“I’ll give it to Grandfather.”
That was when the woman stopped and said, “Don’t you dare be little Yobu, Nnakato’s son.”
It took Paulo a moment to remember that Ruth was Nnakato. He shook his head.
“My name’s Paulo Kalema, I mean Kalemanzira, and yes Ruth is my mother. But my name was Nsobya before I changed it to Kalemanzira.”
For a long time, Magda stared at Paulo as if he were an apparition. Then she said, “I need to sit down, bring me a mat.”
Kalema went inside the house and brought a mat. He laid it on the verandah. Magda bent painfully, both hands reaching for the floor. After she sat down she repeated counting on her fingers, “You’re Nnakato’s son, who was named Nsobya but is now called Kalemanzira?”
“Yes. Well, Kalema.” Magda stopped. She looked away from Paulo and made clicking noises in her throat.
“Bring me a gourd of water, Kalema. My throat is parched.”
“We only have glasses,” Paulo said.
Again Magda stared at him. Then she asked, “Do those words mean anything to you, Kalema—I mean, bring me a gourd?”
“It’s the old way of asking for a drink.” Paulo was now getting uncomfortable.
“Get me a glass of water then.”
When he brought the water, Magda muttered something under her breath and drank. Her old throat trembled as she swallowed noisily. As she put the glass down, Paulo noticed that her hands were quivering. She took a breath and said, “Glasses rob water of taste.”
“Grandmother does not smoke the pot anyway,” Paulo smiled.
“No, Faisi would not do such a thing. Now tell me, Kalema, has anyone ever told you about Magda?”
“Magda who is also Bweeza of Nakaseke,” Paulo laughed in awe. “That’s where I was born.”
Bweeza clapped her hands happily. “Do they call me by both names? How you’ve grown, Yobu!”
“Yobu?”
“Yes, Yobu. That’s what Luusi named you, after her brother. Is she fine, your mother?”
“She’s fine.”
“Married?”
“Not yet.”
“Come here. First, I am going to carry you on my back, then sit you on my lap.” But she hugged him. “They kept you away from me. Me, in whose hands you dropped?”
Paulo grinned.
“It is good that my children know both my names but that Magdalene is what your Christian family wanted. My real name is Bweeza.”
“Then I’ll call you Jjajja Bweeza. I am not Christian.”
“Ah aha,” Magda exclaimed. “Come here again.” She held out her hands. Then she whispered, “I prepared your first bath: I included lweeza for good luck.” She said this as if it were the reason Paulo was of no religious inclination. She kept stealing glances at him as if she did not believe he was real. Finally she said, “You know, Kalema? You belong to your mother’s family in ways you might never know. This is why I am angry that they’re not allowing daughters’ children at the family reunion.”
“Family reunion?”
“The letter I gave you is an invitation for Kanani. We are organizing a meeting for the wider family to come together.” Magda’s eyes lit up. “We’re going home, back to the base.” Now she sighed. “But Kanani’s too mad to attend. I wish you could come though. I am convinced that you’re significant.”
“I am a daughter’s son.”
“That is where I get impatient with tradition. If a man cannot be sure of his sons except by the word of a woman, then a daughter’s children are more reliable. Do you see how tradition shoots itself?”
In a way, Bweeza was as fanatical as his grandparents.
Magda was keen to leave before Kanani and Faisi returned. Paulo drove her back to her home and she told him the story of his birth along the way. When they reached Nakaseke Town, she asked him to stop the car while she went to the market.
