Love over Religion

Two years of silence

The wedding was a transaction conducted in the language of celebration. There were drums, rented for the occasion, played by men who had not eaten that morning. There was food, prepared by neighbors who would be repaid with favors and future labor. There was Halima, dressed in robes of gold and green, her face veiled, her body occupied by a stranger who moved through the rituals with mechanical precision.

She did not see Sam. She had forbidden him to come, knowing that his presence would be a wound he could not hide, a danger he could not control. But she felt him. In the crowd of faces, in the weight of attention, in the spaces between the noise, she felt his absence like a presence, his silence like a shout.

Alhaji Lami claimed her before witnesses. He spoke the words, accepted the contract, placed his mark on documents that transferred ownership from father to husband with the efficiency of a livestock sale. He did not look at her face. He had examined her once, in the market, and found her acceptable. Further inspection was unnecessary and, he implied through his indifference, somewhat vulgar.

The wedding night was a lesson in the economics of power. He came to her in a bedroom that smelled of his first wife's perfume, a room she had vacated for this occasion, a room that would be Halima's prison. He performed his duty with the detachment of a man fulfilling a religious obligation, and she performed hers with the discipline of a woman who had decided that her body was not her self.

Afterward, he slept. Halima lay awake and thought of Sam. She thought of the factory, the candles, the moths. She thought of the vow she had made and the vow she had broken, because this, this submission, was a betrayal even if Sam had accepted it, even if they had planned it, even if survival demanded it.

She did not weep. Weeping was a luxury for women who had hope of comfort. She had only herself, and the distant promise of a future she could not yet imagine.