by Jessica Yu
Deborah turned to her with a smile so confident it could have sold toothpaste. “You!”
“Me?” Gladys yelped, frowning in mock indignation.
“What answer do you want to hear?” said Mike, and everyone laughed.
“Oh my God. Ooh-eeee . . .” Gladys groaned and chuckled in equal amounts. “Because we have even now promised!”
These promises Gladys made! They were like a string of fireworks, with each successful explosion lighting the fuse of the next.
Ah well, she thought. At least now we know the way. At least that.
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Four
Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor from Karamoja
LOST CHILDREN
The 11-year-old boy who reported himself to Old Kampala Police station about two months ago has changed his story, swearing that the latter was the right version. At first, he claimed he had come to Kampala and failed to trace his parents when he went for a short call without informing them. Now he says his father is the late John Bosco Mugerwa, who left Karamoja and settled in Kiboga District . . . He died of cancer when the boy was in Primary three at Kiboga Progressive School.
His stepmother brought him to Kampala two months ago and abandoned him at the New Taxi Park where he stayed for a week before reporting to police.
Children lied. And not just street kids. Little kids lied because they couldn’t remember. Some kids lied because they didn’t want to be sent home. Others lied because they worried that their stories would not arouse enough sympathy. Gladys had interviewed one street boy who had tried to warm himself next to a power box when sleeping on the sidewalk. When he got electrocuted, he told police that other street kids had burned him. He did not tell the truth out of fear that he might be held responsible for damaging public property.
Some street kids lied because other street kids had coached them. Don’t say that you were thrown out by your uncle for misbehavior, the seasoned ones would advise. Tell them that you got lost trying to follow your auntie through the taxi park.
Shame was at the root of many lies. House girls lied about why they ran away from their employers. For some, it was easier to explain that they had not been paid than to reveal that they had also been raped.
Gladys had suspected that there was something wrong with Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor’s original story. He lacked the roughened exterior—and interior, for that matter—of a boy who had survived on the street for years. Given the trauma of his burns, she had refrained from investigating too deeply.
But now it was clear that Junior had lied. And Gladys believed he might still be lying. At the start of the holidays, she had gone to the school to pick up Ezra. There, Junior had come to her. “Auntie, I lied to you before,” he confessed. Through Agnes’s encouragement, no doubt, he had undergone a religious transformation. “Now I am saved, and I can no longer lie. I am going to tell you the truth.”
The story of his accidental separation from his parents had been a fiction, he announced. He didn’t know what had happened to his mother, but he knew his father was dead, of cancer. He had survived on the street not for many years but for only one week! And he knew his tribe.
“I am a Karamojong. I was born in Karamoja, and I left my mother when I was very young.” He had had a Karamojong family name, but it had been changed along the way by a stepmother who did not like it. “I cannot remember it now.”
Gladys strongly suspected this to be another pothole in his story. First of all, the soft, round-featured boy bore little resemblance to the tall, dark, skinny-legged herders of that tribe, with their hidelike skin. Second, Karamojong culture was very strong. There was no way that they would allow one of their sons to take another name.
“How can you say you are Karamojong?” she pressed him.
“It’s true, Auntie Gladys. I am not lying!”
She demanded to know everything now. “Have you been to school before?”
Though he claimed never to have attended school, the other kids had noticed that Junior Victor seemed to be following along with the lessons. Recently he had been discovered helping one of the younger boys with math.
“Yes,” he conceded.
So he did know some English. What conversations had he followed, pretending not to understand?
“What else have you been lying about?”
“Nothing—that is the truth!”
FALSEHOODS AND OMISSIONS and shifting facts were a thorn in Gladys’s side, as they added unnecessary layers of difficulty to her job. It was impossible to provide proper assistance to a child if you did not know the truth. How could the police track parents who did not exist? How could relatives identify a child they had not seen for years if that child had the wrong name? If a child did not reveal that she had been defiled, how could her defiler be brought to justice? How could the girl get tested for pregnancy and HIV?
Then there were the complications of explaining these discrepancies to Gladys’s editors and readers. Yes, I am writing again about that boy I wrote about two months ago. But now he has a different story. And a different name. And we are still not sure if he is telling the truth. Ehhh!
Corrections were necessary but awkward. Having invested sympathy in a child’s plight, her readers might feel a touch annoyed to read that the circumstances differed from what had initially been reported. It was like telling Esther, “I know you are a vegetarian, and you have already eaten the dish I have served you. But I have just learned that it contained meat. Sorry.”
In her corrected profile, she faced the problem of how to identify this boy. At this point, he had so many possible names: Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor and something Karamojong? She chose to avoid the issue of the name entirely. The photo and the revised information would have to do. Maybe there would be just enough truth in this new story for someone to recognize him.
A FEW DAYS after the Saturday Vision column ran, Gladys’s phone rang. It was Officer Rebecca. “Someone has called,” she announced.
“Called for?”
