Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  Two weeks after Toofa’s death, Suubi came back from school to find his room cleared out. A girl, a netballer playing for Coffee Marketing Board, had moved in.

  One morning, Suubi was told that the shy girl in the garage had had a baby in the night. Suubi had not seen the girl’s stomach swell. The attitude of the women toward the shy girl turned abruptly. They visited her in hospital, took her food, and washed her clothes. When she was discharged, they helped her with the baby. The landlady heaved herself up and went to the bush and collected the kamunye herbs to heal the girl’s stitches, the slut woke up early every morning and helped her in the bathroom, the quiet woman collected herbs for the baby, boiled them in ekyogero, and bathed the baby every day until the stump of the umbilical cord fell off. Suubi heard her instruct the shy girl, “Not just the tit: put the whole areola into his mouth as well or he will suck the skin off.”

  The tenants now called the shy girl Maama Boy. Her baby was Boy.

  Boy cried all night and slept all day. Maama Boy cried with Boy. The old man started to drip, drip in for a few minutes to visit and then he would leave quickly. Maama Boy started crying during the day when Boy was asleep. The landlady was unsympathetic.

  “You chose to grow up too quickly. Get off that stool, find a job, and look after your child. Your man has had children since before you were born. Yours isn’t special to him.”

  Kulata had started ailing—now she was up, working in the market and being evil, now she was down, shivering with malaria, making everyone feel sorry for her. At first, Suubi did not even realize that Kulata was dying because she spent most of the day at school. However, Kulata’s malaria started to come and go too often. One time, it came back with such aggression that Kulata stayed down for a month. When she got up she had lost a lot of weight. The tenants started whispering, What kind of malaria is that, hmm? And then suspicion started to grow around the Palace. That malaria is not alone; there is something else and the suspicion spread into the village. People started to steal furtive glances at Kulata, looking for the symptoms of that something else.

  It was at around that time that the quiet woman said to the other women that she had seen, as Kulata bathed in the communal bathroom, the kisipi, belt-like shingles people get on their skins around their waists when their immunity is weak. Everyone knew that the kisipi was the number one symptom for the new death. The minute you see it, you say goodbye. But as Kulata did not talk to the tenants, no one knew the real truth. Eight months after Kulata started ailing, her visits to the toilets accelerated and the tenants looked at each other with knowing looks. She’s started the sprints! As if it were an athletic event. When her lips ripened like peeled tomatoes everyone said: Eeeh eh there is no hope there anymore!

  But then Kulata would bounce back and carry on with life as if she had not been dying. It did not make sense to Suubi, the way Kulata went back to work in Owino with as much gusto as if she had a future. Every time she saw Kulata feeling better a question was on the tip of her tongue. She wanted to ask: When are you dying? Or to request: If you get there before me could you keep my place warm? But you can’t say things like that to grown-ups, however evil.

  6.

  June 1988

  When death came to collect Suubi, it was ambivalent. It was eight years since she arrived at the Palace and heard that Babirye would collect her but nothing had happened so far. Her shoulder bones still showed through her school uniform. The skull still showed on her face. She still had no cheeks. Even puberty, which normally made girls round out, had not sprayed its sheen on her. Though no one had seen her fall sick, it was presumed that a proper bout of malaria could take her.

  Suubi now spent her nights in the garage, tending Boy. The garage was infested with rats. Because Suubi wore neither shoes nor slippers her feet were so calloused that the crusts had cracked. When she fell asleep, rats fell upon the crusts on the soles of her heels and peeled them off. The rats were excellent surgeons. They breathed caressingly onto the spot they were peeling, deepening her sleep, while they sunk their teeth into the crust. They peeled layers and layers of skin, leaving her feet tender. It was not a problem when they peeled away just the dead skin but sometimes a zealous bite into the tender skin woke her up. Then she kicked at her bedding. The tenants advised her to get a rough stone to scrub all the dead skin off her feet but Suubi worried that if she did not have crusts the rats would bite into her feet.

  Maama Boy insisted that she take a bath both in the morning before going to school, and in the evening before going to bed, but it did not help. The rats kept coming back to her, never biting anyone else in the Palace.

  Suubi had barely grown back the skin on the soles of her feet when it was nibbled again. It was a school day. Her heels were so tender they hurt. On the way to school, she lost heart. Children would laugh at her. Instead, she turned to the walkway that led to Namirembe Cathedral and mounted the steep hill. She thought of going to the grounds on the eastern gate near the cemetery where the view over the city was wider. The day before, in the history lesson, the teacher had made them read a passage by Harold Ingrams describing Kampala’s landscape:

  If you cast your mind back to the days you made mud pies and can imagine happily turning out, with no particular arrangement, a large number of pies from a round not very deep bowl on top of a flattish ground you will have a very fair idea of much of what this lakeside region of Uganda looks like. The social organization of these lakeside people seems to be based on this hill arrangement . . .

  Suubi hoped that standing at the summit of Namirembe Hill would help her work out what mud pies looked like.

  It was ten o’ clock in the morning and Suubi was dodging grown-ups. A child in school uniform loitering outside school was everybody’s business. A grown-up would take her hand, march her straight to the headmistress’s office and say, “Here’s your pupil. I found her truanting,” and the headmistress, to justify the grown-up’s initiative and to encourage him, or her, to do it again, would caress her buttocks with a cane before the do-gooder left.

  As she made her way past the cemetery, Suubi’s eyes caught sight of the kabaka’s lake. She stopped and sighed. The lake seemed so close. It was unbelievable that Kabaka Mwanga had it dug with traditional tools so long ago. Suubi must have lost herself in the view for she did not see the old man step out of the cemetery. He looked at her feet—Suubi never wore shoes to school. She stood on her toes to protect her heels.

  “What happened to your heels, my child?”

  Suubi jumped.

  “The rats nibbled them,” she recovered quickly hoping to deflect the man’s attention away from her truanting.

  “And no one cared to take you to hospital?”

  For some reason, the words “no one cared” made Suubi burst into tears. It was the first time that someone had used the word “care” as if she, Suubi, could be an object of care.

  “No.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They are gone.”

  “Gone, where?”

  “Kaganga.”

  “An orphan: who taught you to talk like that?” But he did not wait for her answer. “God knows what’s happening to all the orphans we’ve made,” he said to himself.

  Suubi wept harder.

  “Come child, come with me. I’ll take you to Bata and get you a pair of shoes. Have you had anything to eat at all?”

  Suubi shook her head and followed the old man. They walked down the hill, past Kayanja Primary School toward Namirembe Road. The old man bought her two fat vegetable samosas from a kiosk on Namirembe Road and they hopped onto a taxi going to the city center.

  The car ride was soothing. Suubi had not been in a car for many years. She sat behind the man, eating her samosas. When she looked up, she noticed a thick fatty ring of scalp that fell above the man’s neck like a collar. He is rich, Suubi thought. Only rich men get their scalp rolled into fatty collars. Maama Boy’s old man had one and he had a Mercedes. Suubi was reassured.
They alighted at Blue Room and went into a Bata store. It smelled of new leather and privilege. A wonderful feeling spread over Suubi at the prospect of getting new shoes and showing them off at school. The man looked around but said he did not like the shoes in that branch.

  “There is a branch on Entebbe Road where I bought my granddaughter’s shoes, let’s try there.”

  It was a mild day, soothingly gray as if lazy rain was coming. Suubi and the old man walked past Nakivubo Stadium, across the canal into the former UTC bus park and then into the taxi park. They caught a taxi bound for Kajansi.

  As familiar landscape disappeared behind her, a nagging doubt crept up Suubi’s back—hmm maybe—but the car ride was so beguiling, the concern of another human so intoxicating and the man’s age so reassuring that she did not allow her doubt to form. They alighted before Kajansi Clay Works, just after the colonial gymnasium with the muscly statue outside.

  It was drizzling in Kajansi.

  As soon as they alighted, the old man started to run. He crossed the road, went down a shrouded path, and disappeared into the eucalyptus woods below. Suubi followed him down the slope presuming that he was running because of the drizzle. When she got to the bottom and heard the cars on Entebbe Road whizz above her head, she stopped.

  “You’ve abducted me. You’re going to rape me.”

  The old man opened his eyes in shock and disbelief.

  “You? My child, look at me. I am an old man. Why would I rape a child?” He stopped and thought. Then he added, “If you’re worried that I’ll rape you, go back to the road. I’ll go to my house and get more money. I’ve only realized I don’t have enough, my house is just after the woods.”

  Suubi turned and walked back toward the road.

  “Wait,” the old man called. “I should give you money for your fare.”

  Suubi noted that the man shouted as if she were deaf. He frantically checked his breast pockets, then patted the hip and the back pockets.

  “Wait here, child,” he screamed. “I’ll run home and bring the money.”

  Suubi started to walk again, heading back. Then she heard another call. When she turned, two men were upon her. She yelped.

  “Girl, stop. Don’t you want your shoes?”

  It was no use screaming. The young men held her.

  “She’s old,” one of them said breathlessly.

  The other threw up his hands in frustration, panting like a sprinter beaten to the line. The old man caught up with them.

  “How do you mean ‘old?’”

  “Those legs, she can’t be less than eleven.” He turned Suubi’s head and saw the hidden straws in her earlobes. “Her ears are pierced as well. Even if she was the right age, she’s blemished.”

  “I didn’t see them. I doubt they’ll see the holes in the ears.”

  “Girl, how old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “I told you. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Have you been with a man?” The old man was not giving up yet.

  Suubi started to shake her head but the young man thundered, “Don’t lie, we’ll find out.”

  “It was Toofa who did it to me all the t–”

  The young man did not wait for her to finish.

  “I knew it as soon as I laid eyes on her.”

  “Besides, she looks half-dead,” the other young man said.

  “We can still try—”

  “You heard the man: he doesn’t do orphans or street kids, he wants a proper child.”

