A Duniyata Book 1 Complete Hausa Novel
“Ma’am… please, ma’am… you know Abba isn’t well. If you go, who will take care of us? If you go, ma’am, who will look after Abba?”
The boy’s voice, frail and trembling, could not belong to someone older than twelve or thirteen. Even without being told, even without seeing his tear-streaked face or his quivering hands clasping the sick man between his knees, it was clear he was drowning in shock, fear, and despair.
His eyes stayed fixed on her, hoping to hear the only words that could calm him: “I won’t go.” But nothing in her expression gave him hope. Instead, she adjusted the veil on her head and bent to stuff the last of her belongings into a black bag before her.
“Please, Mariya,” the sick man said, his voice thin, his breath rattling as though it might escape his chest, “not for me, but for these children… stay with them. Mine is a light illness; I am sure only a few days remain for me. They are the ones who matter…”
The man’s body was marked by illness, poverty, and hardship. The boy, melting inside with pity for them all—except her—looked away from his father’s face. His heart thumped wildly, on the edge of breaking. For ten days their father had spoken no word to them; night after night the boy had strained to hear even a whisper. Now at last his father’s mouth opened, but only to plead in the face of disaster, not to bless them with kind words as before.
The boy’s eyes still searched her face, praying her heart might soften. But she only swung her bag onto her shoulder and snapped:
“I found them here, and I’ll leave them here. Even a child whose mother died the day he was born survives—and there are millions of them, older than thirteen or eighteen.”
With that she stepped toward the door. The boy realized she truly meant to go.
His mind shrank under the weight of it; he could no longer sort right from wrong. He threw himself at her feet, crying with all the strength his young years allowed. She looked down as if to pull her foot away but then lifted him up and sat him on a chair.
“This is your destiny,” she said. “Here you will stay—good or bad, easy or hard. If I stay too, we will all be like a tree rotting from the roots. Better I move on a little; perhaps the future holds a share for me.”
Her words struck him like a blow. He could see his father’s eyelids close as if in surrender. The boy’s own eyes shifted to his younger sibling, who had started to follow her toward the door.
With a voice far bigger than his years he shouted:
“Come back and sit! We will live—we will live with our father! We will live through hardship or happiness! We will live with joy or without it! We only have each other now. We have no one but ourselves and our father!”
She froze and turned back. Their eyes locked. She knew his ways well, the strange, almost ancient traits that sometimes startled her, but never had she imagined such burning words from his tongue—words that landed like carefully forged iron, as if he had been saving them for this moment.
They looked away from each other at the same time. He turned back to try to make his father more comfortable. The man’s body had grown heavy and slack, though breath still passed through his nostrils.
The boy had no hope left in her. Yet he could not stop thinking about her footsteps leaving the house, an exit that stayed etched in his mind, an exit that he blamed as the root and key to every hardship that followed.
