Amatulmaleek 1 Complete Hausa Novel

She remained silent, listening to the way her uncle’s voice rose, the anger and frustration clear in the tone. His face showed sheer fatigue along with that anger—there was no softness or mercy in it at all.

All that anger and frustration, coupled with the raised tone of their mother sitting nearby, she was listening closely.

From her perspective, even her mother and her elder sister felt the pain deeply in their hearts whenever their mother was involved in such arguments. No one in the house would raise a hand to stop him, much less intervene in the argument that struck at their nerves.

Even Uncle Bellon, as usual, was full of anger and bitterness, roaming around in front of them with his fury. Yet no one dared to oppose him; his mother merely endured it, and Jannat herself didn’t even lift her gaze or speak.

This time, the intensity of his argument and his words were so severe that her own eyes and her mother’s filled with tears—tears he would never want to see from his sibling.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his large garment and, repeating the last words to their mother, said:

“Truly, if Abdulhameed ever goes to that foreign school again, I swear, by Allah, I will not be able to endure his mischief. My sibling is gone, and he left nothing for me but suffering. If you will not stay where Allah has placed you and have no control over your children, then gather them now, or in the future we will not manage.”

He turned and left the room without stopping the chaos and yelling he had caused, leaving the small section of the house where they mourned the death of their father, alone with just themselves inside.

Their mother exhaled deeply, not even glancing at where AmatulMaleek was sitting. She continued stitching Abdulhameed’s torn garment, who had burst it with a needle, with no complaints, since her young age prevented her from doing much else.

None of them spoke because AmatulMaleek’s focus and seriousness were remarkable despite her youth. She could suppress things well, hiding them within herself.

The mother knew that AmatulMaleek would not speak, so she swallowed her own tears to ensure that AmatulMaleek would not see her move from her seat to retrieve the laundry she had taken out in abundance.

AmatulMaleek glanced at her stealthily, putting down the needle and thread in her hands, and looked at her mother with wide, white eyes without saying a word.

One thing always ran through her mind: if Mommy—their mother—was the elder sister of Maamah, why was it that she always sent them food and goods but could not remove them from this life of hardship, misery, and humiliation at the hands of their father’s family?

Whenever their food ran out, her younger sister, being very small, would run to find something to eat, while they would survive the night as best they could. Sometimes Maamah would prepare the household women’s dinner and, when done, tell them what she had prepared for her children.

Her biggest amazement was that on every day they received food from Mommy, it would be divided carefully; whatever they were given would last them two days, after which they would return to the same hardship.

In the life they had grown up in, their household was large—occupied by their father, their mother, their father’s brothers, and their families—ranging from two wives, three wives, even up to four. That was the nature of the household they lived in, full of gatherings and constant activity.