The nurse helped, and Borogie pressed Nata’s stomach again, forcing out the remnants of the placenta. Each push made Nata whimper – not loudly, not fighting, but in the defeated way of a woman who had no cry left to give. Her tears were dry. Her body moved like someone elsewhere, her eyes glassy, far away. The pain of the placenta removal blended with the pain in her heart until they became one blurred, overwhelming ache — a pain without shape, without edges, without air.
The Royal Victoria Hospital had no facilities, no morgue space for stillbirths. It had peeling walls, rusting iron rails, and nurses who did the work of twenty in a single shift. Babies born alive were squeezed two to a cot. Babies born dead were carried out quietly, wrapped in cloth, handed back to families before grief could even gather itself.
The nurse — young, gentle, and unexpectedly related through a cousin of a cousin — tried to comfort them. Her voice trembled, even though she had seen this scene more times than she wished to remember.
“I am sorry,” she whispered. “We must bury him now.”
“Now?” Nata asked, confused, her voice thin, as if afraid to disturb the air around her. As if afraid that breathing too loudly would erase whatever shred of memory she still had of the child she had carried.
But even before the nurse answered, something in her mother’s posture told her that now was the only answer poor families ever got. There was no time for mourning, no room for delays, no refrigerated space for babies whose futures had been denied before they began.
The nurse placed a gentle hand on Nata’s shoulder. “We… we cannot keep him here, my daughter. I’m so sorry.”
Nata felt her breath catch in her throat. She felt the room tilt slightly, the heat pressing down on her, the walls melting into a soft blur of yellow and grey.
Her mother, steady in her sorrow, pulled out her best wrapper – the one she had planned for celebration after the naming ceremony. Red and gold, patterned with fish and millet motifs. A wrapper meant for joy. For women to dance in at dawn. For visitors to admire when they came to greet the new mother. A cloth that should have been spread over a bed with incense burning nearby, not a burial mound.
They wrapped the baby in it.
The cloth swallowed him too easily.
Nata reached forward suddenly, instinct overriding shock. “Don’t take him,” she whispered. Then louder, gripping the bundle with trembling hands: “No. Leave him with me a little. Please.”
Her fingers tightened around the bundle — around the tiny, still body she had carried beneath her ribcage for eight months. Her mother took a step back. The nurse bowed her head. Yerro wiped his face with the edge of his shirt, unable to watch.
Nata held the tiny body to her chest.
It was the first time she had held him — and the last.
She rocked him gently. The movement was something her body remembered on its own — the tender sway of a woman cradling hope. Except now, hope was cold. Hope was small. Hope was wrapped in red and gold cloth. Hope had no breath.
She pressed her cheek against the wrapper, breathing him in, memorising the weight she had waited eight long months to feel. Her breath hitched. A small sound escaped her — not a wail, not a sob, but something raw, the sound of a heart folding in on itself.
She whispered something no one else could hear.
No one asked her to repeat it.
Only when the nurse gently touched her shoulder did she loosen her grip. And even then, her fingers did not want to open. Her hands had to be pried open slowly, finger by finger – not forcefully, but with the soft insistence born of compassion.
“I am sorry, my dear,” the nurse said. “Allah knows best.”
The words fell uselessly. Nothing could reach the place where Nata had retreated.
Once the burial cloth was tied, Caw Ousman – who had joined them with another vehicle from Jeshwang – and Nata’s father, Yerro, and her husband Buhari, stepped forward. A few other relatives Nata did not know followed in silence, their faces long, their steps heavy.
They walked out toward the Atlantic shoreline behind the Atlantic Hotel — a familiar place. Once, Caw had worked there as a caretaker before a quarrel with the hotel manager had ended his employment. The beach smelled of salt, kelp and faint echoes of music from a distant radio played by a juice presser.
There, under a coconut tree, they dug a shallow grave.
The Atlantic waves rolled lazily behind them, indifferent.
The wind blew as if carrying away a name that had never been spoken.
No naming ceremony.
No songs.
No kola nuts.
No ram.
No incense.
No ululation.
No happiness.
Just the Atlantic.
Just the wind.
Just the soft thud of sand being poured over a child who had never opened his eyes.
And the silence —
The kind that clings to walls.
The kind that follows you home.
The kind that sleeps beside you.
…
Caw Ousman felt strange — hollow, as though the wind had passed straight through him, leaving him thin and brittle. He had carried the small, wrapped body to the shoreline. He had shoveled the first handful of sand. And he had whispered the dua the imam once taught him, one meant for travelers returning home.
