THE ELOPE PLAN

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Jane and Mayor lived in a small city. They went to school together in a boat crossing the Eleyele river. Jane was the daughter of a Hausa landlord, and Mayor the son of a well-known Muslim planter. They had been friends from childhood, who studied in the same high school, grew up playing and studying together. The two families had a good relationship and as the two children grew, they fell in love.

Mayor usually lends his novels such as to Jane. One day, Mayor handed her a set of romantic poems. She observed that Mayor highlighted a lot of romantic lines of the book and that was how he expressed his love interest in Jane through the poetic lines, Mayor swam into her heart. That was they start their love journey.

It was an era where email and social messages were not available, they reach out to each other through hidden love letters placed inside the books they exchanged.

Few years later, Jane's mother saw a letter from Mayor while cleaning her bookshelf. Once the two families came to know about the affair, they broke up. Despite the long-standing relationship between the two families, there was no mean they could partake in inter-religion marriage and this made the families break all links with each other. The life sentences of the two romantic lovers started soon after.

Jane was compelled to stop her studies and was put under house arrest. Mayor was cast out of his home for rejecting to marry a lady his family chose. Due to the pressure from community leaders, his father remove his name from his will and denied him a share in the family property, even tried to kill him.

Mayor's father shot him using a country gun when he tried to penetrate the house but Major had a miraculous escape even though he sustained several severe injuries. Separated and escorted all the time, Jane and Mayor couldn't talk, let alone meet without their parents not knowing. For seven years, they hardly managed to even get to see each other. They got the opportunity to speak for a while once met after 10 years. At one point, they planned to elope but they were worried for their families stopped them. Jane could not elope in the light of the fact that it would affect the marriage prospects of her unmarried sister. For Mayor, it became his duty to take care of the family after his father's death.

After 25 long years of waiting patiently, they finally chose to run away and live somewhere peacefully. By this time Jane's sister got married and Mayor made all the plans so that his family could live the same life. They waited for 25 long years for the sake of their family and they decided they could wait any longer. They decided to elope a week after. Jane for the first time in many years smiled.

Few days before the elope, there was a heavy rainfall that evening, a tragic boat accident happened in which a person who had saved many passengers drowned in the whirls of the river. It was Mayor. It took several days of searching before they finally fish out the body and identify it as the remains of Mayor.

Jane did not get to see his body, there was no one to follow her to his house, and the dead body was buried immediately due to the Muslim beliefs. Following Mayor's death, Jane tried to take her life six times. She did not want to live in a world without Mayor.

After the last attempt, she was admitted to a hospital in their area, where she again tried to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills along with water from the Eleyele river which Mayor drank at the time of his death. The following day, Mayor's mother visited her at the hospital and talked her out of taking her life. She told Jane that if she did not wish to marry anyone else again then Jane should live as her son’s widow. Jane moved into Mayor's house with his mother.