The
worst thing about being on death row is the waiting, the nightmares,
the interminable introspection and the verdicts you pass on yourself.
In the darkness, in the night, the verdict; whether guilty or not,
keeps coming back, the incident - the one moment of madness that
will haunt you till your dying moments, when you dangle from the
noose like a piece of meat in an abattoir. That was Santi’s
ordeal as he sat on the cold floor in the damp, overcrowded cell,
his mind still refusing to believe that he was just a number waiting
to be scrubbed off the board.
He had been reading that night, that
first night, when the call came. He picked up the phone. It was
a new number.
“Hello,” he said huskily.
“Hello.” It was female.
She spoke with a honeyed voice.
“Yes?” He did not
recognize the voice.
“Hello, who is this?” she
asked.
He felt offended. “Excuse me,
you called my number. I should be asking you that.”
“I want to speak to Sylvia.”
“Ah, I think you’ve got
the wrong number.”
“No, this is definitely her number.”
She was insistent. She sounded sure.
“I don’t think so. This
has been my number for close to a year now. Perhaps you should check
the number again.”
“Well, okay.” She
terminated the call.
She had a wonderful voice, he thought,
as he put down the handset. She reminded him of the little birds
twittering in at dawn from the palm trees. He resumed his study,
refocussing on the tiny print. Then the phone chimed again. In the
night, it sounded loud, like an angry bell tolling. It was her again.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hey, I think you are right,”
she said. “I got the wrong number.”
“Oh!” he chuckled. “Okay.”
“I forgot to apologise for waking
you up. I know it’s quite late.”
“Well, no problem. It’s
all right.”
“I did wake you up, didn’t
I?”
“No, I was just eh...doing something.”
“Something? Like what?”
He wanted to tell her it was none of
her business but he thought better of it. “I am reading.”
“So, you are a student then?”
“Yes, and you?”
“Same here. Computer Science.”
“That’s great. That’s
what I am studying too,”
“Where?”
“Jos. What about you?”
“Zaria, A.B.U.”
“That’s...terrific. So,
what’s your name?”
“Farida. What’s
yours?”
“Santi, they call me Santi.”
That was how it started. They talked
about their studies, comparing notes. Then they got personal. Every
night, a little past midnight, she would call him and they would
talk for hours about the rains, about the future, about randy lecturers,
and then they started talking about love. That was how he fell in
love with the honeyed voice at the other end of the line. They exchanged
pictures through MMS. Her beauty, he thought, matched her voice.
She was slender like the fresh stalk of budding bean and had a smile
that, for some strange reason, reminded him of a clear spring running
gently over white rocks. His feelings for her grew.
Two months later, she invited him to
Zaria so they could meet face-to-face. He had been looking forward
to seeing her, so, he went, on a weekend, when the sun rose with
a smile as if blessing the union forged over the GSM interface.
He got to Zaria and took an okada. She guided him on the
phone to the threshold of her heart, her home. She was waiting for
him at the door when he arrived and he realised that she was even
more beautiful than in the picture. He kept thinking about that
clear spring each time she smiled. She asked him in, served him
food and a soft drink and sat by him. They were overwhelmed and
just kept looking at each other, smiling, sighing contently, happy
to abide in the fragrant presence of a promising love.
“See what GSM has brought me,”
she said and they both laughed. Then they relaxed and started talking,
excited like teenagers after their first kiss, hidden away in an
empty classroom. Her grace charmed him and he watched her every
move, every gesture, with eyes veiled with adoration. She grew,
in his mind, from the myth on the phone to a living goddess - his
Aphrodite. She magically took his breath way and he was willing
to surrender his life then, in the fatuous manner of lovers, so
that nothing else could wipe away the memory of that sight of her
enchanted splendour.
Then she excused herself and went to
the bedroom. He stood up, looking at her framed photographs on the
walls, on the mantelpiece beside the vase of synthetic flowers.
