Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  “As soon as you settle in you forget yourselves, making me beg for my money.”

  This she said at the end of every month as she went around the rooms pointing fingers and threatening. The tenants, like cockroaches, would not stir. Once, overcome by fury over the non-payment of rent, the widow stood in the corridor and let off a high-pitched lament.

  “This world is a blender,” she said. “Who would have thought that I, the wife of a high court judge, would beg for rent from cockroaches?”

  If she saw a family eat fish or meat or even three proper meals a day, then they had better have her money ready at the end of the month.

  “You’ve been feasting all month. I saw. You can’t live like a cockroach and dine like royalty. I want my money.”

  The tenants called her unfinished house the Palace. Though an ordinary three-bedroomed bungalow, the Palace had over ten rooms. Each was rented by someone or by a family. The widow provided her tenants with a makeshift shelter, walls, a rough floor, and a door. There were also metallic frames in the windows but there were no panes. Some tenants filled the windows with bricks, some, like Kulata, boarded them up and the too-poor covered them with black polythene sheets.

  A family of seven rented what should have been the sitting and dining rooms. They partitioned them with curtains and made a few more rooms. The kitchen and pantry were rented by a couple who behaved like strangers during the day, but the wife was always pregnant and nursing a baby.

  Kulata rented one of the bedrooms.

  The second bedroom was rented by a gaudy single mother, Balinda, who bleached her face. She had five kids who all looked about the same age. When she touched her face, Balinda’s unbleached hands seemed to belong to someone else. The tenants called Balinda Fanta-face, Cola-legs. Every morning, she painted her face, dressed up, and went to sell charcoal in the market.

  The master bedroom, large and self-contained, was rented by a woman who brought home a different man every night and another during the day. She had a proper window with panes and curtains. She opened the window during the day and the curtain fluttered in the wind, like in a real house. The ceiling, en-suite bathroom, and toilet were painted white. Her room was painted a delicate cream. She had two beige sofas and her floor was covered with a brown carpet. She had wired her room with electricity and had a fridge, a TV, and a stereo. The landlady never quarrelled with her over rent. To Suubi, this was the queen’s chamber in the anthill but other tenants called it “the office.”

  A youth, Toofa, rented what should have been the toilet, and a girl who slept during the day because she worked in a bar rented the would-be bathroom. There were pipes and gaping holes in the walls of the bathroom and the toilet. These holes were stuffed with newspaper; otherwise snakes looking for rats would crawl in.

  A shy teenage girl lived in the garage, which faced away from the other rooms because it opened outside. She was kept by an old man who drove a sleek Mercedes. The girl had been in a boarding school when she stole herself away and came to Kampala with the old man who “parked” her in the garage. Apparently, her parents did not know where she was. When the old man came to see her, he hid his Mercedes behind the Palace. He never spent the night. Sometimes the girl was rich, sometimes she was broke, depending on how often the old man visited. In the evening, she sat on a stool at the door and stared at the road. When the Mercedes came, she jumped off the stool and ran into the garage. After parking the car out of view, the old man would go into the garage and lock the door. The women of the Palace would spit.

  The evenings when the man did not come, the girl sat outside sighing. At around eleven at night, she would pick up her stool and lock herself in.

  No one liked her, except Suubi—when she gave her food. The tenants whispered about the girl. Of course, they whispered about each other, but in the case of the shy girl, they whispered in unified anger. That a girl should escape from school, not let her parents know where she was and waste herself away on an old man was appalling. Even the slut allowed herself a piece of prejudice.

  “Now that she has started with an old man, it will always be old men for her.”

  The landlady lived in a three-roomed annex set apart from the Palace.

  5.

  The first year in Kulata’s home was tolerable, only head-bashing when she got in Kulata’s way. To Suubi, life was daytime coming and going, night-time arriving and departing so that life carried her along. It had brought her to Bulange, to Kulata, to Mothers’ Union Nursery School, and now Old Kampala Primary School. She did not resist it. She did not anticipate it. She did not hope. She did not regret. What she did resist were bad thoughts from the past because they hurt for nothing. Life soon taught her to forage for food in the market, especially during school holidays when there was no school lunch. Kulata only fed her at night when she returned home. In the market, women selling pancakes, samosas, bananas, fruit, and buns were most absentminded with their foodstuffs. But mostly her thinness was very useful. Market women would look at her and shake their heads.