Because truly, what else could he say for a child whose journey had ended before it began?
But the strangeness he felt was more than grief.
It was kinship.
He had felt it before — once, long ago, when he was no older than eleven, standing barefoot on cracked earth in Fulladu, watching the last of their cows collapse one by one as the drought wrung the land dry. He remembered his mother’s wail the day their final heifer fell sideways, legs trembling, ribs like a washboard. He remembered his father sitting beside it, stroking the creature’s neck with a tenderness he never showed to his children.
He remembered the smell of starvation — the metallic smell of death too close, of famine settling into the bones.
Half his family died that month.
Half.
No one talks about what it means to bury half your childhood before your beard even grows. No one speaks of what a young boy feels when he washes his little sister’s body, too light in his hands, too still, too cold.
So as he placed the stillborn child into the shallow grave, the Atlantic’s wind pushing at his back, he felt something pull in his chest.
A recognition.
A memory.
A wound reopening.
This boy is me, he thought in a sudden, startling rush.
A life swallowed too soon.
A breath stolen before it became real.
He had stood there, long after the last handful of sand had been poured, staring at the earth. A part of him had been buried there too — the small, hopeful part that still believed life could be gentle.
He wiped his brow, though it was not sweat but grief on his skin.
He whispered under his breath, “Go safely, small one. Allah knows your name even if we never spoke it.”
Then he turned away, but his feet were heavy, as if the earth tugged at him, refusing to let him go too quickly.
…
Caw paused at the hospital entrance, leaning against the whitewashed pillar as the smell of disinfectant and boiled rice drifted from the kitchen. A tired patient’s cough echoed in the courtyard. A baby cried somewhere in the distance — the kind of sharp newborn wail that should bring joy but instead pierced him like a thorn.
He shut his eyes.
He felt empty.
He felt old.
He felt the long road of his life stretching behind him, full of graves, farewells, and unspoken prayers.
“Allah,” he murmured, “do not let me leave this world the way I entered it. Alone.”
But he did not know whether God was listening.
He did not know if He ever had.
His hands still shook. His throat felt tight.
As he walked back toward the hospital, he lifted his head — and froze.
There she was.
The woman he had been searching for.
She was coming down the steps, a basin balanced on her hip, her wrapper faded but clean. Her scarf was tied low, framing a face lined by worry and sleepless nights, yet still beautiful in that quiet way hardship could never dim. Not very tall, but graceful — the kind of grace that came from endurance, not vanity.
Her steps were slow, exhausted, but steady.
Caw’s heart kicked against his ribs so loudly he nearly placed a hand over his chest. There she was — the woman whose presence had lingered in his mind since the family gathering. The woman whose soft greeting and shy smile had stirred something inside him he could not name.
She didn’t see him at first. Her eyes were trained downward — the eyes of a woman with burdens but no complaints.
But when she lifted her gaze, their eyes met.
A jolt passed through Caw — part recognition, part disbelief, part longing.
She stopped mid-step, surprised, her breath catching lightly. “As-salamu Alaikum,” she greeted shyly.
“Wa Alaikum Salam,” he replied, his voice strangely hoarse. It felt as though grief and yearning were fighting in his throat for space.
“What brings you here?” she asked gently, unaware of the storm she had stirred within him.
“My… my family,” he stuttered. “A loss.”
Her face softened instantly, her eyes warm with genuine sympathy — a softness he had long been starved of. “May Allah give you patience,” she murmured, lowering her gaze respectfully.
“And you?” he asked, clearing his throat.
“My mother is admitted,” she said. “Asthma. I came to bring her lunch.”
It was nothing dramatic — no sweeping romance, no thunder. Just a quiet exchange on hospital steps, with sun falling slantwise across their faces and grief sitting heavily between them. Just a small kindness. A tenderness. A human moment.
But for Caw Ousman, it felt like a door had opened somewhere inside him — a door he had thought long sealed.
When she turned to go, he panicked.
“Wait…” he said, taking a step forward. “I—”
He swallowed, nervous for the first time in decades. “I may need to… greet her again. Your mother. Please… your address?”
She blinked, surprised but not offended. There was no fear in her glance, only curiosity.
“We stay at Lasso Wharf,” she said. “Near the old shed. Ask for Kumba Wandianga’s house.”
“I will,” he whispered.
She nodded gently before walking away, her steps measured, her back straight.
Caw stood there long after she disappeared from view.
He had come for grief.
But he left carrying something he feared might soon become desire.
To be continued…
