‘You would ask, Chicha! I don’t know. They suddenly began hating me when Kwesi was barely two. Kodjo Fi reduced my housekeeping money and sometimes he refused to give me anything at all. He wouldn’t eat my food. At first, I used to ask him why. He always replied, “It is nothing.” If I had not been such an unlucky woman, his mother and sisters might have taken my side, but for me there was no one. That planting time, although I was his first wife, he allotted to me the smallest, thorniest plot.’

‘Ei, what did you say about it?’

‘What could I say? At that time my mother was alive, though my father was already dead. When I complained to her about the treatment I was getting from my husband, she told me that in marriage, a woman must sometimes be a fool. But I have been a fool for far too long a time.’

‘Oh!’ I frowned.

‘Mother has died and left me and I was an only child too. My aunts are very busy looking after the affairs of their own daughters. I’ve told my uncles several times but they never take me seriously. They feel I am only a discontented woman.’

‘You?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Perhaps you would not think so. But there are several who do feel like that in this village.’

She paused for a while, while she stared at the floor.

‘You don’t know, but I’ve been the topic of gossip for many years. Now, I only want to live on my own looking after my child. I don’t think I will ever get any more children. Chicha, our people say a bad marriage kills the soul. Mine is fit for burial.’

‘Maami, don’t grieve.’

‘My daughter, my mother and father who brought me to this world have left me alone and I’ve stopped grieving for them. When death summoned them, they were glad to lay down their tools and go to their parents. Yes, they loved me all right but even they had to leave me. Why should I make myself unhappy about a man for whom I ceased to exist a long time ago?’

She went to the big basket, took out some cassava and plantain, and sitting down began peeling them. Remembering she had forgotten the wooden bowl into which she would put the food, she got up to go for it.

‘In this case,’ I continued the conversation, ‘what will happen to Kwesi?’

‘What will happen to him?’ she asked in surprise. ‘This is no problem. They may tell me to give him to his father.’

‘And would you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘And would you succeed in keeping him if his father insisted?’

‘Well, I would struggle, for my son is his father’s child but he belongs to my family.’