  “Does this one eat any food really?”

  And Suubi would look down shyly. The next thing would be: “Here, take this,” and they would pass on a cluster of ndiizi bananas or pancakes or other fruit. She knew not to wear out their kindness by frequenting too much. That was when she stole from the nonsense women who were not moved to kindness by her thinness. She did not steal from men because when they caught you, it did not matter how thin you were, men had no hearts.

  Suubi knew she was going to die, everyone said it, but she had decided that she would not die during the day. She was vigilant not to fall asleep during daytime because then death would overcome her and she imagined that it would hurt. She was prepared to die at night just as her grandmother had. Her grandmother did not feel any pain as she died, Suubi thought, because Suubi did not hear her cry out yet they slept in the same bed. It never crossed Suubi’s mind that dying was not easy.

  Kulata was angry most of the time. It was not clear to Suubi why. She hated everyone. One tenant said: That woman thrives on anger like maggots on shit. But Suubi had heard women whisper. Apparently a man, a long time ago, gave Kulata the anger and then ran off with another woman, though the tenants could not agree whether it was the anger that he ran away from, or a lot of miscarriages. You would think that after the man died and then the woman he ran off with joined him, Kulata would find a smile but no, she carries on being angry.

  And so everyone waited for Suubi to die, including herself. She had not put on any weight. The taller she grew the thinner she looked. Her kneecaps stuck out like tennis balls on two sticks. Her skin was still ashen. Kulata scrutinized Suubi’s body for signs of the onset without shame. Sometimes she asked her if she had diarrhea. When Suubi shook her head, she would suck her teeth in frustration. One day she said, “You know, God’s so evil He could let you live.”

  After a while, when Kulata did not see any deterioration in Suubi’s health, she became direct, “Ye, when will she die?”

  At first, thinking it was a rhetorical question, Suubi did not respond. Kulata tended to ask as they ate supper, after she had enumerated all Suubi’s recent misdemeanors. Suubi kept her attention on food, feeling slightly guilty about still being alive. But one time Kulata kept such a steady gaze on her that Suubi felt obliged to respond.

  “Soon,” she promised—wiping her plate with her forefinger and licking it—as if she had felt death coming. “Probably next month at the latest. I’ll ask Babirye.”

  “Did you say Babirye?”

  “She sleeps in my bed sometimes.”

  Kulata slowly put her plate down. Suubi, now drinking water to fill the empty space in her stomach, did not realize that her aunt had stopped eating.

  “If you ever tell lies again . . .”

  Suubi looked up in surprise, “Which lies?”

  Kulata threw her plate at her and missed. Suubi ran outside. She was confused. A woman had said that Babirye would collect her. Kulata her
self had said that Babirye had better hurry. Why would she then doubt that Babirye slept in her bed?

  The following day Suubi broke one of Kulata’s only two china plates. Ranting, Kulata said, “God, when is she dying?”

  “She’s not: you are.”

  Kulata stopped. Suubi’s eyes were so narrowed they were almost closed. She stood head defiant, chin pointed, eyes not blinking. Her chest rose and fell, breathing deeply as if she were out of breath.

  “You will slim and slim slowly . . .” she caught her breath and then breathed out, “until you’re bones only.”

  “Who told you?” Kulata reached to grab her. Suubi did not move. She pointed her index finger.

  “Hit Suubi on the head again and I’ll cripple your hands first.”

  “What is this?”

  “Babirye. And you dare tell Nnakato that I came . . .”

  Then Suubi sneezed a few times. When she stopped, she saw the shards on the floor and said, “I am sorry about the plate.” She hurried to find a broom to sweep them up. But Kulata remained standing, staring at her.

