Mutunci

Abdulbaseet Yusuff

One would think, and rightly so, that business is all about money: that after centuries of commerce leaving feeble camel trails across the infinite desert, turbans rifling in the Sahelian wind like rebel flags, that somewhere in those hellish Harmattan nights, in those tents scripting trade secrets in Ajami, that the spirit of capitalism must have howled into us, seeped past tympanic membrane into our breasts, that the jugular of our conscience by now would be mincemeat between its jagged fangs. But it is not. On Fridays, Muntari loads his dates into his barrow: Business, he says, is a date with a prescribed fate Maktub! It is all written already. The mullah in his Khutbah says life is hardly about the moolah, that money is mere currency, by which he means to say, only of worth in the current: the sheen on the coins subject to rust. I am no expert in the date business, in the margin of the profit, but often, I catch Muntari fingering through the heap for the juiciest Khandari dates, the ones plump but faintly wrinkled, stuffing them into the cupped palms of waiting boys. Once a customer stopped by his absent neighbour’s pile of dates. One would think, and rightly so, that it is fair game to hawk down on the chance, clench claws on the client Call it naiveté & Muntari would scarcely pay any mind, but like a gingered apprentice, he transacted on behalf of his neighbour, tucked the cash in the bands around the barrow, & returned empty-handed to his shed. Or so one would think. That his hands must always be empty, until you watch him pushing his barrow steadily into the crimson sunset, a halo around his figure like a vignette, with boys in the angwa trailing him offering to push, tender hands in his callused palms, & you would see that hands couldn't be any fuller.

About Abdulbaseet Yusuff

is a Nigerian writer. His works appear in Indianapolis Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Cutleaf Journal, Brittle Paper, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere.