When Nata was discharged a week from the day she gave birth to her stillborn child, a very hot afternoon, she moved slowly, her body tender, her spirit bruised beyond words. Every footstep felt like lifting a rock she wasn’t strong enough to carry.
Her mother supported her under the elbow.
Her husband carried the tin of powdered milk and the loaf of bread, now stale.
Her father walked ahead, silent in the way fathers grieve — upright, stoic, and full of ache.
The taxi ride home bumped along the unpaved roads, the smell of dried fish and diesel mixing in the humid air. Nata leaned against the window, her cheek hot against the glass. She never looked at anyone. Not once.
Back in the compound, neighbors watched from behind their curtains. Some whispered prayers. Some simply whispered.
Nata stepped into her room and paused.
Everything smelled of fresh soap and cooked maafeh lalo.
Mbentoung Mballow, her grandaunt, sat on the low stool near the doorway, her wrapper neatly tied, her hands folded in her lap. Beside her, Neneh Dado — her stepmother — kept her eyes lowered, as if unsure how close she was allowed to come to Nata’s sadness. She knew this kind of sadness well. She was the barren woman of town, the one to whom charity was given lavishly for those women seeking not to suffer the same fate as her…!
Together, they had scrubbed the floor until it shone, rearranged the room with quiet care, laid a clean sheet on her mat, and placed a steaming bowl of maafeh lalo — her favorite — on a small tray by the wall.
She took it all in slowly:
the smell of the food,
the neatness of her things,
the softness in Mbentoung’s gaze,
and the awkward but earnest concern in Neneh Dado’s posture.
A tired gratitude flickered in her chest, but it did not reach her eyes.
“Thank you,” she murmured — barely a breath.
Then, without another word, she lowered herself onto the mat, turned slightly away from them, and lay down. Her body surrendered to the heaviness, her silence filling the small room more loudly than any grief could.
The two women exchanged a quiet glance — a rare moment of unspoken agreement — and said nothing more.
They let her rest.
Because sometimes, even comfort is too heavy to hold.
Then she turned her face to the wall — and stayed there.
Her arms ached for a child she could no longer hold.
Her breasts ached for a baby who would never suckle.
Her womb ached with the absence of life and the memory of pain.
She did not weep loudly.
She did not scream.
She did not tear her clothes.
Her grief came quietly — in the way she stopped speaking, in the way she stopped eating, in the way she seemed to float through the days like a ghost tethered to a body that refused to die.
The compound lay in a silence so heavy it felt as though death itself had stayed behind to keep her company.
Nothing but silence.
The kind that clings to walls.
The kind that follows you home.
The kind that sleeps beside you.
Grief, in its quiet cruelty, stayed with her.
Stayed with them all.
…
All but Ousman Bah.
He grieved for Nata — his grandniece who had lost her second child under the most brutal circumstances — but his grief was not pure or undivided. It ran beside something else, something he wished he could uproot yet could not: a delirious, youthful thrill, shaking him awake like harmattan wind shaking a frail pawpaw branch on a dusty path.
Yes, he felt sorrow. The burial of the stillborn had pressed into his chest a sadness he had not expected. He had held the tiny bundle himself — held it with the reverence of a man reminded of life’s fragility — and whispered a dua meant for travelers, because what else could he offer a child whose journey ended at its beginning?
But beneath that sorrow pulsed another truth:
Ousman Bah felt alive again.
And that aliveness came not from home, not from reconciliation, not from healed wounds — but from a quiet girl at the hospital who had looked at him with gentle eyes and spoken to him with a softness he had not felt in years.
In the weeks after their uneasy reconciliation, Mbentoung had transformed.
At least on the surface.
She had become intentional — deliberate in each movement, each tone, each gesture.
Her voice softened, losing its old sharpness.
Her temper simmered low, no longer boiling over at every imagined slight.
She chose her words carefully, mindful of their weight.
She acted… different.
And for the first time in years, Ousman found hot water waiting for him every morning, placed in two enamel kettles:
one at the bedroom gate for ablution,
another near the small thatched bathroom at the edge of the compound for bathing.
No longer did the cold of dawn bite into his bones.
