Echoes of Fulladu 2: The Photo

That night, after the guests had gone and the house had quieted, Mr Owens found Matou sitting on the back steps, staring up at the moon.
“She didn’t look happy,” Matou said, her voice flat.
“Who?”
“Nata. In the photo Mama showed me. Her eyes didn’t look like Nata’s eyes.”
Mr Owens sat beside her. “Sometimes we do what we’re told,” he said. “Even when we’re not ready.”
“Did she love him?”
“I don’t know.”
Matou was quiet for a while. Then, “Will I be married off like that too?”
He turned to her, alarmed. “No. No one will marry you off without your say. Not while you’re here.”
She looked at him, searching his face for truth. “Promise?”
He placed a hand over his heart. “I promise.”
……………………………
The following week, Mr Owens sat his daughters down — all of them. Beatrice sat nearby, silent but attentive.
“I want you all to understand something,” he said, folding his hands. “Matou is your sister. That means she eats when you eat, sleeps where you sleep, plays when you play. There is no ‘us’ and ‘her’ anymore. Only us. All of us.”
The girls nodded, some more reluctantly than others.
“And if any of you feel that is unfair, you come to me.”
He paused, letting the words settle.
By the end of the term, something remarkable had begun to bloom in her. Not joy, not yet — but trust. Trust for the man who had become than a hero to him. One evening, she came home and placed her school report on the dining table.
“Third in class,” she said, almost shyly.
Mr Owens picked it up, read it, then broke into a grin. “Well done, Matou!”
It was small. But it mattered.
And yet, despite the warmth returning to her cheeks, despite the growing ease in her laughter, Matou still carried the ache of waiting. Waiting for home, for a world where her mother didn’t leave with tearful eyes and clenched jaws, for a world where her sister wasn’t married off in secret.
When she slept, she dreamed of Jeshwang — of the mango tree near the pit latrine, of Nata chasing her with a bucket of water, of Borogie braiding her hair under the moonlight.
And in her waking hours, she counted the days to the next visit.
Because no matter how gentle Mr Owens became, or how soft Beatrice’s words turned – at least, in the presence of Mr Owens, or how the children began to fold her into their circle — Matou’s heart beat to the rhythm of another place.
A place where love had always been loud. Messy. Fierce.
A place called home
………………………………
The night Nata was handed over to her husband was one etched into her body, bone-deep and unforgettable. After the final ululations faded, after the dancing slowed to a hum and the courtyard lanterns flickered low into a faint orange glow, the real ceremony began — the one no one warned her about truthfully.
She had been ushered into the marital room, her new room, a narrow mudbrick enclosure softened only by a raffia mat and a mattress brought from the main house. A dusty kerosene lamp cast shadows that danced along the wall, like jinns mocking her innocence. In the corner, someone had placed a wooden stool with a calabash bowl of water and a folded wrapper. Her heart thumped like a war drum in her chest.
Outside, there were whispers, feet shuffling, the hushed excitement of older women whose duty had long been defined by the grooming and handing over of girls into a life of silence and submission.
And then he entered.
Bukari Jallow — her husband now. A man she barely knew. He was not cruel, not aggressive even, but his quiet presence filled the room with dread. He removed his shoes carefully, like someone arriving at a sacred shrine. Nata’s entire body tensed. Her hands trembled where they gripped the edge of the mattress. She stared down at her knees, knotted tightly beneath her wrapper.
No one had told her what to truly expect. They had hinted. They had smiled with knowing glances. They had called it “the duty of a wife” and “the beginning of womanhood.” But nothing could have prepared her for the searing, tearing pain that came next.
It was like being peeled open from the inside, like her very skin was being skinned alive. Her cries, sharp and involuntary, tore through the quiet. She bit her lip, clutched the bedsheet, whimpered like an animal facing the most brutal of punishments. Bukari hesitated only once, murmuring something she could not hear, before continuing, steady and persistent.