The main road in Nakaseke was still murram because it only led to peasant towns that had no commercial traffic. A handful of brick blocks had sprung up on either side of the road. But between the new blocks, old mud structures still clung onto life. Yet the new buildings seemed out of place the way rich people are when they visit poor relatives. Paradoxically, the mud structures were alive with activity—people were going in and out of the shops making a lot of noise. They sold everything from boiled maize, boiled eggs, matchboxes, and pancakes to cooking oil and kerosene measured by a funnel, bar soap cut into pieces, gourds, and calabashes. Ropes and traditionally smoked coffee beans in fiber sachets hung down the doors. Maama Paatu’s Hare Saloon, where women had their hair straightened or braided, threatened to collapse with activity. All sorts of synthetic hair weaves and second-hand clothes hung on nails or metallic hangers by the door. Women, some waiting for their turn, some scrutinizing second-hand clothes, clogged the doorway. Next to Maama Paatu’s salon, loud music boomed from an impossibly tiny strip of a shop selling audio- and videocassettes.
The new shops had an ostentatious air about them as if saying to Nakaseke, modernity has arrived can’t you see? Here, hardware merchandise including cement, nails, paint, and bolts were sold beside skin lotion, toilet soap, combs, make-up, bleaching creams, and other skincare products. One shop sold plasticware in all sorts of bright colors but on the shelves, lanterns and wax candles sat next to exercise books, biscuits, scones, and kitenge garments. Even Michelle’s Beauty Salon—which had proper sinks, wall mirrors, padded chairs, and modern driers—was empty. Paulo smiled at the war between the new and the old. He wondered how long Nakaseke’s loyalty would hold out against the lure of modernity.
At the end of the block on the right was the market, but Paulo could not see Bweeza anywhere. The market stalls were made out of sticks and planks topped with straw shelters. The stalls heaved under huge jackfruit, pawpaw, uju, and other varieties of vegetables and fruit. One stall had just Bwaise yams. The last stall sold protein: sacks and sacks of dried nswa—flying termites—by the mugful. It also had powdered groundnuts and a few molding dry fish. Paulo looked around for a butcher: there was none, not even pork. In the absence of meat, he thought, Nakaseke needs its nswa.
Bweeza reappeared. But instead of shopping, she came back with friends. She introduced Paulo to them. Those going in the same direction as she was, she offered a lift. “Squeeze in. We don’t leave each other by the roadside, do we?” Then she told them about Paulo. “You remember my girl Luusi who had a baby here in the 70s? This is the boy. Yes, so grown and driving me in his own car. Fruits of a long life, what can I say?”
Paulo asked Bweeza to help him choose good Bwaise yams to take home but she scoffed, “Why would you want these anemic ones in the market when I have proper yams in my swamp?”
“City people,” a woman in the car smiled. “They can’t tell the difference.”
When they arrived at her house, Magda quickly got out of the car, grabbed a hoe, and asked two girls to get the large baskets and follow her. They disappeared behind the house. Paulo, now on his own, looked around the compound. He could not believe that his life started here. Magda’s huge house was old. It might have been affluent in the 50s and 60s but with age and disrepair, it looked decrepit. She lived with three grandchildren, which made the house look like a vast nest when the birds have flown. An old Bedford lorry with a skinny steering wheel in a black rounded cabin sat on its hinges next to a tank. Its bonnet was a thick nose ridge. Its flared nostrils were covered with fins like a radiator and the wood on the back had rotted and fallen off.
Magda and the girls came back carrying baskets full of yams on their heads. They rested them outside the kitchen and Magda peeled the clay soil off the yams with the back of a knife. Then she washed the rest of the soil off and cut off the tendrils. She divided the yams into three heaps and packed them in bags. She instructed Paulo that one bag should go to each of the twins’ houses and one to her brother Kanani. “But don’t tell your grandparents that I sent the yams,” she said, “Or they might not eat the
m.” Magda filled the rest of the boot with all sorts of fruit for Paulo.
Paulo felt ashamed. Magda had cared for Ruth through a tough time but his mother had never bothered to return or taken him to visit her. He wondered at Magda: she loved people regardless of whether they loved her back. To compensate for Ruth’s oversight, he promised to come back soon. Before he left, Magda made Paulo promise that he would make sure that Kanani read the letter.