“For . . .” With all the children that came through the station, Rebecca had a hard time keeping track of names. She never forgot their stories, though, and remembered them that way. A boy abandoned by his father at a fish landing site became Fisherman. A baby left in a matatu might become Taxi.
“For Junior.”
A woman had called with information. The boy had a mother. And another name.
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Five
Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor Mananga
It was a couple of weeks before Gladys had everything arranged, but finally she returned to Early Learning School to pick up Junior. The Volvo’s driver today was Osman, Mike’s chatty young nephew, who cautioned that they would need to be quick in order to avoid the worst of the midmorning traffic.
However, Gladys could no more speed through Early Learning School than one could speed down Kampala-Entebbe Road on a Monday morning. As soon as she left the safety of the Volvo, children surrounded her, reaching for her hands, looking up at her with hopeful eyes. She did not have clothes or soap or pocket money for them today, but she did not feel too badly, as the birthday party would be coming up soon.
As Junior followed Gladys to the car, she noticed he was wearing a pair of hard-soled black shoes. They were in decent shape, and the broken laces were knotted at the grommets so that his feet could slip in and out as if they were loafers. “Eh, did you get new shoes?” she asked.
“No, I borrowed them from a friend,” he told her. The plastic slippers he had purchased for himself had fallen apart.
AS ON MANY a Wednesday, Gladys was operating on only a couple hours of sleep, having managed to submit her column and photos to her editor after an eternity of sitting in the dark, cursing first a power outage, then the poor Internet reception. But with Junior beside her in the car, she felt no fatigue, only anticipation.
Junior was quiet. This was not the hopeful boy who had grinned with pride at his new slippers and gaped in w
onder at the blue expanse of Lake Victoria. Sitting in the back, he stared ahead, his look lost somewhere in the space between him and the front seat. Auntie Gladys was taking him somewhere for the day, and he didn’t know where. Perhaps her warning from weeks before was running through his head: The minute I hear you are acting badly, we will come to the school and take you out.
He had been told not to lie. And he had lied.
Now he found himself again in the car, this time going in the opposite direction, away from Entebbe. Why were they taking him back to Kampala?
Gladys did not tell him. Junior could not know that they were taking them to Old Kampala Station to see a woman who claimed to be his mother.
The boy had not seen his mother for years. If Gladys informed him, “We are taking you to see your mother,” the power of suggestion might push him to identify a stranger as kin. She could not take that chance. His reaction must be kept pure.
So if the journey caused the boy apprehension, there was nothing to be done. Perhaps the heat would distract him. For weeks they had had no rain, and the sun had reigned mercilessly in the empty sky.
To make matters worse, the Volvo’s power windows had been failing progressively. At present the back windows were stuck in varying states of mid-descent and the front passenger window was frozen—or melted—shut. Osman’s window was the only one that still worked, but he was afraid to tax the mechanism, lest they end up with a) two closed windows that would not open, effectively turning the front of the car into an oven, or b) three half-open windows that would not close, increasing the risk of robbery. Thieves, particularly street children, were notorious for dashing through traffic and dipping past lowered windows to snatch handbags, mobile phones, food, whatever was within reach.
The jam intensified as they neared the city, as did the heat in the car. The congested highway became a parking lot and then a shopping mall. Vendors streamed between the idling cars, brandishing armfuls of belts, hats, plastic toys, newspapers, bananas, toothpaste, battery-powered fans, and shiny lenticular portraits of Jesus, whose eyes opened and shut when you tilted the plastic card. The hawkers peered into windows and windshields, fishing for eye contact, while drivers and passengers did their best to pretend the hawkers were invisible. On the edge of the road, two Mormon missionaries stood blinking, faces and necks flamingo-pink against their black-and-white suits, nearly Martian in their otherness.
Amid the fray, a one-legged man on crutches rocked his way from vehicle to vehicle. Gladys clucked her tongue and nudged Osman. “Do you have water? Give to him.”
The man, chapped-lipped and grimacing in the heat, accepted the bottle with a gracious nod. Watching him lumber off, Gladys could not help but offer unheard advice. “You can’t keep here begging on the street in such weather. Even with one leg, you have to find work that keeps you out of this sun! The water will go, and you will just have to raise another thousand shillings for another bottle. Because there’s no way you can stand in such terrible heat all day without taking water. You would collapse, surely.”
Her phone chimed. “I really wish I had money or whatever,” she muttered as she reached for it, unable to shake the thought of the one-legged man and his Sisyphean labor.
It was Officer Rebecca. “You said you would be here already.”
“We are coming,” Gladys assured her.
The day had been long in the planning, and Rebecca was worried that everything could be derailed by a late start. This was no time for Uganda time! “My people have been waiting.”
“Just keep them there. We will be there!”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER Gladys clumped into the Family and Child Protection Unit office, pulling Junior and Osman in her wake. “I’m melting!” she bellowed.
“Madam Gladys, nice to see you,” greeted Officer Mugerwa. He inspected Junior. “His face has healed very well!”
