Echoes of Fulladu 2: The price of her candor

Zainabou was misunderstood —but loved. That was her paradox. Everyone in the compound knew she was spoiled, especially by her father. She could unleash insults like a storm, hurling words sharp enough to wound every heart in the household, and still be the one brought bowls of steaming pap, or handed second helpings at dinner. Love, in her case, was indulgence—gentle, resigned, and sometimes helpless.
She ate voraciously, yet remained thin, her bones pressing like stubborn truths against her skin. Nata sometimes wondered if madness itself devoured a portion of her meals. Or perhaps her ceaselessly whirling mind consumed more than her body ever could. It was a puzzle Nata could not solve, though she often soliloquised about it in her quiet moments—half in fascination, half in sorrow.
Lately, Zainabou had taken to repeating one desire with aching regularity.
“I want a man. A husband of my own,” she would declare, her voice firm with longing.
She would look around the compound, eyes blazing with envy, and say, “Every night, all of you lock your doors and lie beside your partners. Even you, Father,” she pointed boldly, “you have my mother, the old hag, and your little sweet wife too. Everyone has someone. I want a man who calls me darling, who strokes my hair, who cares when I weep. Am I not human too?” Her sigh at the end was like a heavy curtain falling after a desperate play.
Her father, Mama Sellou, would shake his head with a half-smile, indulgence lining his tired face. “Let her be. She’s not well.” His tone carried affection, but also helplessness, as if love alone was both the balm and the barrier.
And it was true—she wasn’t well. But neither was she entirely unwell. That was what made her so confounding. She remembered people’s names long after others forgot them. She could recite the Qur’an with clarity on days when her mind was still. Once, she had tied Nata’s headscarf for a naming ceremony with such dexterity that it left Nata breathless. Her crooked fingers, bent by deformity, moved with surprising grace, her voice crisp and precise in its instruction.
“You have a long forehead,” she had said bluntly. “This style will suit you better.”
It did. Nata, who loathed pretense and sugar-coated niceties, admired such candor. That day, she wore the scarf with pride, her reflection almost a stranger in its quiet dignity. For a brief moment, she forgot Bukari, forgot her miscarriage, forgot her stolen youth. She smiled—and the smile was hers.
But with Zainabou, moments of clarity never lasted. By dusk that very day, she had scrambled up the mango tree in the corner of the compound, her thin frame swaying among the branches. She shouted to the heavens about betrayal and broken promises.
“The moon lied to me!” she screamed. “It promised me a husband with golden teeth and a voice like the kora. But where is he now?! WHERE?!”
No one tried to coax her down. They had learned patience was the gentlest rescue. So they waited, their silence stretched like an old mat. Eventually, she descended on her own, muttering about men who whisper lies into mango leaves and moons that deceive.
Watching her, Nata felt something she had not expected—affection. Strange, tender, almost envious affection. Zainabou, for all her chaos, carried a clarity Nata lacked. She said what she felt. She screamed when it hurt. She demanded when she longed. She flung her truth into the world without apology. Nata, bound in silence, endurance, and the unspoken rules of womanhood, found herself envying that freedom.
Perhaps that was the real paradox. The world only tolerated such honesty when it came wrapped in madness. And maybe that was why, in her own quiet way, Nata began to love Zainabou too.
…………………………
Then the day finally came when it was announced that Zainabou would be given in marriage to her father’s long-time driver, Mama Jang. The decision was sealed not with a chest of gold, bags of rice, or bolts of cloth, but with an unusual dowry—her father, Mama Sellou, promised a kasanbarr, a big, rumbling lorry, in exchange for the union. To many, the arrangement seemed strange, even absurd. What kind of father traded his daughter’s hand for a machine? But in the world of families and bargains, where daughters were often reduced to terms of exchange, it was accepted. A lorry was wealth. A lorry was mobility. A lorry was power. If it took the marriage of his troubled daughter to secure it, then so be it.
