BRIDAL CONTEST

Chapter 11

    The next day after eid Amnah's system was having a tantrum, only 10days away from nigeria and she feels like disappearing back.

How will she cope for the remaining days. Her cousins were teasing her when she requested for where she can get a Nigerian dish in makkah. She couldn't care less because her taste bud was denying the taste of any other meal apart from the ones she grew up eating.

    Beeba was of help, she helped with an idea of where she can get it although she didn't want to ask the blogs herself because of her reputation, they will look down on me she said, well she won't blame her seeing the way her blood were sizing her up when she blurted so too. What perplexed her more is that the blog asked for money in return of the favour.

   Everything is about money in this world. No wonder people are going to any length, both legal and illegal to get stipends, May Allah see us through. She got her answer from the comment section after she wired down the money to the account the details were sent to her.

    She hired a cab from their hotel and told him her destination. Shahra-sittin like she was told is a Nigerian community, it has a market as rowdy and dirty as the Nigerian market. Nigerians did a great job of dominating the place and polluting it.

   She couldn't convince herself to eat from the food of the dirty environment so she tried the next option which is calling the number she was given, the woman by the other end of the line asked for the phone to be put in loud speaker so that she can communicate with the driver.

She changed from Hausa to Arabic with a fake forced accent. Amnah could pick out simple words from the long description, she knows a little Arabic from the one learnt in islamiyyah.

   She tuned out on the landscape that she didn't notice when they arrived at the restaurant until when the driver notify her. She walks into the place which is different from the place she visited earlier. This place is a whole lot cleaner and fresher with incense sticks burning on each corner of the room.

   A woman in her late 40's embraced her with a warm welcome. The woman is wearing a black jilbab with black hijab, and her feet in cover shoe. Leaving the only part of her body visible to be her face and hand which is fair with dark knuckles and patches of pink here and there. Her green veins visible under her almost transparent skin. The thick scent of perfume not able to console the foul smell of cheap bleaching cream.

   It made Amnah cringe from the pungent smell, she used style to walk to a table and sit pretending to be too famished for a long conversation. The woman spoke in forced Arabic accented Hausa.

"Ba wata guziri daga nijeria?", she asked referring to contrabands like colanut, bleaching cream, and other concoctions forcing aynun to replace the A's.

   "A'a", Amnah replied with a simple no and requested for her food.

Young girls of about her age and some even younger than her topple into the room to deliver food to customers. They are transformed like the other woman, denying their birth skin colour all with the zeal to fit in the foreign society.

Something must be done to stop this people from laboring for another country without being acknowledged. They should not only be deported but punished severely to serve as a lesson to those planning to come.

But then she remembers that all the fortune they have acquired here are being seized by the Saudi government before they are forcefully deported to serve as a punishment but it doesn't stop more people from trooping in.

   They will reap so much if only they will labor this hard in Nigeria. But if this business is completely abolished how can people like her eat Nigerian cuisines abroad, she wondered.