It was true. The shocking pink patches on the boy’s cheek and chin had returned to a normal deep brown, and his arm showed only faint outlines of the blisters that had removed half of the skin there. Only the back of his right hand was permanently pink and freckled, like the chest of a sunburned mzungu.
Officer Rebecca quickly dispatched with the small talk. Uncharacteristically, she wore a sleeveless dress in lieu of her uniform, but her manner was all business. “They are just outside,” she said, her tone low and conspiratorial.
Three people stood on the veranda in front of the office, glancing about with the muted nervousness of caged birds. There was a petite woman in a pale-blue blouse with a white lace collar and a silky blue-and-green skirt. She was young, but weariness slackened her pretty face. Two girls stood with her. One looked Junior’s age; the other was only a toddler. Both wore frilly dresses decorated with beads and satin sashes. One had only to glance at their worn shoes to know that these were their best clothes.
“How are you?” Gladys greeted them. The woman dipped her head in response, her eyes fixing on Junior.
Gladys looked at Junior too. The boy glanced at the woman and the girls, but without particular interest. He was accustomed to hanging on the edges of others’ affairs, and assumed that this meeting did not concern him.
Rebecca leaned down toward him, asking, “Who are these people?”
The boy shrugged.
“Do you know them?”
Junior studied the woman. His eyes flicked down at the toddler in the flouncy white-and-purple dress. No lightning bolt struck. Not even a candle.
“No?”
Junior shook his head. “I’ve never seen these people before.”
Gladys reached over to take the older girl’s hand. “Do you know this one?”
Another headshake.
Gladys pulled the woman closer. “How about this lady?”
Junior began to look embarrassed. Clearly he was failing a test. He looked from the mystery woman to the girl to the toddler, rubbing the back of his head with his left hand.
The mystery woman waited patiently, head slightly cocked, hands held behind her back. Her lips were pressed into a firm smile, as though sealing something off behind them. She could not take her eyes off the boy.
The silence of the moment caught Osman’s attention. The young man had not been told anything about the purpose of this visit, and he had not been particularly curious. Now he glanced between Gladys and Rebecca. From what he had witnessed, it was rare for these two bold ladies to be quiet at the same time.
The moment grew awkward, painfully so. Junior fidgeted, raising his brow and drawing air in through his teeth, a perfect pantomime of confusion. Gladys exchanged a glance with Rebecca. Could they have the wrong woman?
But the expression on the woman’s face—she looked at this boy like a mother.
Junior’s head wagged again. “I don’t know them.”
Rebecca leaned in, nudging him once more toward the older girl. “Not even Marcy? You don’t remember Marcy?”
“Marcy?” Junior repeated. He glanced back at Rebecca and then at the girl again. Though he had been looking at her, only now did he see her. A dam burst flooded the fallow fields of his memory. He began to smile, his rising joy held back only by the thinnest tether of disbelief. Could it really be his sister?
Twitching with excitement, Gladys ducked behind Junior to look at Marcy. She peered into that mirroring face with the familiar soft round features, and her smile grew as wide as the boy’s. Gladys spoke into his ear with low, quick words, the way a rider might urge on his horse. “Where have you heard that name from?”
“It’s my sister’s name.”
“Is that your sister?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?” Gladys growled playfully. “Give her a hug!”
Beaming, Junior moved to his sister’s side and wrapped his right arm around her.
“Ah-hahhhh!” Gladys cheered.
Rebecca laughed. “That is real love.”
Transfixed, Osman released a breath he had not realized he was holding.
“What about the mother, do you not recognize her?” Gladys asked Junior. The two siblings dropped their arms and turned to look behind them. “You see her now. Do you know her?”
Again Junior stared at the woman. He did not move toward her; he did not speak. But there was distress beneath his silence. The enormity of the moment seemed to be pressing on him all at once.
This was his mother.
He was looking into her eyes.
He did not recognize her.
“You do not know her?” Gladys said softly. “You do not know your mom?”
Junior did not want to shake his head, but he could not nod. Finally he just dropped his chin.
Tears welled up in his mother’s eyes. She fumbled for her younger daughter’s orange jacket and used its lining as a hankie.
Gladys felt such pity for the mother. How many times had this poor woman dreamed of this reunion, only to have it come to this?
“It has been too long, that’s why he has forgotten,” Rebecca soothed Junior’s mother. “Don’t cry.”
The woman only buried her face deeper into the little jacket. Marcy too began to weep. Even the younger girl, who looked no more than three, whimpered into her mother’s skirt.
“You know that is your mom,” Gladys spoke quietly to Junior. “What are you going to do about it? Just look at her over there.”
Junior looked stricken. Suddenly he pressed his left hand to his eyes and tears began to seep out from the heel of his palm.
They stood apart for several aching moments. Finally, eyes still closed, Junior lifted an arm toward his mother. At the gesture, she exploded in tears and pulled him tight to her body, her delicate face distorted with emotion. She tried to speak, but raw sobs tangled her words. Her mouth gulped for air, as though she were being choked. Then she closed her eyes, surrendering, and threw her head back with an open-mouthed expression of exultation.