The following day Grandmother wept openly. The teenagers’ eyes were dark with worry. They whispered a lot. Grandfather was sullen. Kirabo, excluded from all conversation about Gayi, imagined the worst. At night, the murderous bull returned to torment her.
It was then that she found out Gayi was Grandmother and Grandfather’s real child, their youngest of five. People kept coming to commiserate. Grandmother did not say much, only wept. Grandfather would shake his head and sigh, “Children. They don’t belong to us. We only bring them into the world.” No child brought up in that house—and there had been many—had ever rebelled, least of all a girl.
Three days later, Miiro’s older children, Aunts Abi and YA, Tom and quiet Uncle Ndiira, came and there was a family meeting in the diiro. Afterwards, they put announcements on the radio asking Gayi to come home because everyone was worried. Some of these notices said she could go to her siblings in the city, but so far, no Gayi. Then they put out other announcements threatening whoever was keeping her with kidnapping and child defilement—still nothing. Not even to say Stop worrying, I am fine.
Miiro’s brothers, Faaza Dewo, the priest, and Jjajja Dokita, the doctor, came, and they hugged, whispered, and sighed. But horrible Jjajja Nsangi, Miiro’s only sister, stayed for a week. Nsangi was one of those women who were men in their brothers’ houses. She called Grandmother “Wife.” Grandmother knelt as she waited on her. Jjajja Nsangi claimed that in her brothers’ houses there was room to raise her voice and to stretch her legs. Miiro loved his sister too much to say anything. Grandmother was on her best behaviour whenever Nsangi visited. She reinforced her maleness by asking the teenagers, “Who am I?”
“Ssenga,” they replied.
“And what does ssenga mean?”
“It means if.”
“Let me hear the whole saying.”
“If you were not a woman,” the teenagers would chorus, “you would be our father too.”
“Don’t you ever forget it.”
After commiserating, Nsangi asked Miiro to buy her kangaali, her word for alcohol. “I need to engage the gears,” she said, as if she was a car. And Miiro bought her beer even though Nsangi had been diagnosed with rich people’s afflictions—high blood pressure and ulcers. She also suffered from sugars and had been told to eat small-small meals frequently, and to skip the rope. When Grandmother heard, she whispered, “By the time doctors tell you to skip a rope your laziness is so middle-aged it has grandchildren.”
After Nsangi left, no one talked about Gayi again. When Kirabo tried to, the teenagers elbowed her—Shut up—as if Gayi were worse than dead. But every time the bus went past, it flashed the word “Guy” and Kirabo’s heart turned.
THE BITCH
1
4 January 1977
Kirabo walked back to the house, deflated. Running back and forth to the road to check whether Tom was coming was juvenile, but she could not help herself. With Tom she became a child again—running, screaming, throwing herself at him whenever he arrived. Besides, there is nothing like telling the villages you are leaving for the city—grown-ups giving you their blessings, friends saying they will miss you, some giving you envious looks because you are wearing city airs already—only for them to wake up the following morning and find you breathing rural Nattetta air.
Tom was expected at ten hours of day. At twelve hours in the evening, Kirabo felt compromised. Her smartest dress had lost its going-away effect. It was an “already-made” dress with a MADE IN GHANA label, unlike the “made in Nattetta” sack-like things, run off the local tailor’s sewing machine without imagination. Tom had bought it for her last Christmas. Kirabo wore it to church, and even Sio stole guarded glances as he hurried to his parents’ car. You don’t wear that kind of dress to go away, and then linger like unsold fish.
•
Grandfather had let Kirabo go. Instead of Grandmother, it was Tom who asked to take her to the city, though Kirabo suspected that after the Nsuuta affair, Grandmother had been pushing Tom to take her with him. One day, he arrived on one of his hurried visits and announced, “Kirabo will start to live with me when her results come back.”
It was casual. As if he were humming to himself. He stood under the mustani tree in the western courtyard between the house and the kitchen. Grandfather stood by the window of his bedroom, which opened out into the courtyard, while Grandmother sat by the kitchen door. As he spoke, Tom picked up a green stone seed that the mustani had dropped and threw it high in the air. It whistled as it soared, then dropped somewhere in the coffee shamba.
