Crimson skyline

To say it was an aberration won't quite do it justice, it was in the least, earth shattering, as  though all forms of life activity mysteriously got sucked out of us,numbing us to stillness as Karl's words reverberated through our respective heads in a shocking statement that would later quite blow up in our faces,

"I'm converting back to Christianity"

He said again in case it didn't sink in the first time. As far as we knew,Karl was happy being muslim or so we thought and was slowly getting used to Mom calling him by his muslim name Omar.

"But why?".

Was all Mom could utter in a shaky voice that thankfully sliced through the stillness which was so profound I was beginning to feel suffocated,


"Well, I thought I could do this, I thought it's what my father would have wanted, I thought it would cement my bond with you guys but honestly, I found islam quite overwhelming, too many rules, too many praying in one day..."

My eyelids fluttered in shock at that as he continued,

" ...And now with the impending ramadan fast, I just thought I couldn't handle another month of fasting, the previous one was quite tumultuous for me as it is, I want a break"

Now if anyone knows my Mom well enough, they would know one of the things she detest so much is to disrespect her religion, not when she had being the daughter of an imam and grew up in a humble and respectable islamic household quite revered in her hometown. I saw blood rush through Mom's fair cheeks in an apparent readiness to clap back but being the mother that she is, knowing it quite made sense for Karl, who was born and bred in the united states, raised a christian, and went to war in a country whose fraction of her citizens portray islam as a religion of the depraved to be truly overwhelmed. She swallowed hard and mustered a smile, replying as sweetly as she could summon,

" Darling, trust me when I tell you I understand how you feel, but you couldn't tell me you haven't found inner peace since you converted to islam, have u? You couldn't tell me you didn't feel some form of attachment to your late father after converting to islam, did you not?..."

As Mom made to continue, Karl snapped angrily as he sprang to his feet, asking Mom to just stop as his  mind was made up and he had already texted the Matriarch of his decisions and to be paid out his own share of his inheritance as he needed to go back to the states to have an alone time. We were all shocked to our marrow as I tried to touch him to talk some sense into him but he yanked my hand off and angrily bounced off  to our room. Sitting there at the dining table all looking flabbergasted, we all tried to brainstorm on what could have set this off? Karl is the sweetest of my brothers, what could have gone wrong? I tried to make sense of it but before we move forward, a look into how the day had started. 

THE MORNING. 

Picking out my wok of marinated meat prepared the night before from the imposing LG refrigerator in the kitchen and pushing the door close with my outstretched foot, I walked to the working slab just by the wide kitchen window overlooking the side compound. The frozen marinated turkey in hand, all set to thaw it down by placing in hot water then put in the oven to grill to start preparing some new recipes which I'd gotten from my good friend Hott's new website which is my go-to source for getting nice recipes and healthy tips for daily living, when I saw Mom and the Adagiri matriarch who had driven in a few minutes earlier in an anger-charged animated gesticulations in the sparsely green area out in the compound, she had visited us that morning saying she was in abuja to conduct some business and decided to branch by and by "branch by" , this means to start trouble. I heaved a sigh dejectedly as I rubbed in my meat and ingredients together. The Matriarch also lambasted Mom for supposedly not raising us well as her sons now have the audacity to demand for their inheritance,

" How could they do that? Just because they carry the Adagiri bloodline doesn't mean they should start hounding me, demanding for their inheritance, you useless witch, instigating my grandkids against me ehn" ,

Mom hit back, saying we were old enough to start asking,

"My children and I have been through a lot, what did you do to help in any way? So if they demand what is rightfully theirs, why see it as though a rebellion against you? If you push someone to the wall, at some point, they would rebel"

Mom fumed which led to tempers flying, angry voices raised with a lot of screaming heard. I dropped my meat and quickly drying my hands with the kitchen hand towel to go and separate the women before a fight ensues ( the Matriarch is a fiercely strong lady for her age so much we joke she swallows a live child each morning to keep up her strength and whom QT and Hamz and even Karl must have taken their strength after) when i saw QT jumped out to separate the women as the Matriarch called up a staff to come and drive her away but before she left, she said something which I found quite unsettling,

" The Adagiri inheritance, the circumstances of how it came to be and how it should be shared is beyond your comprehension, but you this little witch, you think you can take me on? I will show you"

And with a snap of her fingers, got inside her car, waiting for her staff to arrive as Mom kept screaming and clapping at her, assuring her she couldn't do her or her children any harm. It was quite a sight to see. Thirty minutes later, her staff arrived and drove her away while that statement she made kept auto-replaying in my mind. What was behind that statement? How did our Adagiri ancestors came about that wealth, why couldn't it be shared? Questions upon questions popping up in my mind which I just had
to do something about. Meanwhile ramadan was around the corner and Karl had being acting quite strange in its wake, reading up on the king james version of the bible online and hesitating to join us for prayers and sometimes giving excuses around the time for prayers. 

AFTERNOON.             

What the Matriarch had said that morning got me a little uneasy and I wanted to do something about it so I picked up my phone, clicking my bookmarked google page, it was time I investigate the family so I checked up the family on ancestry.com  through records of birth, death, census, marriage, immigration, birthplace, occupation, value of personal estate, life expectancy, military service and it revealed  a rather startling result.

My ancestor Yajuro Adagiri had arrived san francisco in 1872,apparently a victim of the slave trade and his progeny had lived in the states right up to the 1920s before he alongside his family escaped and found their way back home but not before he racked up some bounty from his masters according to records which from my guts says it was quite dastardly. These got me so curious and decide to take it a notch further on personal prodding and undercover investigations which my spirit tells me would unearthed a shocking discovery but which I knew I couldn't do on my own.                               

EVENING. 

 Infomercials on the telly kept relaying the blessings of the impending ramadan and urging interested persons and or organisations to sponsor ramadan programmes. Naturally, just as most people are wont to be, I was jittery and in my case, that's because of my body image problems, I fear the inevitable shrinking of my weight to a size zero and enduring the stress of waking at night to take the pre-dawn meal and I am a muslim, so for Karl who is new to islam and  who has got a complexion that gives out his mood easily, one could see how terrified he was, his cheeks move in an obvious clenching of teeth whenever one of the adverts and infomercials on telly gets relayed.

 REALITY. 

 After minutes of extensive talk about Karl, we all agreed the best way out was to let him calm down before we brooch the religion topic again and which thankfully worked, he agreed to remain a muslim and also perform the upcoming fasting but the source of the Adagiri fortune still remained a mystery and source of curiosity in my mind and thought to get Hamz on board, letting him know how far I'd gone, he was shocked as was intrigued about what one could find out on the internet.

 " Everything is just a click away...are you indeed sure this Yajuro Adagiri is our ancestor?"

He chimed and with my eyes going saucers implying I was quite positive, I responded

" How many Adagiri families have you seen or heard of in this country? The unique thing about our surname is that it is unique...not many go by that name"

I said with a smile and Hamz nodded,

"So are the Kardashians, Another thing we have in common".

Two Adagiri sons are on their way to unearth sensitive and mysterious information about their powerful and illustrious family contrived in mystery, awe and intrigue, The revelation of which is so poignant and way beyond their years, would they succeed? 

As the boys take on their genealogy, The sky is littered with moulds of reddish cloud cast upon it by the dull glow of the inflamed rays of the setting sun...This is called CRIMSON. 

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