So Long A Letter

DEAR YAHANASU

I have received your letter. By the way of reply I'm beginning this diary, my prop Is my distress. Our long association has taught me that confiding in others allays pain.
Your presence in my life is by no means fortuitous. Our grandmothers in their compound were separated by fence and would exchange messages daily. Our mothers used to argue over who would look after our uncles and aunts. As for MS, we wore our long khimars and follow the Stony roads to the Qur'anic school. If over the years and passing through the realities of life dreams die. I still keep intact my memories, the salt of rememberance.

I conjure you up. They past is reborn, along with it's procession of emotions. I close my eyes. Ebb and today off feeling, neat and dazzlement, the woodfires, the sharp green mango, ebb and tide of images: drops off sweat beading your mother's ochre coloured face as she emerges from the kitchen, the procession of young wet girls chattering on their way back from the springs.
We walked the same parts from adolescent to maturity, where the past begets the present.

My friend, yesterday you were divorced. Today I'm a widow. Mohammed dead. How am I to tell you? One does not fix appointments with fate. Fate grabs whom it wants, when it wants. When it moves in the direction of your desires, it brings you plenitude. But more often than not, it unsettles, crosses you. Then one has to endure. I endured the telephone call which disrupted my life.
I reached the hospital late 😪 the mixed of smell of suppurations and ether. The hospital distorted faces, a train of tearful people, known and unknown, witnesses to this awful tragedy. A long corridor which seems to stretch out endlessly. At the end, a room. In the room, a bed. On the bed; Mohammed stretched out, cutoff from the world of the living by a white sheet in which he is completely enveloped. A trembling hand moves forward and slowly uncovers the body. His hairy chest, at rest forever 💔 is visible through his crumbled blue shirt with thin stripes (he loves blue color 💙).

This face. Set in pain and surprise, is indeed his, the full hair head, the cute lips mouth are indeed his. I want to grasp. But someone pulls me away. I can hear Bala chikaji, his best friend explaining to me, a heart attack came on suddenly in his office while he was dictating a letter. The secretary had the presence of mind to call me. Bala chikaji recounts how he arrived too late with the ambulance. I think the doctor after death. He mimes the messaging of the heart that was undertaken.
I listen to the words that create around me a new atmosphere in which I move, a stranger and tormented. Death!😭 The tenuous passage between two opposite world, one cumultous, the other still.
Where to lie on? Dan'talaka is gone. I hold tightly to my prayer beads (charbi)  reciting "ALLAHUMMA AJIRNI FEE MUSIBATI WA AKHLIFNI KHAIRIN MINHAA". uncountably .
Cross section of my life spring involuntarily from my memory, grandiose verses from the holy Qur'an, the Noble words for consolation fight for my attention.

"Joyous miracle of birth, dark miracle of death. Between the two, a life, a destiny". Says Bala chikaji.

I look intently at Bala. Trying to at least ask his least words but my tongue failed me, I just kept staring at his reddened eyes expressing their 10years of friendship 😢.

Mohammed is indeed death yahanasu. The uninterrupted procession of men and women who have learned of it, the wails and tears all around me, confirm his death, this condition of extreme tension sharpens my suffering and continues to the following day.

Phewww!😕😕 It's not easy.
Lemme rest small haa'aan
Remember I'm not used to it 😁
Still a novice🤗❤️🌹

I Dedicate this page to  BALA🌹 a big thank you for always been there for us in thick and thin 😪
We love you!!