  “Who cares, it’s not like there is a stall selling proper children.”

  Suubi looked at the ground. The smell of grass was overpowering. The ground was wet. It still drizzled. She realized that her last view of the world would be this damp morning, the narrow path in the woods with a pungent smell of grass. Fancy waiting for death and ending up under a sacrificial knife. All the insects she had killed crawled into her mind, mocking.

  Two other men, standing at either end of the path, now joined the young men. They kept their faces averted. The old man stared at Suubi like a starving child forced to throw away a bowl of porridge because a fly had hopped into it.

  “Do we leave her here?”

  “Do you want to take her home?”

  Suubi must have blinked, for when she opened her eyes the young men had vanished. The old man stood petrified. Then Suubi saw cows coming. The old man put his hands on Suubi’s shoulders. The hands shook. His voice rattled.

  “Run, child. Do you see the cows? They belong to a spirit. These are her woods, she hates trespassers. If she catches you, you’re dead.”

  He turned and the bushes swallowed him.

  Suubi recovered and ran as if the soles of her feet had not been nibbled. She did not stop until she broke out of the woods into short thick bushes. She realized that she had run away from Entebbe Road but she could not see the end of the bushes. Luckily, she could still hear the cars. She could only go back where she came from. She looked back into the woods: no witch, no cows came her way. She waited for a while, then ran back.

  As she finally came to Entebbe Road, a woman carrying a basket on her head and a baby on her back came down the slope. She had not seen Suubi yet. Suubi hid. She knew that spirits preferred wearing bland disguises like that of a woman carrying a child on her back. The woman walked past. Suubi expected her to melt into nothingness but she walked on in human form. It did not make sense. Surely if the spirit wanted to see her, it would have?

  After a while, Suubi emerged and ran toward the road. The noise of the cars grew louder. She climbed the incline and the muscle-bound statue outside the colonial gym came into view. As she came to Entebbe Road, she heard from down below, “There’s a girl. Girl, stop.”

  Entebbe Road was too close for Suubi not to try. She ran.

  “Wizards! Abductors!” she cried out. “They want to sacrifice me.”

  People from across the road—some working in their gardens, some doing household chores and others tending roadside stalls—came to her aid. But when they held her, Suubi fought, convinced that they were all part of the spirit world. One of the men calling from below caught up.

  “We only want to talk to her. We’ve caught some suspicious men. Why were you in the woods, girl?”

  Suubi, sure that the spirit had come in multiple guises, screamed and shouted until a woman said, “Give her to me. She’s frightened.”

  Another group of people from the woods came up. They held the old man and two of the young men. Suubi stopped struggling and pointed at the old man.

  “He brought me here. I was on my way to school,” and she told the crowd about the rats, showing them her feet, the old man, the shoes, Bata, and the young men. She told them her age, about the straws in her ears and the woods’ spirit. She left Toofa out. Young men laughed at the idea of the woods belonging to a spirit, someone asked how stupid she was to be led into the woods to buy shoes but the woman holding Suubi rebuked,

  “Would you laugh if she was your child? Just imagine the number of children they’ve abducted so far.”

  “Look how far they brought her,” another woman added, “All the way from Mmengo!”

  “You’re at home thinking that your child is in school studying,” a woman broke the lusolobyo she had been using to cut banana leaves into two and gave the other half to another woman, “While she’s been abducted by these—” and brought it down on the head of one of the men.

  “Wait, people. We need to get off the road.”

  The crowd turned, heading back to the woods, some breaking branches off trees, others picking up wood, some calling others, “They abducted a child. We’ve found her. We’ve got them!”

  The crowd swelled. They came carrying mbukuli clubs, hoes, and sticks. Women were hysterical. They held firewood and stones and hoes. They started stoning the abductors but one of the men cautioned, “Hold on, the police will see us.”

  “If you don’t know what to do with them, hand them over,” a woman crie
d. “That child was on her way to school,” she added, as if going to school was the most moving aspect of Suubi’s story.

  As the crowd turned off the road onto the path that led down into the woods, the old man begged, “Take me to the police.”

  “Police, my womb,” a woman screamed. “We’re taking you back where you brought her.”

  The last part of her sentence must have stirred her for she threw a stone at the old man, the men holding him ducked and the women fell onto the old man, hitting him wherever they could. The men pulled him away, insisting that they would not have women kill a human. One woman, incensed by this statement, squared her shoulders and challenged the men.

  “Do you know the pain of a child, hmm?”

  “We need to interrogate them. They’ll lead us to the priest,” one of the men pleaded.

  “Pregnancy is a promise,” the woman’s voice shook. “The child in your hands is the real thing. The longer we hold onto them the more chances of the police coming along. We’ll catch neither the other two nor the shrine man. And that will be a miscarriage.”

  “Instead, we’ll be arrested for abduction, grievous bodily harm, and intent to murder.”

  “And in two days, these men will be back prowling the streets for other children. Do you know how much they make out of a child?”

  The women must have swayed the crowd because when they pounced on the men again, few people restrained them.