  After that incident, Kulata never hit Suubi again but she also stopped talking to her. Eventually she stopped feeding her altogether. Often times, Kulata did not let Suubi into her room for the night. Tenants gave Suubi food, especially the slut and the shy girl. In any case, Suubi stared hard at meal times. As soon as a family got ready for a meal, she crept close and pretended not to look at the people eating until a woman would say, “Suubi, why don’t you wash your hands and join us?” and Suubi would start as if she had not been aware of them all along. Instead of saying, “I have just also finished mine,” like polite people do, she would wash her hands and eat with the family. But when Kulata was around, the tenants did not feed her no matter how hard she stared. Instead they asked: “Suubi, your lips are cracked. Have you had anything to eat at all?”

  “Of course,” she would lie, all the while eyeing their plates in despair.

  The nights were uncomfortable. Sometimes tenants let her into their rooms, but they had to let her out very early in the morning so that when Kulata woke up, Suubi was shivering sufficiently outside her door. Suubi was not frightened of being locked out of Kulata’s room. There was no immediate danger to her life, as the outside door that led to the corridor was locked. It also gave her satisfaction that when tenants called Kulata thoroughly evil, it was true. Once in a while a rare moment came when Kulata was kind and fed her or she came looking for her and asked her into her room. These moments were as sudden and as unpredictable as madness. Then Suubi felt pangs of guilt for the things the other tenants said about Kulata. For those few days, Suubi tried to forget the bad past because remembering terrible things hurt in the teeth. Instead she focused on that day as the first day of her life. But then, like temporary insanity, the kind Kulata would vanish. The real Kulata would come home one night, open her door slightly and squeeze through. As Suubi ran to join her: Welcome back, Aunty, Kulata would bang the door and lock it as if she regretted her moments of lapse. Sometimes tenants saw her coming home and told Suubi to run to the door before she got there. Still, Kulata would open the door slightly, squeeze through and close it in Suubi’s face. Suubi slept in the storeroom.

  As years went by and Suubi outgrew the storeroom, Toofa, the youth who rented the toilet, took pity on her and sneaked her into his room. Toofa was kind. He bought her fried cassava chips and chicken or fried Nile perch with chapati. The door to his room could not open properly because his iron bed fit right into the doorway. Toofa hung his clothes on nails hammered into the wall. Magazine pictures of cars and motorcycles made his room seem crowded; the rest of his walls were covered in bloody guts of squashed mosquitoes.

  While other tenants gave Suubi a mat to lie on and a piece of cloth to cover herself, Toofa let her sleep in his bed. When all the tenants had retired, he would insist that they take a bath first and then they ate together with his lantern burning lazily.

  In bed, Toofa asked if he could rub himself on Suubi. At first, Suubi was not sure. But all he did was rub his hardness on her backside. Suubi did not mind as it made something not unpleasant flicker between her legs. Before long, Toofa would rattle like convulsions and make a stinking mess. That was the only problem: the slime and smell. Suubi was eleven.

  Throughout her life at the Palace, Suubi went to school. From Mothers’ Union Nursery School, her forms were forwarded to Old Kampala Primary School. Every morning, she washed her face, wore her uniform, which she hung on a nail in the storeroom, and went to school.

  At school, Suubi was a different person. Her parents were in Britain. She lived with a wicked aunt who stole the money and the things her parents sent. Suubi took random items like video cassettes, shampoo, children’s books, a vase, a makeup kit, all sorts, to school to prove her story: things she stole from shops and hid in the hedge.

  This story of loving parents living in Britain and sending her things was not conjured out of air. It was built on a woman with no name. Once in a while this woman came to school and asked for Suubi. She only came in the morning before break time. Suubi would be writing when the teacher would say, “Suubi, you’ve got a visitor in the staffroom.” And she would give the other pupils a knowing look, a message from my parents again, and sprint to the staffroom. The woman looked just like the women in the Palace, or in the market, or on the roadside, only that she was quite light-skinned. She was not rich-looking at all. But she had really kind eyes and the way they looked at Suubi, she knew that her mother would look at her just like that. The woman always had a bag. When she saw Suubi at the staffroom entrance she would say, “Eh, eh, she’s here!” as if Suubi had worked very hard to be there.