He began to wonder if she lived alone when he heard her scream.
He raced to the bedroom, calling her name, his heart thumping wildly.
He rushed in and was caught by a blow behind the head. He fell face
down and saw that he was lying next to the gaping face of a man,
frozen horridly in death. He drew back and was struck again. There
were two other men in the room, hefty like prized wrestlers. Farida
was behind them. She watched as they trounced him, his screams filling
only his own head, before he lost consciousness.
He woke up on a damp floor that gave
off the offensive smell of stinking shoes. He was cuffed and shackled
and his left eye was almost blinded. He was conscious of what he
believed were his bloated internal organs and he thought all the
bones in his body weighed twice as much. He was in a police station.
A policeman came and had him straddled on a chair. He said he wanted
to take a statement. Santi explained what he could remember and
the policemen started laughing. The officer in charge nodded to
one of them and they brought out a prepared statement and asked
him to sign it. They would not let him read it, they just wanted
his signature. When he refused, they had him beaten and tortured.
He eventually signed the statement.
Weeks later, when he was arraigned
in court for the murder of Farida’s husband, he still could
not believe it. The First Information Report said he went to see
the deceased and they started arguing about money. Farida’s
husband, the FIR said, went into the bedroom to get some money and
that was when Santi followed him and stabbed him fourteen times.
Farida screamed and passers by came and apprehended him in the act.
Santi could not prove that he signed
the statement under duress and the police had three eye witnesses
– Farida and the two giants. And so, after months of attending
a trial that seemed designed to convict him, he was found guilty
and sentenced to death. He was thrown into prison, awaiting the
hangman with as much anxiety as he had awaited his fated meeting
with Farida.
Somehow, he developed a relationship with one of the warders, an
elderly one who had the courtesy to listen to his story. In Santi,
the warder saw himself when he was young. Listening to the convict’s
tale, he thought they were even more similar than he imagined; the
naïveté, the lure of a promise of love, youthful fantasies;
utopia. He sighed and shook his head. Sometimes, he would smuggle
bread, garri, soap, salt, at times even pepper, for Santi to make the intolerable
meals have the semblance or taste of something edible.
She surprised him again when she paid
him a visit. He thought she would be remorseful but she smiled with
the hint of triumph when she saw him in his ill-fitting death row
uniform, as if she had won a bet. The only thing he could think
of saying to her was: “Why, Farida?”
She shrugged. “They have not
been treating you well here,” she said. “That’s
not right. They should treat you well. See how wretched you are
looking, God!”
“Why did you do this to me?”
he asked, looking deep into her eyes.
She laughed this time. A demon stirred
in him, urging him to wring her throat and, at least, die for having
actually killed someone.
“I don’t know,”
she said at last. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that
to you. You are such a handsome guy. We could have had a thing together,
you and I. we would have made a wonderful couple.”
He gaped at her, startled by her impunity, her heartlessness. He
still could not believe she could do such a thing; that innocent
smile, those tender eyes, that voice – the sound of happiness
itself.
“I should kill you,” he
said through his teeth.
She looked deep into his eyes and shook
her head. “You can’t do it, Santi,” she said.
“You don’t have the eyes of a killer.” She gave
him the fruits and some items she had brought for him. He looked
at the bag and tipped it over the edge of the table. The things
scattered on the patchy floor.
“Just get lost, okay!” he shouted. “Just go, enjoy
yourself while I take the fall for you. What pains me is that I
could have done it for you, for love. I could have taken the fall
for you, on my own terms. I am that stupid, you know. But you just
had to set me up, you bitch! God!”
She was shocked. The anguish in his
voice, the sincerity got to her. Perhaps for the first time, she
felt a tinge of remorse. She stood up with tears in her eyes. “Santi,”
she sighed, “I have been most unfair to you. Perhaps, I should
explain to you why. You deserve to know that, at least. I will tell
you next visiting day, I promise.” She turned and left. He
was taken back to his cell, seething, hating himself.
