Realizing how fragile the ice she was skating on had become, Padlock tailored her despotic immunities and said, rather plaintively, “Why can’t you believe me?”
“I can walk away, you know that. You are not the only woman in the world.” He stopped there, unwilling to reveal the juicy bounty of his escapade. Padlock’s aunt had given him the blissful attentions of an experienced mistress in her fastidiously scrubbed little house. The relief of not having to explain himself, because she had always known that he would turn to her! Serenity could almost hear himself thanking Nakibuka’s former husband for beating her, thereby opening her eyes to gentler forms of love, his specialty.
Serenity and Nakibuka’s impromptu conversation had taken its own course, meandering and coming back on course to concentrate on them. It was untainted with hurried confessions or forced intimacies. The letter had nestled itself very late in the web like a casual thread, till it was drenched with the saliva of laughter, the pangs of anger and sadness severed by mutual understanding. Mythical mellifluous eyes and felicitous neck and volcanic love were transferred from half-red, halfblack print to the winsome character of the bridal aunt. By the time the volcanic crater of holy juices was explored, both parties were giddy with passion.
“Somebody wants to destroy me,” Padlock said, interrupting Serenity’s sweet lapse of concentration.
“Have you created that many bitter enemies? Or is it Mbaziira the Great’s girlfriend driving an old rival off her patch?”
“I don’t appreciate such crude language.”
“Well, what is so refined about an old woman pining for young blood?”
There came noise of a scuffle and long, sulky squeaks from overburdened bedsprings.
“What are you doing?” Serenity said with alarm. “Give me back that letter now. Don’t eat the evidence. Are you mad?”
Padlock was lucky that Serenity abhorred violence; otherwise she would have suffered a broken jaw. Serenity swallowed his anger and concentrated his thoughts on Nakibuka. His crucifixion on the joyless cross of a monogamous relationship was over; his thirst was not going to be mocked any longer by the sponge of his wife’s vinegary sex. Given a choice between fecundity and beauty, his wife had opted for the former, her aunt for the latter. Two children later, Nakibuka’s body was still taut, supple and undeformed. He now desired her more than ever. He dreamed about her and wanted to be with her. She was the best thing that had happened to him in a very long time.
As mosquitoes terrorized my silent vigil, making me think of retiring, Padlock’s voice pierced the night: “Where did you spend the last three days?”
Silence.
“Tell me where you spent the past days.”
Silence.
“I want to know where you were.”
The passionate whinings of mating dogs drooling with the lust of a nocturnal orgy drew nearer. The rustling of dogs’ feet, accompanied by sharp panting and heavy sighing, passed two houses away. Somewhere in the darkness were about twenty dogs at the mercy of their hormones, watching or mating or drooling. These were dangerous dogs. A few days ago, an orgy of frustrated canine lust had resulted in the mauling of a drunken man, too heavy-legged to flee, who had run into the pack. I didn’t wait for more warning. I entered the house. As I tried to sleep, many long minutes later, shots rang out. The orgy whined dementedly, almost climactically, and then fell silent.
Padlock, I had to admit, was possessed of an intuitive intelligence, but she lacked style. A few days later, she called me to her Command Post and, without looking at me, asked if I happened to know somebody with a typewriter. Apparently, a friend of hers wanted some important documents typed out for her. Expressing fake surprise at being involved in such high-caliber matters, I replied that I knew nobody rich enough to own a typewriter. I hinted that Serenity had access to a typist and a typewriter too. Defeated, she was grabbing at straws to thatch her embarrassment when a customer called. I vamoosed.
Days later, I noticed that somebody had developed the sneaky habit of going through my geometry set and exercise books, and my clothes too. At the same time, I noticed that Loverboy had not appeared in the compound for some time now.
A fortnight later, I discovered that the searches had been extended to my bedding: the mattress was out of place, and had been left like that on a number of occasions. I developed the little habit of pasting old glue and chewing gum residue on my geometry set, on my bed and in the corners of my suitcase.
There are two pits despots naturally fall into: stereotyping and scape-goating. Padlock was no exception. She dropped hints that she knew who the criminal was, which was another way of saying that I was responsible.
