At the beginning, there was peace.
A spare bedroom and parlour were cleared and set aside for Zainabou and her new husband. The furniture was modest—just a bed with a carved wooden frame, a raffia mat, and a low table—but to her, it felt like a palace. She walked about the room like a queen surveying her court, touching the curtains, adjusting the pillows, arranging and rearranging her few possessions with giddy satisfaction.
For the first time in her life, she belonged to someone. She was not merely her father’s spoiled daughter, nor the madwoman of the town. She was a wife. And she reminded everyone of this new title every chance she got.
“Don’t call me Zainabou,” she would say proudly to her cousins. “Call me Debo Jang—Mama Jang’s wife!” She laughed so loudly and so often that the compound walls seemed to shake with her joy.
In those first weeks, she blossomed. She bathed early, tied her headscarves neatly, and even cooked on some mornings. Mama Jang, though quiet and much older, seemed patient, even tender with her. He brought her kola nuts and groundnuts in paper bags, small gifts that made her clap her hands in delight. When neighbours passed by, she would rush to the door to show them what “her husband” had brought her.
And for a brief while, she was happy. Entirely, glowingly happy.
But happiness, for Zainabou, was always borrowed time.
It began subtly, almost imperceptibly. Zainabou would stay up through the night, pacing the courtyard, her wrapper dragging in the dust, her lips moving to some unseen rhythm. At dawn, her eyes would be bloodshot, her headscarf loose, but she would greet her husband with a crooked smile.
“I was speaking to the moon,” she would say softly. “It told me secrets. Secrets only wives know.”
At first, Mama Jang humoured her. He would sit on the bamboo stool by the door and nod, replying, “Eh, Zainabou. If the moon speaks to you, then listen well. But come inside, my wife. Your body needs rest.”
But her nights grew louder. Her mutterings turned to shouts—at shadows, at birds on the fence, at children whose laughter drifted too close to the compound walls. Sometimes her rage struck him directly.
“You!” she screamed one night, standing barefoot on the parlour table, fists raised toward the ceiling. “You conspire with the spirits of that lorry! You promised me golden teeth! You promised me a voice like the kora! WHERE ARE THEY?”
The courtyard fell silent. Neighbours whispered in the dark, women clicking their tongues as they drew water. The children huddled close to their mothers. Everyone seemed to have known this moment would come. Everyone except Zainabou herself.
Her mother’s heart sank. She had prayed that marriage would be her daughter’s tether to the world, a rhythm to calm the storm inside her. But schizophrenia does not respect prayers, dowries, or bridal cloth. It arrives as it always does—unbidden, merciless, and impossible to cage.
At first, Mama Jang tried to be the patient husband. He guided her gently away from the neem trees she tried to climb. He coaxed her to eat when she forgot meals, and when her voice rose in furious bursts, he murmured calming words.
“Sit, Zainabou. Sit, my wife. The spirits mean nothing. Only my word matters. And I say you are safe here.”
But patience, like cloth, wears thin with time. His shoulders slumped lower each day. His laughter, once hearty and booming, dissolved into weary sighs. The man who had once walked tall as a trusted driver in the household of her father began to shrink in stature. Neighbours looked at him with pity, then derision. The whispers reached him even when unspoken: What kind of man cannot control his wife?
One evening, after she had chased away a group of women fetching water, cursing them as witches, he sat alone at the doorstep.
“Why me, Allah? Why give me this wife when my heart meant only loyalty to her father?” he muttered.
When she appeared behind him, smiling as though nothing had happened, he tried to sound firm but his voice cracked.
“Zainabou, the women will not respect me if you keep shouting. You shame me before the whole street.”
She laughed, a strange, musical laugh.
“Respect? What is respect to the wind? It blows where it pleases. You are my husband, Mama Jang. The others don’t matter. Only we matter.”
He stared at her, his eyes heavy with exhaustion.
“But you don’t see how small I have become. In their eyes, I am not a man anymore. Just the husband of madness.”
The compound turned cold around him. Men who once greeted him with wide smiles now offered curt nods, quickly moving on. The women whispered louder. His place at community gatherings dwindled; he spoke less, avoided eyes, and found excuses to stay away.
Zainabou, though, remained convinced of her permanence. She still wore her bangles proudly, adjusting her scarf as she walked with the poise of a wife certain of her place. To her, she was not broken, not half-human. She was a woman who had asked for marriage and received it.
