"Don't go home, he knows."

Her voice is low, so low I could have missed her warning but for the gentle tug on my arm.

I stop and in the dying light of the day our eyes meet and hold.

Mama Tunde! She lives two houses away. I know her because her son is a regular at our place. Handsome and very fair complexioned every one calls him oyinbo. He is best friend to my neighbour's first son.

I know her but we are not friends, neither are we close enough to share the kind of secret that would excite such a warning.

I stop and feigning ignorance despite the wild beating of my heart,
ask, "Who knows?"

"Your husband." She says softly, her voice barely audible, her gaze averted as if she
is too ashamed to behold my shame. "He knows about your lover."

And at those words, something gives way deep inside me. I feel the way a
pebble must feel when you let it drop down an abandoned and empty well. I feel the knife turn in my gut. I am a samurai and this is my hara kiri.

When I look up, Mama Tunde is gone. Dusk is falling and the bus stop buzzes with workers hurrying home. I sit down on the dwarf fence that separates the shopping complex from the main road. Tears sting my eyes and I raise my hand to wipe it off as it slithers down my face.

I knew this day would come but I was like a woman teasing a bad tooth with her tongue and dreading the day my pleasure would sire true pain. The day has come and like a warrior caught without his sword in battle I am unprepared.

I see a schoolboy trudging home with his young sister, their feet raising a cloud of dust in their wake. I see a conductor fondle an orange seller's breast as his bus passes her. I see a deranged man masturbating in the space between the staircase, a homeless lady staring up at him with unabashed longing.

And I sit here waiting for nothing.

************

There is so much pain lurking in those things that give us pleasure. I discovered that fact a long time ago, but my knowledge did not make me any wiser. Instead it fettered me with a yoke that grew heavier with each stolen moment.

I was married to a man I did not love. I had a lover who did not love me. But I was bound to these two men by a feeling of gratitude, but gratitude is a sad and sorry thing. Like a cheap cloth that wears out with time, gratitude can so easily grow tattered. Mine did, but I was powerless to put off my rags and don another covering.

My journey to this dwarf fence, this buzzing bus stop, this darkling plain, began a long time ago. I was twenty-three and an undergraduate. Life loomed large ahead of me. I was chasing a degree and dreams of marriage and children. But fate was stalking me with a hideous grin. It was mocking me without my knowing it.

Like a rumour of rain, trouble had been brewing for days on campus, but no one knew when the rain would begin to fall. The day of violence dawned without incident but before we knew it the peaceful rally organized by the Student Union Government had turned into a monster with bared fangs. Cars and windows were smashed and in no time the campus had been turned into a battleground. Molotov cocktails and bullets whizzed past overhead like deranged meteors.

Smoked out of hiding by tear gas, we ran for the gate at the rear of the campus, but anti-riot policemen had blocked it. We turned and headed for the hills and that was where the nightmare began.

They let the boys escape. They grabbed the girls. They dragged us into a thicket. They raped us, on the bare rocks, thorns and briers digging into our backs and buttocks. Not once, not twice.

As they passed me from one black clad monster to another I felt a cocktail of emotions; anger, revulsion then resignation. When they were done, I lay there unable, un-willing to move. Like a python that had gorged itself, I lay there willing death to come, but death had other plans.

Dusk was afoot when I finally roused and dragged myself back to the hostel. I got under the shower and kept scrubbing my skin until it was raw. Then I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.

For three days I did not go to school. I felt dirty and angry and helpless. I had told no one. Rape is a personal dilemma.Like a terminal disease you keep from family and friends in order not to cause them pain, I kept it to myself. And so did the others, I suppose. Bearing our shame without words, we tried in vain to wish away the evil that had been done us. It was a battle you fought alone, without help. It was a lost battle, like a cripple training for the Olympics. So when I discovered that I was pregnant, I stole out to a clinic at the back of the hostel with the little money I could raise and had an abortion.