Now, if there was something I was raised to despise, it was stealing, especially from parents and relatives, but Padlock did not know this, and she continued suspecting and holding me responsible. Of course, I had stolen Treasure Island, but not for money. The interesting thing was that more and more books went missing, and the more it occurred, the more my property was searched. Many shitters complained, constantly, that their pens, pencils and exercise books had gone missing. The truth was that some shitters lost these things at school, as did many other kids, but because of the stiff punishment that accompanied declarations of such careless losses of property, they took the shortcut and made use of the scapegoat.
Brought up on blood sacrifices, I decided to sacrifice myself in a bid to thank the gods who had saved my skin by keeping my name out of the Miss Singer scandal, at least as far as Serenity was concerned. At the back of my mind, I had the feeling that Serenity suspected me but had decided to ignore me because I had accorded him the opportunity to pursue the object of his desire. In sacrificing myself, I also wanted to thank Padlock’s gods for their role in my victory. At the bottom of all this, I wanted to reclaim my former constituency, the shitters, who still saw me as a cross between a criminal and an outcast of sorts. I wanted to become their hero and weaken Padlock’s hold on them.
Ergo, on two occasions I implicated myself in the improbable pilfering of two pens. Glad that the criminal had been revealed by the working of God’s grace, Padlock gave me twenty guava-switch strokes on each occasion. Every stroke was invested with all the past angers, past frustrations and past suspicions, and if I had not been toughened by my mission, I would have incurred serious damage, but on both occasions I acted tough as nails. I did not cry out; neither did I shed a tear. She swung at sensitive parts, and to divert my mind from the pain, I concentrated on my heroic role, and the tears remained safely in their ducts. I saw the eyes of the shitters widen with admiration, and my face turned cold as stone, veneered with a hero’s insouciant arrogance. I was their hero. It felt good. I was back on top. Convinced by now that I would not shed a tear even if she removed my eye, Padlock let me go. I swaggered like a cop after flooring a troublesome criminal. I swaggered like Amin after winning with a huge knockout in a boxing ring. Padlock could not stomach it. She called me back and cut me thrice with the switch on my right calf. It just made me swagger more. She finally gave up.
Furnished with a heroic criminal, the thief did a better job. I started enjoying the game and my part in it. Padlock’s wallet was raided a number of times. The thief’s sense of timing became spectacular. When Padlock left obvious baits, he humiliated her by ignoring them. He wanted to hunt his prey and work for his booty. He surely knew that only gods expected and accepted sacrifices. When Padlock hid under the bed in a bid to nab him, he never showed up. The house swelled with the pungent arrogance of a clever raider and the bad blood of his frustrated tracker. As if to provoke his tracker even more, the thief extended his finger to “tooth money,” sometimes called “rat money.”
When one uprooted a milk tooth, after many threats and gruff shakings by Padlock’s rough fingers, one deposited the bloodied thing behind the cupboard for the “rat” to find and replace with hard cash. It was that money that the thief started targeting. Padlock was especially annoyed because she had, on two occa
sions, used silk thread and yanked teeth with such force that the bleeding was so heavy, everyone feared she had cut into the gum. With blood guilt on her mind, she went berserk when she discovered that the rat money had been stolen. In respect for tradition, she had to replace the stolen money on both occasions. In addition to that, she observed that both “robberies” were committed while I was away. So somebody had surely been insulting her intelligence! Ergo, the property of the shitters got raided.
On the day of judgment, night prayers were said as usual and the roof was stained by Padlock’s last-hymn tremolos. Supper was just minutes away. This time, though, two shitters were not served groundnut soup, which was appetizingly thick with dry fish. The aroma filled the house and tickled our sharp appetites. A schooled sadist, Padlock had taken care to buy quality fish and quality groundnuts and had prepared the food in a quality banana-leaf-thatched pot to heighten the flavor. We ate our food inches away from the condemned shitters, their foreheads gleaming with beads of guilty sweat, their eyes red with fear. We washed our dirty fingers with water poured and trapped by the two criminals in small bidet-like plastic basins such as I would, years later, find in a foreign brothel, and which I would always associate with smut, soap, fish smells and poisoned meals. Serenity, high in his chair like Pontius Pilate, washed his fingers absentmindedly, looking neither at the block of blue soap proffered nor at the trembling shitter making the offering. Godot, encased in red, tired-looking hard covers, was the only being on his mind. And, oh, the ever so sunny aunty of the woman herding his brood.