Eventually, he told the aging warder
about Farida’s visit. He told him what she said. The old man
with a clearer head was the first to see the opportunity.
“We could get you out of this,”
he said, excited. “If we could get her confession on tape,
it would give you some leverage. You could walk out of this.”
So, he smuggled in a cheap recorder with new batteries and a tape.
He kept them for Santi until the next visiting day. They tried it
out, it worked. The problem was that the buttons snapped with such
a loud kpak that would give them away. So Santi had to start recording before he
was really close to her. The idea gave Santi a new breath of life
and he looked forward to that day with the candle of hope burning
brightly in his heart. The day came. They had the tape hidden on
Santi. They waited and waited. The hours crawled until the day went
by. She did not come. Santi took it to heart. He developed a fever
and hoped to die. He adamantly refused to get well.
Unexpectedly, she came. They rushed
through concealing the recorder under his clothes, having made sure
it still worked. Weakened, he trudged to the visiting room and there
she was, in her angelic splendour. She brought him food and some
other things. She had to bribe her way in, she explained.
“So, you are back,” he
said. “Why the hell are you back? What do you want with me?”
“I heard you were sick. I knew
this condition they are holding you in will certainly kill you,”
she said. “How can anyone live like this? It’s inhumane.
Anyway, I have been thinking about you. I missed our night calls,
our…conversations. You won’t believe how much they mean
to me, those conversations.”
“See where they got me,
those…conversations.” He was sarcastic.
“I know how you feel. The truth
is; I am actually in love with you.” Her voice quavered. He
looked into her eyes, startled. She was close to tears. “I
have been missing you but I know you will not believe me,”
she said.
“That hardly explains anything,
does it?”
She dabbed her eyes. She was actually
crying. “What is killing me is that you will never believe
me.” She went on explaining how she was missing him, how she
could not sleep at night because she was thinking about him, about
their night calls. She cried so much he wanted to hug her but he
feared if he had the chance to, he would end up strangling her.
But all that rambling would not help him. He would soon run out
of tape if she kept going on like that.
“Explain it to me, Farida, because
I don’t understand,” he said. “If you love me,
why would you do such a thing to me?”
She took her time dabbing her eyes.
“I will tell you my story, as I promised. I will tell you
why I did what I did.” She told him about her marriage to
her husband. How he had bought his way to her parents’ heart,
how they had forced her to marry him, how she hated the man’s
guts and how she had planned, for long, to free herself with the
help of her boyfriend. It was this boyfriend, she said, having learnt
of her relationship with Santi, that planned the frame up and executed
it. She told him how he had threatened her life if she did not cooperate
and how he had promised to kill her mother if she refused to marry
him. She told him how she, too, was a prisoner, like him, how she
too was waiting for her own hangman.
“I don’t think you will
see me again,” she said at last. “But I just thought
you deserved to know the truth, and to know that I truly love you.”
She rose to leave. “I will pray for you, Santi, everyday,
until I die.”
The old warder was waiting. Anxiously,
he seized the recorder. “Did you get it? Did she confess?”
Santi nodded.
The warder played back the tape. The
recording was scrappy and static frothed from the device but the
voices could be heard. “Ah, so she loves you, eh?” he
smiled and fast forwarded the tape. He pushed the play button and
listened. “Yeah, yeah, more love talk.” Again he hit
the fast forward, then the play button. “This girl really
has it in for you,”
“Just a little forward, now,”
Santi said.
The warder speeded up the tape and
pushed the play button.
“…I will tell you my
story, as I promised…” Farida’s voice was
saying.
“That’s it,” Santi
shouted, excited.
“… I will tell you
why I did what I did. You see, my husband was a rich man but I did
not want to marry him because I had this…boyfriend I really
liked. He was…” there was a brief silence then the
device snapped to a stop as the tape ran out.  |