“Ah haa.” Grandmother smiled so widely Kirabo saw all her teeth. But not Miiro. He asked, “Why now?”
Tom walked towards Grandfather’s window to avoid raising his voice. “I want to keep an eye on her education.”
“And what have we been doing all this time?”
“You have been helping me.”
“Listen to that: we have been ‘helping’ him. As if the child is his alone.”
Tom did not respond. He stood by Miiro’s window, as if anticipating further protests. But when none were forthcoming, Tom walked over to Grandmother and squatted near her. Unlike other males in the family, Tom never stood when speaking to Grandmother unless she was standing too. As he settled down, Miiro’s voice came again: “Have you chewed this decision over properly?”
A look of exasperation clouded Tom’s face. He returned to Grandfather’s window, folded his arms, and replied in a low voice, “Of course.”
“Hmm, because we don’t want to hear choking later.” Grandfather came to his window. His silhouette was distorted by the thick anti-burglar bars, but Kirabo could make out his forefinger wagging furiously as he whispered something to Tom. Then he went back to tidying his bedroom. Tom replied under his breath, making sharp cutting gestures with his hands. Grandfather hmmed. Kirabo, who was washing dishes by the katandalo, strained to hear what was being said.
On his visit the following weekend, Tom had changed his mind. At the time, he had been visiting every week because Kirabo’s primary leaving exams were coming up. He talked her through exam etiquette, bringing her pencils, pens, and the Oxford Mathematical Set. He also brought PLE past papers for revision, which they would work through together. He visited her teachers and paid them for Kirabo’s coaching. On this occasion, Tom had decided he would come for Kirabo not when her results came back in March, but in early December, soon after the exams. She needed to get used to her new home before she started secondary school.
Miiro was not amused. “Forget that,” he had said. “She will eat Ssekukkulu with us. And after we have held the first day of the year together, you can take her.”
Tom said he would collect Kirabo on the fourth of January.
•
Kirabo had never been curious about Tom. She had never been interested in who he was beyond Tom, her father, who visited late in the evening and was always in a hurry. Tom, who would throw her up in the air when she was still small, catching her and tickling her cheeks with his stubble as she squealed, “Stop, please Tom, stop!” No sooner would he put her down than she would throw her arms in the air, squealing, “Again, Tom, please, again!” Beyond that she had never given him much thought as long as he visited and brought her gifts.
The prospect of living in Kampala had given Kirabo hopes of seeing her mother sooner. Away from Nattetta, the promise she had made to Nsuuta not to look for her mother would become void. Ever since Nsuuta told her not to go looking, Kirabo’s obsession with her mother had become all-consuming. But she had made adjustments. Living with her mother was out of the question. All she wanted now was to look at her, hear her voice, see her smile, feel a little of her love, so she could finally say to herself: This is where I come from. Still she imagined her mother’s life. She lived in a flat in Kampala. Her husband, a horrible man, was bald, had a beard, and never smiled. Despite what Nsuuta had told her, in her mind her mother was still millipede-dark, tall with long skinny legs. She wore a yello
w maxi circle skirt and a blouse of indeterminate colour and platform shoes. She had a huge round Afro like Diana Ross on Grandfather’s gramophone disc. The only thing Kirabo could not see clearly was her face. It was always in the dark.
•
The house was at supper when Tom arrived. A short knock and there he was—tall, very dark, white long-sleeved shirt, tie, jacket in his hands, impatient. Kirabo glared at him—none of the usual running and throwing herself at him. She had lost all credibility when she took off her going-away dress. Her friends, who had hovered all evening to see her off, had slunk away in embarrassment.
Tom did not step in. He stood on the doorstep looking at Kirabo. “You mean you are not dressed yet?”
“Kdto,” Miiro clicked. “Tell me you are not travelling with a child at this time of night.”
“I left the office late.” Tom spoke as if Miiro did not understand the demands of city life. But this time he had gone too far.
“Office this, office that, always in a hurry; it has to stop. If there is no time to come, then there is no time to come. But don’t ever come here at night again.”