The wedding itself was nothing short of a spectacle. Zainabou, dressed in radiant layers of wax print fabric—colors clashing yet somehow perfect—looked like a flame set alight among the crowd. Her arms were stacked with bangles that clinked and chimed each time she moved, their sound echoing her bubbling joy. She shone brighter than she ever had, as though the sun itself had chosen to rest on her. Her smile stretched wide, unfiltered, unashamed, her teeth flashing with triumph. For once, she was not a shadow lurking at the edges of conversations, not the object of pitying sighs or mocking laughter. She was a bride. Madness, yes. Outbursts, yes. But still—she was a woman, and at last, she had achieved the one dream she had clung to like a lifeline.
For months, she had made her desire known. “I want a man. I want to be called darling,” she had declared again and again, her voice loud, unafraid, unwavering, even when the world met her words with ridicule. They laughed at her, dismissed her yearning as the ramblings of a broken mind. But for Zainabou, there had been nothing broken in that longing. It was her truth, her insistence on belonging to the human circle of love and tenderness. In a society that used her schizophrenia as proof of her “less-than-humanness,” she fought back not with fists or defiance, but with stubborn desire—reminding them all that she carried the same hungers, the same ache for intimacy, the same right to be seen.
And true to her untamed spirit, she refused to leave the wedding invitations to family. That was not Zainabou’s way. She took to the streets herself, marching through the dusty roads of town with the same zeal she had used to announce her dreams. She stopped at markets, compounds, and street corners, proclaiming her joy with uncontainable urgency.
“I’m getting married! Me too—I’m getting married!” she cried, grabbing the hands of startled vendors, pulling children into her embrace with wide-eyed delight. She insisted that even strangers promise to come. “Please come and see for yourself. Come to my wedding!”
Her excitement was contagious, her voice impossible to ignore. People laughed, some humored her, others rolled their eyes. But as word spread, curiosity grew like wildfire in the harmattan. They had heard her talk for so long about wanting a husband, about her determination to be a wife. Most had dismissed it as a madwoman’s impossible dream. But now, faced with the startling reality of her union, they could not resist the pull. And so, they came.
By the wedding day, the compound was swollen with people. The crowd was larger than anyone expected—neighbours, skeptics, distant acquaintances, even gossips who wanted to see for themselves the unbelievable sight: a woman the community had long branded mad marrying a man who, by all accounts, was sane.
“They said it could never happen,” one woman whispered to her friend, balancing a child on her hip.
“Let’s see it with our own eyes,” the friend replied, craning her neck above the throng to catch a glimpse of the bride.
But to Zainabou, none of it mattered. The whispers, the curiosity, the stares—they were all invisible to her. What she saw was something greater: love, affirmation, proof that she was not a ghost in the world of the living. She looked around at the sea of faces—some mocking, some marvelling, some pitying—and whispered to herself, “They all came for me. All my friends.” In that instant, she was no longer the mad daughter, no longer the burden. She was the center of a celebration. She was a bride. She was enough.
Her mother wept openly, unable and unwilling to stop the tears. For years she had carried the silent grief of raising a daughter who lived suspended between clarity and chaos, brilliance and breakdown. She had feared the worst—that Zainabou would live and die at the margins, mocked, pitied, forgotten. But now, dressed in the garments of a bride, she looked no different from any other daughter of the town. She was celebrated, honored, claimed. In her mother’s heart bloomed a fragile hope: perhaps marriage would steady her. Perhaps companionship would anchor her in a world that so often let her drift like a leaf in the wind.
The drummers played until their palms blistered. Women ululated until their throats grew raw. Children darted between the legs of guests, squealing with delight. Pots of rice and bowls of stew passed from hand to hand. Laughter filled the air. And through it all, Zainabou beamed, her laughter rising above the clamour, louder even than the drums. She had always said she wanted a husband, and now she had one. She had always insisted she deserved love, and now—before the eyes of all who doubted—she was receiving it.
As for Nata, who had been among the first to hear of the impending marriage, she smiled quietly through the commotion. Her heart carried no envy, no judgment, only gladness for her friend. She thought to herself, “Zainabou always gets what Zainabou wants.” And it was true. But this time, it was more than a want. It was a right. And for once, the world had conspired—awkwardly, reluctantly, yet undeniably—to give it to her.
To be continued…