Determined to register my protest, and to sabotage Padlock’s sense and system of justice, I was the first to rise. An undercurrent of disgust coursed through me, making me resent the calculated sadism of official justice. Maybe I empathized too much with the subversive element. The truth remained that I had played a part in the drama which had culminated in this, and I had enjoyed the exploits of the duo. I was troubled by the jangling question of whether I was responsible for their defense. Padlock called me back.
She reached under the green sofa and removed three finger-thick guava switches and declared, rather pompously, that she had caught the thieves who had been terrorizing the household. The duo was ordered to lie down a foot from each other. Serenity, who had so far said nothing, and in the spirit of despotic harmony was not supposed to say anything, disappeared behind the red shroud of Godot. Padlock was all over the shitters like a hungry eagle terrorizing a brood of hens. In a wan attempt to resurrect Big Brother’s machismo, which had saved them on the two earlier occasions, the duo turned their glazed eyes to their hero; but my act was too surreal to replicate, and at their age their hero too would have failed to call forth any macho wonders. The orgy of howling, drooling, prancing dogs cracked the confines of nocturnal mating scenery and invaded the house. The resultant mayhem of canine vociferation was punctuated by pleas for clemency, promises never to sin again and prayers seeking deliverance from the notorious St. Jude Thaddeus, savior of desperate cases. One of the shitters even went so far as to call upon the mighty Serenity, probably in the name of Godot, to intervene; but he only got cut more viciously as Padlock made it clear that despotic or non-despotic intervention was out of the question.
General Idi Amin had told us to fight hard and come back each time we fell. And his rise to power had proved that the majority of people needed a savior, somebody to save them from themselves and their fears before they could get in shape to fight. There had to be giants, heroes, like me to save the helpless. It struck me how easy it was to sit back, watch and put your hands hopelessly in the air. Everybody had put theirs in the air the day Serenity hammered me, maybe because they never listened to the general as I did. Maybe it was because they had never drunk from the well of heroism and self-sacrifice Grandpa had shown me. Maybe it was because they had never woken up at midnight to go with Grandma and deliver a baby five kilometers away. I wanted to rise above them and take the blows. I asked myself what General Amin would have done in this situation. He would have intervened to save the shitters, or at least distracted Padlock to give the victims a breather.
Moreover, General Amin was fond of sending messages and warnings to his enemies. He warned imperialists, colonialists, racists and Zionists that their time was over. It was high time somebody sent a message to Padlock that overkill was not the baptismal name of corporal punishment. Above all, for the first time since my arrival in the city, it struck me that I was as much a parent to the shitters as the original providers of sperm and eggs. I, in fact, knew more about these children than the despots. In cleaning them, washing them, helping them with homework, bribing and blackmailing them, I had got close to them. I had grown fond of them.
Anyway, wasn’t it known that I was a co-parent? Wasn’t it known that I was the third force in this dictatorship? Wasn’t it known that I regarded Serenity as my elder brother, and Padlock as his mean-hearted wife who had to be harassed, corrected and damned if she was too crooked to change?
“I am the one who gave them the money,” I suddenly said.
“What?” Serenity prodded, gasped.
“I gave them the money.”
“They confessed to the crime,” Padlock said coldly after giving the duo a few more hard strokes.
I was caught off guard. I hadn’t thought of every despot’s stock-in-trade: confessions.
“Do you mean to say that you stole the money and gave it to them?” Padlock asked with great fury.
Heroism had tripped itself on its coattails. “No.”
Now the more squeamish of the duo looked alarmed. Padlock smelled sabotage and wanted to demonstrate that heroism was synonymous with scars and a bruised ego. She cut me across the back, and an innocent shitter got knocked down as Padlock turned, clumsily, like a buffalo speared through the ass.