Tom kept quiet; his frustration deflated like slow air out of a tyre. Kirabo rose to go and change.
“Will you come in and eat something?” Grandmother asked.
“I’ll roll down the road to see Maama Muto for a bit.” Tom called Nsuuta Maama Muto, “younger mother,” and Grandmother Maama Mukulu, “senior mother.”
He disappeared so fast he did not see his mother’s face fold. He did not take long. By the time Kirabo came back from getting changed, Tom was turning into the walkway. She had thought he would not go “down the road,” as he called his dashes to see Nsuuta, because it was late. When he was in a lesser hurry, he disappeared to Nsuuta’s for long hours, and when he returned, he said, “I have already eaten,” despite Grandmother’s pain. On one occasion, at Aunt YA’s pre-wedding party, Tom spent the whole night at Nsuuta’s, blaming the noise and revellers. He barely made it in time to receive the pre-wedding kasuze katya gifts from the groom’s family and to hand over the bride.
Grandmother, who had left the room as Tom arrived from Nsuuta’s, returned with a pair of her best white linen bed-sheets. All Kirabo’s life, those sheets had been washed in water with Blue-loo to keep the whiteness sharp. They were always ironed and ready for hospital emergencies. Grandmother also gave her a red oval tin of Cussons scented petroleum jelly, a cake of Sunlight toilet soap, and a tin of Vicks VapoRub. Then she sat Kirabo on her lap and said, “Don’t worry about Miiro; I will look after him for you.” She pulled her into her bosom and Kirabo smelled firewood smoke on Grandmother’s busuuti. “Just get the best out of those city schools and be like your aunts. My job is to show off that my eldest grandchild is in secondary school; now she is at university. Do you see me boasting myself?” Kirabo laughed because she had never heard Grandmother speak English.
Miiro went to his bedroom too. When he returned, he sat Kirabo on his lap and said, “Yesterday you arrived a baby and I was showing off that I had a brand-new wife. Now, the village is going to laugh. But I am going to be strong. This is for both of us.”
Tom sighed impatiently.
Grandfather gave her two hundred shillings. Everyone gasped. “Keep it safe,” he said, but he looked at Tom as he added, “You might need it.”
Tom turned away, tapping the doorframe lightly. “There is food in my house.”
“Then make sure she gets it.” Miiro turned to Kirabo. “A heifer and nduusi goat for your O levels and again for A levels. And if you bring me a degree, two heifers, two nduusi goats.” Kirabo felt the tears. She cared for neither cows nor goats. What mattered was that she had been too excited about leaving to realise it would hurt.
Tom extricated her from the arms of her grandfather. “Come, come, we are running late.”
Grandmother and Grandfather stood in the doorway and waved. The rest of the family walked Tom and Kirabo the mile to Nazigo where the taxis to the city stopped.
Word must have gone around that Tom had arrived, because when they came to the Nazigo Trading Centre, all youths, Kirabo’s friends, even those from further-away villages, were hanging around the shops.
Kirabo saw Wafula first, and her heart leapt: He is here! Wafula and Sio were inseparable. Soon, Sio’s silhouette flickered across the corner of her vision and her eyes stopped searching. She would recognise that shadow anywhere. He leaned against the wall of Posta, his back against the metallic postboxes. He looked away from her as if he had not seen her, but she could sense that his body was in turmoil.
As Tom waited for a taxi, Kirabo went around hugging everyone, including Ntaate, the village creep she would never touch under normal circumstances. Indeed, Ntaate stretched himself like a cat being stroked. He stole a glance at Sio while whispering in Kirabo’s ear, “So these are the luxurious hugs Sio enjoys!” Kirabo sucked her teeth in disgust. Ntaate was Ntaate—a creep to the marrow.
After a nervous delay, she tottered over to Giibwa, who stood next to Sio. She looked at Giibwa as if Sio was not there. Then she sighed, “I am going.” Giibwa shrugged as if she did not care, but even as she did so, her face collapsed. Sio shifted and stood on one leg. The other, folded at the knee, stepped on the Posta’s wall as he leaned back. He said nothing. Giibwa chewed her upper lip. Kirabo kept her eyes on Giibwa.
