Then she asked another question.
And another.
And each time, the girl answered correctly.
The old woman leaned forward and said quietly, “Come to my stall every evening after your chores. I will teach you what I can.”
And from that day, behind the market, between stacks of groundnut bags and the smell of roasted corn, Adai got an education.
Mama Nneka gave her old textbooks, pencils, exercise books, and something far more important.
She gave the girl belief.
She held Adai’s face in her wrinkled hands one evening and said, “Your mind is not a kennel. Nobody can lock it.”
For 2 years, this secret arrangement worked.
Adai would finish her chores, walk to the market with the excuse of buying something for the house, sit with Mama Nneka for 1 hour, and return before Blessing noticed anything.
She covered Primary 4, 5, and 6 material. She moved into junior secondary textbooks that Mama Nneka borrowed from a retired teacher on the next street.
Her mind was fast.
Her memory was terrifying.
And for the first time since her mother died, something inside her chest felt warm again.
Something that felt like hope.
But hope inside that compound was always a dangerous thing to carry, because Blessing had a gift—a dark, cruel gift for finding anything that made Adai happy and ripping it out of her hands.
It happened on a Tuesday evening.
Blessing had sent Toba outside to fetch a bucket from the backyard, and the lazy boy wandered toward the kennel looking for trouble.
He saw something under the torn sack where Adai slept.
Books.
Four of them.
He pulled them out and ran to his mother, screaming, “Mama! Mama! The dog girl has books!”
Blessing came outside with her face twisted in a kind of rage Adai had learned to fear more than cold water.
She grabbed every book.
She tore the pages out one by one while Adai watched.
Then she dropped them into a metal bucket, poured kerosene over the pile, and set it on fire right there in the yard while the girl stood 3 feet away with tears running silently down her face.
Blessing leaned close enough for Adai to smell the shea butter on her skin and said, “Dogs do not read. Dogs do not think. Dogs obey. And if I ever find another book near you, I will burn something more than paper.”
The girl did not cry out loud.
She had learned that lesson in the first 3 weeks.
That night in the kennel, Adai lay with her face pressed into Ease’s fur. The old dog had a scar across his left eye from a fight years ago, and his breathing was loud and heavy, but his heartbeat was steady, warm, reliable—more reliable than any human being inside that compound.
Adai whispered to him in the dark, her voice barely louder than his breathing.
“They burned the books, but they cannot burn what is already inside my head.”
And she was right.
