Souls and Smoke
Justin Clement
Mother lights incense when people die in the bombings. The house is redolent with the smell; it clings to the curtains, clothes and to corners, to the point that I suspect the walls are irrevocably suffused with it. The smell is like a spectral presence in the house, its heavy miasma gradually becoming a normal, albeit nauseating, atmosphere in the house.
And let’s not forget that people die every week here.
Mother would watch television in the living room of the cramped apartment we live in, while I would sit on an adjacent sofa doing whatever Mother expects girls my age to be doing. This ranges between embroidering her latest self-sewn clothes, saying my prayers or simply staring into space, at some supposedly profound invisible thing, the act grooming me somehow to become a mature woman. If I tell Mother that looking at nothing is nonsensical, I receive a slap along with minutes of stern lecturing punctuated with more slaps.
So yes, I usually sit and stare into nothing.
When the news on the television reports a bombing, Mother utters silent prayers for a few seconds before getting up and walking to her room to fetch the incense sticks. The incense makes me give up watching television.
“Zainab, take your own,” she says, handing me two of the slender scented sticks. There is a reason we burn two sticks each. The first sticks are for the souls that have been released from the harrowing confines of this world.
The second sticks are lit to bribe God into permitting my brother’s safe escape after he plants the explosives.
He’d always had this penchant for fire, my brother. I recall that particular visit to my grandparents’ place. Nurudeen and I were much younger then. He’d been heating a comb above an open candle, watching with childish delight as the plastic came alight with a yellow-green flame, dripping fiery drops of plastic in its wake.
Now that I think of it, I probably shouldn’t have left him alone in my grandmother’s room. He was nine at the time, just two years shy of my age. I’d left him and gone to the yard to sit with my parents, aunts and grandparents. Nuru had joined us in the yard minutes later, sitting beside me on the large sienna rug spread over the grass, a toothy grin on his face. I smiled back.
I think of that day as the warning, the inauspicious glance into the future. One of my aunts had seen it first, the wispy tendrils of black creeping out of the corridor. Because the alarm was raised early, we were able to save the room from further damage. Still, it was a spectacle to behold. One corner of the room was blackened all the way to the ceiling and even weeks after the fire, the acrid stench of burnt wood and carpet never quite left the room.
When Nuru was discovered to be the culprit, they asked him why.
“I don’t like Grandma,” he said and shrugged, his curved shoulders sagging.
That reply, that simple yet incredulous reply, should have hinted the family.
“Hm, your brother is tough o,” Father said to me later, his tone pensive.
Tough. He wasn’t the only one that used that word; my aunts and uncles did too. Mother even laughed about it, saying she never knew Nuru could be that mischievous. Tough. He’s tough. I wonder now if I was the only one to see my brother then as something a little bit more than tough. I also wonder now if I was the only one to notice the unrepentant look in his young eyes or the murky, writhing thing underneath. That thing so bright and yet so dark.
Nuru is fifteen now. Fifteen with tens of deaths — if not up to a hundred — under his belt. He’d long graduated from arson to bombing. It’s because of the new friends he made at the mosque some years ago. Friends who spent more time smoking weed in dilapidated buses and raining curses on the infidel populace in their psychedelic discussions than worshipping Allah. Nuru doesn’t talk about his friends much, but their attacks seem too coordinated for their juvenile minds — too intricately planned and well carried out to simply be the machinations of teenage boys. They are never caught and the bombings always result in casualties regardless of security measures. I feel strings are being pulled somewhere.
Father is gone now, killed in a riot when the bombings attained their zenith. Perhaps there is still a vestige of conscience left in Nuru and maybe that’s why he chose to move out of the house. He comes around once in a while but I don’t care about that. I don’t even like being in the same room with him anymore. My brother died years ago and a stranger wears his skin. Sometimes, I don’t want him to come around anymore, other times I hope my actual brother walks past the weather-beaten gates of our compound, eyes brimming with tears and mouth full of apologies for the things he’s done. His crimes are unforgivable but I think with time, I just may forgive him; he’s my blood brother, if anything.
If I had one wish though , all I’d wish for was to never smell incense again.
“They caught and lynched some of them today. They put tyres around their necks and set them ablaze.”
I am helping Mother wash rice as she fries tomato paste on a stove behind me, the sharp sizzling sounds pervading the air of the kitchen. I turn fully to her. “Some of who?” I ask. I already know the answer before she replies.
“Nuru’s friends.”
I despise the way she said ‘Nuru’s friends’ when what she is meant to say is ‘bombers’. Insurgents. Terrorists.
“Was Nurudeen among them?” I ask. Despite the contempt I feel for my younger brother, I can’t stop my heart from palpitating.
Mother covers the distance between us fast. A blur, a crack, a curse. I raise my fingers to my burning cheek, certain the welts of Mother’s slender fingers would appear in seconds.
“By Allah, will you shut your mouth?” She hisses, her sloe-eyed face contorting into something venomous, like a pit viper. “Your brother will not be among them, Insha’Allah. Are you mad?”
“I’m sorry.” I slip into my hardened self and keep my eyes on my toes, pliant. I gave up on understanding why Mother chose to not see the truth of Nurudeen and his ‘friends’ a long time ago. Perhaps motherhood blurs the lines between goodness and iniquity, coats the eyes and mind in films of blissful denial. I don’t know.
Mother keeps her eyes on me for some moments before stalking out of the kitchen, nostrils flaring. I turn back to the rice. Mother has left the tomato paste on the stove; in a few minutes, the smell of burnt tomatoes would waft from it. I don’t care if it begins an inferno that engulfs us in the house. As I wash the rice, feeling the multiple grains move through my fingers, all I think of is how Mother hasn’t lit any incense sticks yet. Maybe she’ll do that soon.
My tears slowly drip into the rice water as I begin to mumble prayers for my brother. In that moment, I pour everything pent up within me into a litany of silent supplications.
I pray for Nurudeen, my brother. I pray he is among the lynched.
I pray to God that my brother’s immolation continues into the afterlife.
And I pray that instead of smelling the smoke of his burning flesh, all he smells is incense.
About the author: Haku Jackson is the pseudonym of a young man that writes stories in the dead of night, sleeps all day, and eats at ungodly hours. Writing both works of literary and speculative fiction, he has been published on AfricanWriter magazine and is a graduate of both Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Workshop, as well as Goethe-Institut’s AfroYoungAdult Workshop. He is a sucker for alternative music bands with abstract names.
