Lokaci Bai Kure Ba Part 1 Complete Hausa Novel

On this Saturday, around three o’clock in the afternoon, she was entering their neighborhood, which was extremely busy and packed with people, because the area was close to the market. That made the whole neighborhood extremely lively with business activities going on everywhere. There were blacksmiths hammering metal, sellers of woven mats, sellers of firewood, road workers, some people smoking, and mechanics checking motorcycles. The neighborhood was practically the very definition of a ghetto area.

As she walked, sweat broke out all over her because of the heat of the sun and the speed with which she was walking. Today felt like there might be trouble. As she was about to enter their lane, she saw people gathering tires and wood together, with petrol nearby, and she prayed that no terrible thing would happen again today.

She continued until she entered a little corner where there were two small houses facing each other. She stopped in front of one of the houses and stood still for a moment when she saw a toad at the doorway. Then she turned and entered the house facing theirs, where a woman was in the courtyard. On seeing her, the woman said, “Nurse, you’re back.”

The girl turned her eyes slightly. They were naturally large, very white, almost like milk. Altogether, the girl could not have been more than fifteen years old. She was wearing a white nurse’s outfit with a small white hijab. Her skin was light caramel, with thick eyebrows, full cheeks, very dark eyelashes, and big bright white eyes that looked as if they had been washed with milk. Her mouth was well-shaped, her nose was long, and her small mouth carried pink lips so beautiful that anyone who looked at them might feel tempted to bite them. Her forehead was covered with soft hair lying flat against it, and because of the sweat on her face, the strands clung even more to her skin. One look at her forehead and you could tell she was a very gentle and timid girl.

Just last month she had finished writing her WAEC exams, and Baba enrolled her in an auxiliary nursing program that held on Saturdays and Sundays at the LEA school grounds. She had started attending, where they taught them basic things, because he did not want her sitting idle at home after finishing her exams.

The woman, who was washing rice, said, “Go into my room. Your mother left your key for you on top of the fridge. She and our neighbors went to see someone at the teaching hospital in Gabari. They probably won’t be back until evening.”

The girl nodded and went inside, took the key, then came back out of the house. She stood there, opened the door of their house, removed the key, and entered. She passed through the entrance hall, then lifted up the sack used as a divider and went into the main courtyard, which was neatly arranged all around.

The house was not particularly big, about the same size as the one she had entered to collect the key. She went ahead and opened the door to their room, then entered the sitting room. It too was neat and tidy. Their black plastic chairs were arranged nicely, though one of them was torn and you could see the stuffing. But overall, the room was very clean. There were two rooms behind the sitting room. She went to the second one, opened it, and entered.

There was a small, thin mattress on the floor, the kind boarding school students used, spread with a nice bedsheet. Her schoolbooks were beside the bed, along with a small bowl, and there was also a big wardrobe in the room, which Mama had only recently brought in there.

She crouched down and began removing the black canvas shoes from her feet, the ones she wore to school, when she heard noise and shouting in their neighborhood.

“We will kill him! Kill him! Put a tire on him! Burn him! We will show the government that they cannot stop the way we make our living!”

Immediately, her heart dropped. She was born and raised in that neighborhood, but even to this day she was afraid of it. Apart from going to school and Islamiyya, she never went anywhere. The neighborhood was always in chaos. Beating someone to death, burning someone alive with a tire, or hacking someone to pieces was not unusual there. Even the police themselves were tired of the people in the neighborhood, because they were practically the constant customers of the police station.

The shouting and running she heard made her stop before she could even remove the second shoe. She stood up and rushed into the sitting room. She wanted to go and lock the front door, since Mama was not around and Baba too was absent. She was scared. She hated violence.

As she was trying to lift the curtain in the sitting room, she suddenly heard someone rush into their house with the kind of speed that could only mean danger. Before she could do anything, the curtain was flung aside and someone stumbled into the room.

She stepped backward and nearly fell, but quickly held onto a chair and looked ahead of her in terror.

It was a man. He was tall and broad, wearing a traditional trouser outfit that had turned black, though she could not even tell its original color because of how dark it had become. He had no shirt on, and his whole body was blackened like charcoal. His left hand looked raw and shriveled, as if it had been burned by fire. His face too was blackened, and blood was running down from his forehead. Smoke was rising thickly from him.

He looked at her and saw how the young girl’s eyes had widened, her heart pounding, her lips trembling as though she was about to scream. Just then, they both heard people running near the house, shouting, “He entered this corner! He entered this corner!”

He quickly looked back at her and then raised his hands slightly, speaking in a firm but calm voice so as not to frighten her even more.

“Please help me!”