The morning Nana Aisha visited Alhaji Maman’s house, there had been a light rain. It came swiftly and stopped surely as if able to tell that all good things like rain rarely last. It was a good thing when her husband, Kabir, found work as Alhaji’s driver. It had been a better thing that the work paid well enough to help them rent a one-bedroom in the lower part of Malali Village just before you crossed the small stream of river Kaduna. It had even been best that, unlike his previous jobs as security man or driver for the many wealthy families that called Kaduna city theirs, this job did not forebode any wretched thing. There were no threats from his employer, no sex-starved housewives were asking him to enter their rooms, and no other security or low-level staff were competing for the limited affection of their employer. In this job as driver number two for Alhaji Maman and his two wives, including the girlfriend that lived in Gusau that everyone chose to pretend did not exist, Kabir had found stability and surety, calm and quiet, the kinds of thing a believer like him earnestly prayed for.

Nana Aisha’s Kabir was a good man. In a city as tumultuous as any, Kaduna was not filled with good men. Men who prayed five times daily, did not hit their wives, and strived to educate their children. When her late father, then a farmer in the lower basins of Rigasa, had asked her to meet a young man who had migrated from rural Katsina in search of prosperity, she had declined. She was sixteen and considered herself virtuous enough to marry someone of a higher status who would bring prosperity to her and her poor family. But her father sprung Kabir on her, inviting him one Friday to the hamlets. She had served him tea and some dates and then watched him from the open fire she was nurturing. He was handsome. Nothing too striking, a broad nose with a bridge and small nostrils that evoked an elegant bird, and his eyes, bright and cocooned under a wide forehead. She liked his length but was unsure about his overall presentation of boorishness. When she would share her observations with her father, he would dismiss them and say in his stuttering speech, look at me; do you know where I came from? If you do not want a man like him, then you are not grateful for a father like me. 

Her concerns about Kabir will dissipate with the kind hand of time and money. When they moved toward the city center and eventually to Malali Village, and Kabir started to make the steady and tidy sum many dreamed of but rarely accomplished, he emerged to be just the man she had desired. He did not yet rival the men she had wanted from all the Hausa films she watched, with their sharp styles and brisk walks, but he came close on days when she could look around and genuinely count her blessings. Kabir was a blessing to her. Until he was no more. A ghost of her married past, Kabir died on a trip with Alhaji Maman’s first wife.

If there was anything she truly wanted from Alhaji Maman the morning she dressed in her blue hijab and walked the road to his house, it was not to bring Kabir back or explain to her why her husband was dead. She had too much iman, too much faith in the ordainment of things to doubt that this was her portion, her test. Instead, what she sought from the boss of her husband was an admission that her husband had died under his care. That the choice to have him travel at night and meet the end of a thief’s gun was something the Alhaji felt terrible for, a heartfelt apology. She desired an acknowledgment of her bereavement the same way a child wants to know that its living presence is accepted no matter how terrible the circumstance of its birth is. Alhaji Maman could offer Nana Aisha something like mercy if only he chose to see her. His inner gates remained locked, and excuses for his absence flowed swiftly from the mouths of employees who, months ago, joked and ate with Kabir. People are as disloyal to the dead as they are loyal to the living. Her sense of betrayal ran deep enough for her to keep returning, hoping one of them would crack and tell her the truth: her husband’s death meant nothing to the big man who would give her nothing of his time or presence. 

The instant the Miracle Hunter pushed his trainee, his green ward, in front of Nana Aisha’s crumpled form and told him that she was looking for a miracle, all threads had come loose. She had been attacked by a housekeeper who seemed to have been commanded to take care of her once and for all. The elderly woman had called her an opportunist, a woman using her husband’s unfortunate death to squeeze kindness out of good people who had done nothing wrong. What the Miracle Hunter had sensed from all those kilometers away, the desire he used his tunnel finder to locate, was a resounding call for vindication from a woman's heart in the unfathomable waters of grief. 

There they stood, Miracle Hunter 85499, his young ward, and a woman searching for something few could name. 

“You are a miracle yourself” the Miracle Hunter proclaimed to the boy as if it was all he needed to know to begin. 

The boy did not react to the repeated statement. The wail he heard from Nana Aisha remained sharp in his ears, although her body was as still as ice. He did not want to ask the same question, the only question he wanted to ask, the one he had asked his guardian as soon as he appeared before him, his first memory of existence. He sensed from the older Hunter a kind of anger about his presence. 

Yet as the wail seemed to increase in tempo, the long hairs on his ear alert to the point of pinching pain, the woman unaware of their presence and unmoved by the intensity of her plea to powers far above her, the boy could not help it. He closed his gnarly hands over his ears and said again in plea, “What is a miracle!”