  She would scoop her up and hug her but Suubi had eyes only for the bag. The woman always whispered as if the two of them were thieves, which was intimate and made Suubi quite excited. In the bag she had kabalagala pancakes, ebikyepele, the huge pies stuffed with beans and the mwana akaaba buns all wrapped in newspapers. She always brought Suubi new knickers.

  “I am sure you’ve run out of these,” she would say and Suubi would smile at “running out of knickers” as if she ate them.

  “Don’t let Kulata see them,” the woman would whisper as she stuffed the knickers, a jar of Vaseline, and money inside Suubi’s school bag. It was all furtive, as if the teachers were against it. And then she would say: “Don’t ever tell Kulata about me, my child.” And Suubi shook her head vigorously. The woman would then look at her intently and ask, “Inside you, how do you feel yourself?”

  Suubi would reach inside herself with all the feeling she could muster to feel herself. This would make her eyes roll, feeling, feeling. Finding nothing at all she would smile shyly because the woman’s eyes were so intense. Then she would say, “Fine.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  And Suubi wondered whether she should say that her heart was paining—people got frightened when someone’s heart was unwell—perhaps the woman would give her more money and visit more frequently, but it would be too late because just then the woman would whisper, “OK,” as if she did not entirely believe her but she was prepared to let it go. “Run back to class then.”

  It was all over in a few minutes. Suubi would run back to class, bag bulging, a discreet smile on her face. She would nudge the girl sitting next to her, partially pull out a pair of knickers, then some money, and show her on the sly. “My parents, in London,” she would whisper with such contentment, as if for that tiny moment she would not wish to be anyone else other than herself.

  Suubi did not ask who the woman was or why she was kind to her. Instead she took the woman’s face and on it constructed first her mother, then her father, and then Britain. Every time the woman came, she had brought a message from her parents in England.

  In any case, whenever names of school fees defaulters were read out to be evicted from class, Suubi’s was never among them. She would smile smugly as the dismissed pupils packed their books, left their desks, a
nd walked out of class. It was the only time that someone other than herself was the object of shame and it felt fantastic. And she would swing in her seat and look at the fees defaulters with the satisfaction of “Yee! You were laughing at me that I stink!” She would later explain to the pupils that her parents in Britain sent the tuition fees straight to school, “So that my aunt does not steal it.”

  Looking at Suubi’s glowing school reports, the tenants would say, “Isn’t it just like God to give her plenty of brains?”

  Suubi loved this attention. Sometimes, to harness it, she got her books out and sat on the porch, where everyone would see her, to study. She knew that grown-ups loved the sight of a child working hard at homework. She would only put away her books when the sun went down. Suubi too started to believe that if life allowed her to live she would go far in her studies.

  Only one thing bothered Suubi. Apparently, in class she stank so badly that no one wanted to sit next to her. In the playground, other children ran away from her holding their noses. Sometimes, when girls wanted to evict Suubi from their group one would ask, “Do you smell something?” And everyone would nod except Suubi. Then one girl would say, “I’ll smell you all,” to find the smells. And she smelled every girl’s dress. When she came to Suubi she would smell from afar and say, “Oh oh,” fanning her nose, and they would all run away from her.

  But Suubi never smelled herself. No doubt, the girls were jealous because she came top of the class every term. She got back at them by working hard so that her name would be called on school parade at the end of term. And then Suubi was made to stand at the podium with the teachers, given free exercise books, textbooks, and pencils and the whole school would be made to clap for her.

  One day, Toofa did not come home for three days. Suubi waited and waited, then she went and slept in his bed without him. The third morning, the police came and searched Toofa’s room. Afterwards, they told the tenants that Toofa had been killed during an armed robbery. Suubi was envious that Toofa’s day had come sooner than hers. That night, when everyone had gone to sleep, Suubi again crept into Toofa’s bed. The following morning, she removed the sheets and blanket, rolled them together and put them in Toofa’s bag. She hid the bag in the hedge first. As soon as it got dark, she took the mattress and the bag—she had picked up the lantern as well but then thought, Hmm, can a child really own a lantern? and put it down—to the shy girl in the garage and told her, “I’ve retrieved my bedding from my aunt’s room. Can you keep them for me?”