When he opened the letter, Kanani was instantly suspicious. Firstly, it was written in Luganda. Secondly, it named four generations of his grandfathers. He put it down and looked at Paulo.
“Who brought it?”
“Someone slipped it under the door.”
“Why don’t you read it first and see what it’s saying?” Faisi suggested.
The letter named Kanani as the head of a branch of their clan. Then it invited him to an elders’ council to arrange a family reunion of Kintu Kidda’s descendants. The council would determine the nature of the reunion. Dates and venues of the council’s meetings were provided.
Kanani threw the letter on the table. He could not believe the tenacity of the clan. Decades after cutting himself off, they still clung onto him. It was preposterous that he was expected to take part in organizing a heathen function. Faisi picked up the letter and read it. First, she asked Kanani to join her in prayer. Then she said, “You know, Kanani, God works in mysterious ways. This letter is a calling in disguise.”
“How?”
“I see a multitude of relations hungering for salvation. I see you well placed as a clan elder, as God’s chosen, to feed this multitude.”
“But you know that in his hometown, among his relations, a prophet is without honor,” Kanani argued.
“Now you’re being a Jonah,” Faisi stood up impatiently. “Remember God will send a whale and you’ll still go.”
In spite of Faisi’s compelling argument, she was not a blood Kintu. Kanani knew the family curse. Maybe he should have warned the twins about the evil inheritance but then to tell the twins was to suggest that he did not trust God to take care of the family. In God, the curse is obsolete, Kanani told himself. Nonetheless, doubt plagued him. Had God withdrawn his protection? Was Paulo a coincidence? Kanani was ashamed of himself. How could he think that his grandson was anything but just his grandson?
He sighed.
Sometimes he had a distinct feeling that he and his family were naked, without God’s protection. That was why he was not keen on a head-on collision with the family curse.
As he sat down on their bed, Kanani mourned the fire that once burned in him. As a young man, he would have thrown himself into this quest without question. He would have gone to the reunion and he would have torn down the Devil’s bastions. Now, at seventy-four years of age, all he wanted was to work on his place in heaven. It did not matter whether his crown was without the stars of people he had led to heaven anymore: as long as he was inside when the pearly gates closed.
Kanani deferred the decision. The family reunion was still seven weeks away.
BOOK FOUR
ISAAC NEWTON KINTU
1.
BANDA, KAMPALA
Monday, January 5, 2004
It is ten o’ clock at night. In Mulago Hospital, the door of the mortuary opens again. It has to be a new corpse—either rich or unknown. The attendant has to have been paid a lot of money to come to the gwanika at this time of the night for a mere collection. In any case, poor people, when their loved one dies in the hospital, ask for the body not to be brought to the mortuary. Checking into Mulago Hospital’s mortuary is like checking into the Hilton Hotel. The bill would kill the loved ones. Poor people take their loved one home, buy a needle and syringe, and inject their dead with paraffin so that they don’t stink of anything worse than kerosene before burial.
It is a collection! The attendant is talkative; they’ve given him good money. He is with a woman, her teenage son, and older daughter. These three are confused. They don’t know when their loved one—father and husband—died, how he died or even whether he is dead at all. He disappeared a week ago. They are checking to see whether he died somewhere and has been brought here. The attendant goes to the extreme end of the room on the right where the oldest dead are stored. The shutter goes up, the trays slide out, and it starts all over again.
“Come and see,” the attendant calls.
“Stay right there,” the woman says to her children. They are strong, her children, no flinching.
She walks to where the attendant is. He stands at the head of a corpse while the woman stands on his right. He lifts the head of the first corpse several inches off the tray. The body rises like a log.
“This one?”
The woman shakes her head.
The man lets go and the body falls, ddu like the stump of a banana tree.
“This one? No?” Ddu. “This one?” Ba ddu. He works fast; the refrigerator is huge and there are many bodies to go through.
“Look carefully,” he says to the woman. “The dead change looks.”
