Read Online Gods and Soldiers by Rob Spillman - Free Book Online

“permed,” or straightened, its length touching her broad shoulders. By the time she was fourteen, Zulaikha’s blouses could no longer contain her large breasts.
    Her beauty, coupled with her family’s riches, turned her into the most popular and desired teenager among the young men on Zongo Street. Before long, all the rich Muslim men in the city were knocking at her family’s door, seeking the young girl’s hand in marriage. Her father had planned to marry her off by the time she was sixteen, the usual marriage age for girls; but to the father’s shock and disappointment, Zulai one by one rejected the dozen or so suitors he and his clan chose for her. She refused to even see the men when they called, and she even went so far as to threaten killing herself if forced to marry a man she didn’t choose herself. Her family then asked her to bring home her own suitor, but she told them point blank that she was not ready to marry until she had finished middle school. Such a thing was unheard of from a girl on Zongo Street.
    As all of this unraveled, the street’s young men were on a quest to see who would be the first to sleep with Zulaikha. And it wasn’t long before one of them succeeded. His name was Muntari, a twenty-one-year-old disco-goer and school dropout who three years later found himself in the middle of a scandal when Zulaikha married his uncle, Mr. Rafique, who lived in the same compound with the young man.
    Not long after her first sexual experience, Zulaikha quickly turned into a “sex monster,” as some called her. Wild stories about her encounters with men abounded on the street. One was about how she slept with six men, who mounted her one after the other, but she was still left unsatisfied. Another story related how she had sex with a young man until he fainted and fell sick afterwards. Soon Zulaikha’s loose sexual behaviour began to drag her clan’s name in the mud. Her father then insisted she bring home a suitor, or he would marry her off to the man of his choice. By now most of the men who had earlier sought Zulaikha’s hand had left off their pursuit of her, afraid the girl’s bad name might tarnish their reputations. A few of them persisted, though, and Mr. Rafique was one of them.
    Zulaikha knew from the start that most of the men who sought her hand were rich men with two or three wives already, a practice sanctioned by Islam, the street’s predominant religion. The idea of competing for a man’s attention with two or three other women, along with its concomitant sexual starvation, seemed repugnant and stifling to Zulai. So, even though Mr. Rafique was only a temporary clerk at a local shea-nut butter co-operative union, he was the one she preferred. She was confident that her father would give him capital to start his own business, or at least offer him a position in his transport company. The truth was, Zulai had a genuine fascination for Mr. Rafique—and because of that not even the knowledge of Mr. Rafique’s illegitimate child, Najim, a seven-year-old-boy who lived with his mother on Roman Hill, was enough to change her mind about him. Friends and a few family members tipped Zulai that Najim’s mother was a jilted lover, who was still in love with Mr. Rafique and may cause her problems down the line in her marriage. But Zulai merely brushed this aside. Zulai was also captivated by the fact that, unlike all the other suitors, Mr. Rafique was somewhat educated. He had attended school only up to Form Four (the equivalent of twelfth grade), but on a street like Zongo, where most of the folks never stepped foot in an English school classroom, Mr. Rafique and a few others were like one-eyed kings in the kingdom of the blind. But most importantly, Zulai was attracted to Mr. Rafique’s handsome appearance. She liked the blazers and suits he wore, even on extremely hot days. In short, he conformed to her ideal of the