No longer did he stumble half-asleep in the dark to heat water himself.
He would wake to find her waiting — sometimes seated with her wrapper pulled tightly across her chest, sometimes standing by the doorway, her face arranged in a gentle, almost timid smile.
“What would you like for breakfast?” she would ask.
“And for lunch? And dinner?”
She asked it not with resentment, not with expectation, but with a kind of careful attentiveness he had never experienced from her before.
She swept his corner of the compound with precision.
She laid out his kaftans and pressed them so hard with gum that the seams looked carved.
She made him feel valued.
Appreciated.
Desired, even.
For a while, Ousman observed her with suspicion.
Then with curiosity.
Then with a kind of drained gratitude.
But gratitude was not trust.
To him, this change felt like a bandage slapped over an infected wound — covering the surface, not healing the rot beneath.
He suspected that when the waters stirred — when real tension rose — she would revert.
Back to the vitriol.
Back to the insults and belittlements that had hollowed him out over years.
Back to calling him names that clung like burrs in a man’s pride.
And so, even as she transformed, Ousman’s heart tightened instead of softening.
He had very little trust left.
Perhaps none.
But the real crack in the wall came from something else — someone else.
He had found a new apple of his eye.
The girl he had seen at Royal Victoria Hospital.
The one with quiet strength in her eyes.
The one who had stood with a basin on her hip and a softness around her mouth.
The one who had stirred something inside him that had lain dormant like a sleeping python for years.
That girl.
He didn’t even know her name yet.
Just the shape of her kindness.
The humility in her posture.
The warmth she carried like a lantern.
She was younger — far younger than him — and her beauty was not loud but luminous.
She had the freshness of someone who had not yet been spoiled by bitterness or hardened by marital war.
When she spoke to him, it felt like balm.
When she looked at him, he saw no judgment.
No accusation.
No contempt.
And that alone made him feel like a man again.
He told himself he did not want to divorce Mbentoung.
No — he was not a man who left his wives.
He was from an era where polygamy was normal, even expected when a first marriage frayed.
He wanted both women — just like his nephew Yerro, who had two wives.
A home where his past stood on one side and his fresh beginning on the other.
A marriage where the old and new could coexist like co-wives often did — with time, with patience, with Allah’s decree smoothing out the edges.
But truly, deep down, he wanted something simpler:
He wanted a woman who carried no past wounds toward him.
A woman who did not see him as the source of her disappointments.
A woman who could love him newly, freely, without baggage.
He wanted a clean slate.
…
That morning, determination pulsed in his veins.
He dressed in a white kaftan — one that Mbentoung had pressed with enough gum to make it stiff as cardboard.
His teeth gleamed from the chewing stick he had used so thoroughly that his jaw ached.
He looked into the cracked mirror and saw something he had not seen in years:
A man who felt good.
A man who wanted to be seen.
A man who wanted to be chosen.
And that feeling — new, intoxicating, dangerous — filled his chest like smoke in a clay pot.
He stepped out of the compound with a confidence that surprised even him. The first person he saw on his way out was a man – a good omen that his activities of the day would turn out well.
His steps were light.
His heart beat unsteadily beneath his ribs.
He was going to Lasso Wharf.
Today, he would visit Kumba Wandianga, the mother of the girl he fancied.
Today, he would introduce himself properly.
Today, he would begin courtship.
Today, he might reshape his future.
He walked through the streets of Banjul asking for directions:
“Suma dorm, which road goes to Lasso Wharf?”
“Uncle, go straight, pass by the old shed, then turn left.”
“Ah, to Wandianga’s house? You are close.”
His palms grew damp.
His heart swelled with hope and shame in equal measure.
Hope — because perhaps he would find joy again.
Shame — because he had left behind a wife trying her best, even if too late.
But men of his generation were not taught to untangle feelings.
They were taught to move forward.
As he walked, his kaftan swayed with purpose.
His chewing stick tucked behind his ear like a trophy.
He felt younger — alive — almost foolishly invigorated.
Today, he was not the man wounded by insults.
Not the man drained by a loveless home.
Not the man without a child to call his own.
No.
Today, he was a man seeking possibility.
And he would claim it — even if it cost him everything.
To be continued…