I jumped and sat down again. I got four more cuts. It hurt, but I couldn’t cry out: I had my image to uphold. Another four switches came my way, this time on the legs. I bit back canine howls, thinking about the shitters. I momentarily feared I had wet my pants, but it was not so. I smiled. Once again I had denied her victory. Infuriated by the unsatisfactory sighs of whacked air, Padlock stretched her hand to deliver solid fire to my back, but something popped and glass poured down. She had struck the electric bulb and its shade. Serenity was infuriated: he hated all interruption of his reading.
“Enough of this,” he barked without looking up. “Nakibuka, enough.”
“Who?” Padlock turned to Serenity with the stick still held high in the air.
“What?” Serenity mumbled. He had given himself away. I had heard him; so had his wife.
The stick fell from Padlock’s hand. The shitters could claim it was a miracle performed by St. Jude Thaddeus. A cloud of silence had descended on the house. Padlock sent everyone to bed, and miracle of miracles, she did not even ask the shitters to thank her for disciplining them.
I slept like a log that night. I had acquired two loyal followers.
I missed Uncle Kawayida very much. He never visited us anymore. Sometimes he met Serenity at his office and returned home without coming over. He had bought himself a pickup van in the heat of the Indian exodus and was raising turkeys. I knew that only a Muhammad Ali fight could lure him to our home, but Ali had not fought anybody worthwhile for some time, and he was yet to appear on the stinking Toshiba. I did not like Ali, because he was more arrogant than I ever wanted to be and he openly boasted about his victories. I preferred that others sing my praises. However, I would have forgiven him everything if any of his fights occasioned a visit from Uncle Kawayida. The fact that my uncle stayed away was ample proof that the rivalry between his wife and Padlock was still strong. I was worried about him and his family. His town lay along the route to where anti-Amin guerrillas, under the leadership of the former dictator Obote, were operating along the Uganda-Tanzania border. Amin had successfully repelled one guerrilla incursion, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers, but one never knew what would happen ne
xt. What if the guerrillas crossed the border and took over Uncle’s area?
When I thought about it, the idea of guerrilla warfare impressed me. I liked the risk, the odds, the guts and the sticking of pins into a despot’s backside. I realized that what I was doing to Padlock was nothing short of guerrilla activity. It was not terrorism, as I had once called it; since my village days, I had associated that word with dead dogs and Muslim converts living in fear of incurable penis ulcers. “Guerrilla warfare” sounded better.
I decided to raid Padlock’s Command Post and incapacitate her sewing machine. To begin with, I had never benefitted from the machine: my clothes always got last priority, even if I reported first. I also wanted to bring Serenity into the equation: he was getting off too easily for my liking. If the raid succeeded, I knew that he would be the one to buy the spare parts for the Singer. I also knew that the Singer agent had already gone back to Bombay, Nairobi or London, which meant that Serenity would have to import the parts. This time I was going to reap revenge plus a bit of money too, but basically I wanted Padlock to realize that brute force had its glaring limits. Moreover, I could not stand the way the despots moaned about Amin and his rule, the firing squads, the rising prices, the instability of the economy and the brutality of some soldiers.
Elsewhere, events were taking place that linked me with a woman whose house I would later occupy, whose keyhole I would peep through in a bid to assuage sex hormones gone mad and whose fatherless children I would try to parent. As I penetrated the Command Post, General Amin’s men were penetrating the woman’s house and whisking her off to an unknown destination.
I knocked a tin over in the darkness, held my breath and proceeded. The Command Post smelled of cotton cloth, Singer lubricant, wood and trapped nocturnal heat. In the darkness, the sewing machine resembled a medieval instrument of torture on which sinners were punished by sadistic clergymen and their followers for holy purposes. A perverse joy kicked in my breast and offset the fear in my bones. “She is not your real mother,” I could almost hear Lusanani say in the darkness, her breath tickling my ear. What was she doing now? Would I ever be alone with her in the darkness? It would be wonderful to raid the secret of her petticoats right here, in Padlock’s holy of holies.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 19