“So, you are really going.” Sio looked at her as if she was being unreasonable.
Kirabo sighed.
“It is a waste of time to think you will remember us.”
“I will write.” She sneaked a glance at him.
“That is what you say.”
“I mean it.” She looked at him properly now.
Sio sucked his teeth and walked away.
Kirabo was stunned. Was that it? That was goodbye? She had planned to hug him. That was the only reason she had hugged all the other boys. After a brief hesitation, Wafula left too, even though everyone knew he would rather stay and watch Giibwa toss his heart in the air and catch it. When at the end of the Posta block the night swallowed Sio, Kirabo grabbed Giibwa and hugged her.
Giibwa said, “Don’t worry; I am coming to the city too. My aunt in Kampala asked me to go and live with her. This Nattetta is limited.” She wrinkled her nose. “No possibilities at all.”
“Then we shall be together again,” Kirabo enthused, though her eyes were at the end of the block, “and bring our Nattetta along?”
“Yes.” Giibwa jumped up and down. She hugged Kirabo again. This time Kirabo hugged Giibwa for Giibwa, and for the promise of getting together again.
•
The taxi, a Land Rover Defender, had two bench seats in the back facing each other. Kirabo, sitting with her back to the window, had to turn to wave. Her friends made a racket pretending to speak English: “We will missioooo … Seeoo soon …”
Kirabo glanced at Tom and then glared at her friends, but the boys doubled over, clutching their bellies as if in pain. Even Ntaate, who did not like Sio, held his stomach.
“Seeoo soon.”
As her friends, and then the shops, and finally the whole of Nazigo disappeared, Kirabo closed her eyes. She felt her life merge with the motion of the car until everything became fluid. Fluidity became loss. She opened her eyes and looked through the window again. Tiny pale lights, like drops randomly scattered across the vast darkness, were suspended all around her. The dark seemed to have neither beginning nor end; there was no ground, no sky. And yet those tiny lights were homes, full of life, full of the people she had always known, people like Sio, like Giibwa, like her grandparents. But the night had reduced them to teardrop flames, tossed aside as the car sped forward.
•
For a while, Kirabo’s mind hung on to Giibwa. She could not remember a time without her. She could not remember when, where, or how they met. They just were. Like life—you don’t remember when you were born. Or the sky—sometimes dark clouds came, sometimes it rained, but the next moment the su
n burst through and the sky was limitless. In the last year, when Kirabo’s study for her exams intensified, Giibwa would come as Kirabo studied and sit quietly with her. Giibwa could be quiet, unobtrusive, and patient. Sometimes, as they played, she would ask Kirabo, “Have you done your homework?” because Kirabo was the kind to do homework at the last minute. Everyone knew that about Giibwa. She was the kind of girl to say Let’s go and help this new mother with her baby. Kirabo only went along so people did not find out she had no heart. Sometimes, Giibwa spent days at Kirabo’s home. She melded into the household seamlessly, doing chores like she knew the rhythms of the house, and everyone said, “If only Kirabo were half as good!” The memory made Kirabo’s eyes sting. She imagined this was how it felt to have a sister.
It was Giibwa who made the appointment with Nsuuta to bury the original state. Yet she did not ask questions. If it had been the other way around, Kirabo would have demanded Why are you sneaking about with a blind old woman? Kirabo never told Giibwa about her two selves. It was not a decision. She just did not. Giibwa seemed contented with life, with herself, with everything. Being two entities, one of which flew out of your body, was like hairs creeping on your privates. You see them for the first time, you secretly choke on disgust. Guilt stabbed her, but she told herself that Giibwa would have been uncomfortable if she had told her. Besides, the original state was dead and gone, buried under the passion fruit thicket which roped itself around Nsuuta’s musambya tree. The day before it was buried, Kirabo had sent Giibwa to Nsuuta to say, “Kirabo is coming about that issue: she still does not want it.” Giibwa had run back with, “Nsuuta says it is fine. Tomorrow take an item of clothing to her that you love but don’t use any more.”
A Girl is a Body of Water Page 9