But beneath the surface, the truth grew impossible to hide. Mama Jang’s silence became his shield. His dignity shrank with each outburst, each night of pacing, each morning of whispers carried on the wind. And though he tried—oh, how he tried—he could not anchor her storms.
The marriage, however much he wished to honor it, was drifting toward its inevitable breaking. Madness, in the eyes of their world, was a tide too strong for any man to hold back.
……………………
One evening, as Nata bent over the communal tap, balancing her bucket beneath the gushing spout, the newlywed Zainabou appeared beside her. She carried her bucket loosely, almost playfully, swinging it as if it were a calabash and not a heavy pail of iron. She set it down with a clatter that startled Nata, who had been staring at the stream of water, her mind far away.
“You’re getting stronger,” Zainabou said suddenly, her voice unusually calm, without the sharp edges that so often made people laugh nervously or roll their eyes.
Nata looked up, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“You walk straighter now,” Zainabou said, watching her intently. “Your shoulders don’t sag the way they used to. You don’t flinch so much when someone calls your name. And—” she leaned in closer, lowering her voice, “you’ve stopped crying in your sleep.”
Nata froze, her hand still clutching the tap. The words cut through her like a blade. Slowly, she turned to her, eyes wide with embarrassment. “You… you heard me?”
“I hear everything,” Zainabou replied softly. Her eyes, wide and gleaming, had none of the frenzy of her outbursts. They were steady, like someone seeing clearly for once. “I live in the spaces where people think I’m not paying attention. I see what others don’t. But listen—” she sighed, glancing at the sky above them, “silence doesn’t always mean peace. Sometimes, it only means survival.”
Nata’s throat tightened. The water spilled over, soaking the ground until it pooled at her bare feet. She quickly turned off the tap and stepped back, blinking fast.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Zainabou tilted her head. “For what?”
“For seeing me.”
A short laugh escaped Zainabou, almost childlike. “You’re not so hard to see, Nata. You’re short in statue, with those big eyes and that long forehead. But the truth is—” she tapped her own temple with a crooked finger, “you’ve been taught to hide too well. You cover your soul the way women cover their hair—wrap after wrap until no one knows what lies beneath. But I see it. I see the hurt, the longing. Even when you pretend.”
Nata swallowed. “Pretending is easier.”
“Easier?” Zainabou echoed, raising her brows. “Or safer?”
“Both,” Nata admitted after a pause. Her voice cracked slightly. “If I speak, they will say I’m ungrateful. If I weep, they will say I’m weak. If I dream, they will say I’m foolish.”
“And so you hide,” Zainabou finished for her. Her smile was sad, but not pitying. “I scream because no one listens unless I scream. You hide because no one listens unless you stay quiet. Both are prisons, don’t you see? Madness is only the name they give to women who refuse to keep their pain inside.”
Nata stared at her, stunned by the clarity in her words. For a moment she forgot the laughter, the tree-climbing, the sudden outbursts. Before her stood not madness, but truth dressed in ragged clothes.
The two lifted their buckets at the same time, water sloshing and pulling at their arms. They began the walk home together, bare feet pressing into the sandy earth.
“You know what I wish for you, Nata?” Zainabou said as they walked.
“What?”
“That you find a voice strong enough to say what you feel without trembling. A voice that doesn’t wait for someone’s permission.”
Nata gave a small, almost shy smile. “And you? What do you wish for yourself?”
Zainabou’s laugh rang out, sharp but musical. “Ah! I’ve already got what I wanted. A wedding, a husband, and a whole town watching me dance. Let’s see if God won’t grant me the rest.” She winked, then grew quiet. “But sometimes… sometimes I wish I could stay steady long enough to keep what I have.”
The words struck Nata with an ache she could not name. They walked the rest of the way in silence, side by side. Above them, the indigo sky of Jeshwang deepened, the stars breaking open like scattered seeds across velvet. Around them the sounds of evening swelled—children’s laughter, the beat of a distant drum, the murmur of families preparing supper.
But between them stretched a different kind of sound: the quiet rhythm of two souls recognising each other. Not rivals in suffering, not victims of comparison, but companions who bore witness to each other’s unseen battles.
That evening, under the indigo sky, two girls—one misunderstood, one muted—walked home, not as shadows of misfortune but as fragments of courage.
To be continued…