The pain did not stop when it was over. It throbbed between her legs like a second heartbeat. She bled so much. A cloth — thick, folded cotton like what wrestlers used to pad their loins — was pressed between her thighs to stem the flow. Her knees trembled as she tried to stand. Her inner thighs ached with every step.
The women rejoiced.
They celebrated her blood. It was evidence of her virtue, her upbringing, her worth. That thick, wet cloth was paraded like a trophy. Her family members clapped and ululated. One of them whispered, “Praise be to God, she was untouched!” Her mother was congratulated. Prayers were whispered.
But no one asked Nata how she felt. No one wondered what had been taken from her that night. Not just her virginity — but her peace, her sense of self, her autonomy.
Inside, Nata felt hollow.
She walked like a ghost through the compound the next morning. Her back hunched slightly, her feet unsure. She was bathed by older women — women who had known this same pain and had buried it so deeply they had forgotten how to acknowledge it. They bathed her with hands that were too firm, scrubbing her like a broken pot that needed mending.
When they handed her the powder to put on her neck and shoulders, she obeyed. When they tied her new wrapper tightly across her waist, she said nothing. When they braided her hair in preparation for the photograph — the one that would “immortalise her joy” — she simply stared ahead, as if watching herself from outside her body.
She didn’t recognise her own reflection.
Later that day, she was told to prepare for the family photograph. It would be taken by a travelling photographer from Photo Star, in Banjul, who had been hired by Bukari, days before. He came with his rickety wooden tripod and a square camera with a cloth draped over it. The whole thing looked like a relic from another world.
He took time setting up.
A stool was placed in front of a white bedsheet hung crookedly against the courtyard wall. Bukari sat first, his face stern but expressionless. Then Nata was told to sit beside him — on a woven chair, slightly lower than his. Her legs felt stiff and raw under the wrapper. Her lower body ached with every shift in posture.
“Smile,” someone called.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. Instead, her lips parted slightly, almost like she had just taken a breath too sharp and decided to hold it.
Behind her, Borogie and Yerro stood with solemn expressions, flanked by uncles and aunties whose names she barely knew. The photographer ducked beneath the cloth, then stood again to signal readiness. In that instant, just before the camera clicked, a breeze moved through the courtyard, lifting the corner of the white bedsheet.
And the camera captured it all — Bukari’s stony presence, the forced poses, the generational pride, and in the center of it, Nata’s face.
Her eyes told the whole story.
When the photo was later developed, hand-tinted in soft sepia by the photographer’s assistant, it was framed and placed above the family’s prayer mat in the parlour. Her parents looked at it with pride. Guests admired it. Neighbours whispered about the beauty of the young bride, how dignified she looked, how lucky Bukari was.
But her sister Matou, would stare long and hard at that photo, when her mother brought it during her visit to the Owens’. When her mother, Borogie, pulled out the framed photo to show her, she saw it.
She saw the unmistakable sadness in Nata’s eyes. The kind of sadness that no veil, no wrapper, no braids or beads could hide. It melted from the edges of her irises like a secret cry frozen in time.
That was the day Matou knew something had been wrong. That was the day the photograph stopped being a family relic and started to become a wound.
………………………………
Back in her new home that night, the praise and singing faded. Bukari was already asleep, his back turned to her on the mattress. Nata lay awake, staring at the thatched roof, her stomach tight with nausea. The cloth between her legs was soaked again. She didn’t bother changing it. She didn’t move at all.
No one had told her how cold marriage could feel after the heat of rituals.
She wanted to go home. Not her new home. Her real home. To her mother’s fire hearth. To the old mango tree she and Matou used to climb. She longed for the sting of a familiar slap from her father, Yerro, over a broken calabash more than the silence she now shared with her husband
But the path back had been burned behind her. With blood.
And so, she waited.
Waited for morning. Waited for her body to stop aching. Waited for someone to ask her how she felt. Waited for joy that never came.
Instead, she grew up.
Not by choice. Not by love.
But by force.
And the photograph? It stayed on that parlour wall for decades — an echo of a girl who never got to be one.
To be continued…