Refuge Read Online Free PDF Page B

swift and the heat had risen in her voice immediately, as if she had been anticipating his comment. ‘You know this. I do not need to be telling you this. This is not a country for “Khalifah”. This is a country for “Michael”. It is why we speak English in our home. It is why we are here … living as we do.’ Her voice trembled for a moment and the little boy looked up, sensing his mother’s anger. She paused, waiting for her frustration to ease. ‘Please. Haba? Let us not go back to these things. Not tonight, o!’
    ‘You are right,’ Ifasen said, trying to salvage his homecoming, but the words came out through clenched teeth. The child did not notice the undertone and returned to his drawing. Thick lines of colour ran raggedly across the page. Ifasen could feel his heart beating in his chest and his fingertips tingling. Abayomi looked at him defiantly before shaking her head and turning back to her simmering pot.
    Ifasen left the matter and walked into the cluttered living room. Pushing a tattered chair aside with his knee, he turned on the television. An American sitcom was showing, with canned laughter chattering inanely. He sat down, his body sinking uncomfortably into the rusted springs. The evening already felt ruined by the short interaction and he stared at the screen with hooded eyes.
    The choice of name for their only child evoked a myriad other, more painful issues, including, most fundamentally perhaps, their self-imposed banishment from their homeland. Their love, and subsequent marriage, had disrupted his family, and the healing of the rifts had been slow and incomplete, grasped through small gestures and compromises. It amazed Ifasen that even in the midst of the horror-filled backdrop to their quiet ceremony – the violence in the provinces, the brutal attacks – his mother had still found the energy to focus on his young wife’s ancestral failings. Na’imah had picked at their love like a crone pulling at the threads of an old jersey, trying to scratch open holes in its weave. But young as they were – Abayomi had been just twenty-one – their bonds were not easily loosed. Ifasen’s parents were proud Muslim Hausa. His grandfather had been a learned scholar of Islam, whose views on the Quran and its teaching had been widely respected. His father, Hussain, still dressed in traditional white gowns and attended mosque every day before starting work. For her part, Na’imah filled her days by voicing strident disapproval of those who had failed to follow some small Islamic ritual. Her obsession with formalistic observances narrowed her parochial outlook and underscored her lack of intellect. It shocked Ifasen at times that he regarded his mother with such disdain, but he could not shake his disappointment, held since he was young, that this scrawny woman with her grating voice was his blood relative. Her pejorative manner goaded him, causing him to flinch whenever she complained about the minutiae of a neighbour’s sharia shortcomings.
    Although Ifasen had broken from the path expected of him, defiantly marrying someone of a different ethnicity and faith, he still sometimes felt shackled by his family. He carried the noble looks of his father, his features well balanced and refined beneath his high forehead. He had the same aloofness, a deep-seated seriousness of person that made him seem remote and even arrogant. In truth, he was pervasively unconfident and emotionally uneasy, but the moment he perceived a challenge, his familial shields would rise up, haughty and self-righteous. Na’imah had once referred to one of Abayomi’s friends as a ‘filthy dog’, a heartfelt insult in his mother’s diminutive world. In Ifasen’s moments of stiff-chinned withdrawal, Abayomi would parody Na’imah, disarming him by repeatedly hissing the phrase ‘you dirty dog’, circling him like a craven wolf, until he roared with self-retribution and tried to catch her as she ran whooping away.
    It was a