A step at a time

This moment, there is a woman. And, she might be your wife. 

She has been married for a few years, maybe two or three. Or four. Even just weeks. I cannot disclose the actual duration. It might give her away. But, she is married. And childless. 

Most Saturdays – and they might not even be Saturdays – she fasts. And locks herself in the bedroom. Or climb hills. Pretends to be praying. And crying. For a child. 

Once in a period, she goes to a small clinic out of town to renew her vow: she gets contraceptives. 

Her husband – we do not talk much about him – might be busy wondering what is wrong with him. Or her. Or them, as a couple. 

He might be, at this hour, crouching under the shade of some traditional doctor. Maybe for the fifth time. 

The doctor, a quack, might again make him drink something bland and bad-smelling. 

“This must work,” he might tell him. 

The husband, tired and frustrated, might gulp with all the urgency. Hoping that after drinking such a concoction then, tonight, the fruit of his sweat will start germinating. In her womb. 

The woman, at that imagination, laughs. Says her husband cannot visit a traditional healer. She says that he believes in science. 

“Even to get him to pray with me, it was hard,” she says, smiling thinly, before adding: “and, in the first days I could see that he was doing it unwillingly…”

“What about these days?” 

She says that lately, he takes the prayers seriously.

“Sundays,” she says, “he sits on the television. Shifting from this and that channel, of Prophets. Expecting to collide with a Prophet who will give him a miracle.”

“And, what do you do at that time?”

She is shy. Her face is soaked in cosmetics of guilt and shame. But, she answers: 

“I give him comfort.”

She adds that she quotes scriptures. You, who read the Bible, do you remember that story of Abraham and Sarah? It is the one she frequently refers to. She tells him that it will all happen in God’s own time. She adds, to him: “after all, it is not as if we have a problem. The doctors confirmed. We are both fine. It is just that God has an own time. He will do it, in His time.”

And, that time might be sooner. 

Because, her old lover based outside the country has said he will be coming for a holiday. No, it is not in December. He will come either before or after December. She tells me the month but I cannot disclose.

To the old lover coming back sometime soon to bless them with a child…

She says they had something they called ‘promise to marry’. The two of them agreed that they will marry – at the right time. Then, an opportunity availed itself for him to relocate to outside of the country.  

Prior to departure, he reiterated the promise: he was going to find time to come back, marry her and take her with him. Then, he told her, they would live happily ever after. Have a family. A small one. Of one kid. Because, for him, it was not kids he was after. It was her. Her heart.

She hanged on that promise. 

He went, and like a character in a fictitious story, dropped off the radar. It started like all endings start: a delayed response. A phone switched off. A fight from nowhere. It finished like most other endings: total silence. 

“I tried to reach him through his family but he had given them stern instructions not to ever give me his contact details,” she says.

After a time, she moved on. Or, she pretended to have moved on. She met a man. Or, the man met her. Because, she was busy living her life, teaching herself to forget him, when someday she found herself texting some man that she missed him and then signing off with those heart emoji. That man, she had texted, was the one who had been accosting her and she had been turning him down. It was also the same man who, a year after that text, was to walk with her down the aisle. And kiss her – before God, parents, and the public. 

The photos of their wedding were to be posted on Facebook. And, he saw them – the old lover. 

Like most men, he suddenly realised the beauty he lost. He made contact. 

Some men, when they make that contact, are unlucky. Others, they are lucky. This one, the old lover, was in the latter.

“It was after his message that I realised that I still loved him,” she says of the old lover. 

She texted him back, almost immediately. Thanking him for the kind words he had said about the wedding and, in addition, she asked him how his life was. And, that opened a can of worms.

He told her about his life. It was chaotic.

She commiserated with him and had that skip in the heart when he said he regretted leaving her. They found each other, again, and rekindled the love. 

It became an affair. She had to get a new phone for it. That phone stays at her workplace.

In texting, they agreed that she should not give him – the husband – any child. She should be on contraceptives. And pretend to be struggling to fall pregnant. 

“Wait for me, that should be my responsibility as per promise,” his text, to her, read on the subject of her falling pregnant. 

“Does it mean you will marry thereafter?” I ask. 

She says they have not discussed that. They are taking a step at a time.