. We stay, we fight, we find another way. I will speak to Alhaji. I will tell him the truth, that you are promised to me, that we have been together, that any marriage to him would be built on deception."

"He would kill you."

"Perhaps. But he would not have you."

Halima looked at him, this boy who would die for pride, for principle, for the right to claim her openly. She loved him for it. She hated him for it. She understood, in that moment, that love and survival were not the same thing, that the vow she had made to herself might require sacrifices she had not imagined.

"You will not speak to him," she said. "You will not reveal yourself. You will continue as we have been, meeting in secret, building our hidden life, while I perform the role of dutiful wife."

"Halima..."

"I will marry him. I will bear his name and live in his house and serve his table. But I will never be his. My body, perhaps, when he demands it. My presence, always, because I have no choice. But my heart, my thoughts, my secret self, these belong to you. These I keep."