An old village truck loaded goods and took them to the edge of the town. This song we sing at night during moonlight play reminds me of the old truck that carried us and our belongings, including my little goat, Durgu, from Illori, which my mother bought for me. My mother always said that the goat had the blessing of reproduction, which she realized when my brother was given a chicken named after me. That chicken eventually turned into a goat that I raised, which reproduced and was sold, and my mother saved the money to bring us to Katsina.

Our move to Katsina was due to a quarrel between my father and the women of the house, which started from a children's fight. Despite being children, we were often taunted and called names like 'household servants' children.' They would say things like, 'If you were to speak, I would surpass you in inheritance,' which I didn't understand at first but later realized was meant to demean us.

The root of the quarrel that led to us leaving the village was Mama Tambaya, a feared woman in the household and the entire village. People called her 'Tambaya' because she was known to consult with sorcerers and had mystical powers, which made everyone fear her.

This woman was the reason we left the village where we were born. We were three girls, and she would often call us names, implying that we were a burden to our parents. We lived a difficult life in the forest between Jibiya and Niger, where our mother was from Niger and our father from Nigeria. Their marriage was part of the cultural ties that often formed between the people of the two regions.

The women in our household did not like our mother or us because of jealousy, a common issue among Hausa women, especially between co-wives or relatives. This jealousy often led to conflicts, even more intense than those between co-wives sharing the same husband.

Our household, known as the 'big house' in the village, was envied because of the prosperity my father achieved through farming, which surpassed that of the other men. This led to jealousy and hatred towards our family.

My father was more successful than the other men, partly because of his education in veterinary medicine, which his father insisted on despite opposition from relatives. His relatives lived in Katsina, and he spent half of his life with his mother, who owned the land we lived on. This made the other men see him as an outsider.

Despite knowing that my father inherited the land from his mother, the other men resented us. They would gang up on us, and if any of us made a mistake, they would punish us severely. This forced us to stay in our section of the house, which my father eventually had to create a back exit for, but even that did not protect us from their hostility.