“Ours has a beard and he is not so old,” the woman says unhelpfully.
There is a knowing look on the face of the attendant, a cynical smile almost, as if he knows that this loved one disappeared with a new loved one, but he is not going to throw away good money by telling these people. They can enjoy their denial if they want but it will cost them.
He comes to today’s corpses. He looks at Kamu’s tag and laughs at the day-shift attendant’s sense of humor.
“Kamu Kamugye?”
The family smiles. They don’t even bother to shake their heads.
“He was killed at Bwaise this morning. Mob-justice. Take a look, he might have been mislabeled,” the attendant insists.
“Ours has a beard!” The woman is indignant and her children have lost their sense of humor at the insinuation that their loved one could be the thief.
“He is not here,” the attendant says as he pushes back the last tray. The family is visibly relieved. The attendant pulls off his gloves and apron, throws them in a bin, and locks the door. Kamu waits.
It had been forty-four hours since Isaac last slept but sleep was beyond him. He sat on Nnayiga’s dressing-table stool, his back against the mirror. As he turned, he caught sight of her wig hanging on the top right edge of the mirror frame. Spasms gripped him. He picked up a coat-hanger and prodded the wig until it came unhooked. It fell with a light thud, like a dead pigeon. Nausea rose in his throat. He hoped the hair was synthetic. He spasmed again as he used the hook of the hanger to lift the wig off the floor. He dropped it into a plastic carrier-bag, tied the bag, and rolled it tight. He then slipped it under the dressing table where Nnayiga’s sisters would not find it. He would bury the wig later. Unable to contain himself any longer, he ran to the en-suite bathroom and retched.
The state of his bedroom mirrored the turmoil in Isaac’s mind. The mahogany double bed, disconnected from its side drawers, stood upright on its headrest. Turned like that, the back of the bed looked coarse, like the underbelly of a dead dog. Nothing on the bed had been removed. It had been turned over—mattress, sheets, and blanket. He had found out that morning that tradition demanded that the marital bed be flipped on the death of a spouse, until after burial. Isaac shook his head. What did they think: that he would climb on the bed and masturbate while his wife lay stretched out in the sitting room? He stepped out of the bedroom and locked the door.
The corridor was dark. He must remember to buy a bulb tomorrow. He opened the door to the first spare bedroom on the right: it was crammed with people he did not recognize. He apologized and closed the door. He went to the other spare bedroom but it was occupied by Nnayiga’s sisters. Isaac smiled but before they smiled back he had closed the door. He checked Kizza’s bedroom door; it was locked. Everything that could be stolen had been moved in there. Most mourners mean well but some have light fingers.
Isaac came through the door that opened onto the sitting room and c
aught sight of the coffin. A strong, sappy odor hung in the air, which meant that the timber used to make the coffin was immature. Too much business for coffin-makers meant there was no time to wait for the timber to dry, Isaac thought bitterly. He was perturbed by the coffin’s shape. The two ends were too narrow, as if Nnayiga’s legs had been tied together at one end and at the other her head had no room to turn.
“The womb rattles with memory.”
Isaac wrinkled his nose at his mother-in-law’s theatrics. Where do women learn the art of mourning?
“You’ve got to eat something, Mother,” someone called to the woman. “Here’s a mug of porridge: pour it down your throat then cry all you want.”
When Isaac walked into the room, all the noise died. The coffin lay on the floor in the middle of the room. It was surrounded by women dressed in busuuti and a few in kitenge prints. They had covered their lower bodies and sat on the floor out of respect for the dead. Furniture had been removed to make room. Nnayiga’s mother, flanked by her sisters and friends, was the chief mourner. All soothing energies—shaking of heads, melting eyes, and stories of other bereaved mothers—were directed at her. Isaac had heard her tell about the omens—her eyelid had twitched all week and an owl had hooted outside her house two nights in a row.
“A child’s passing is like no other,” an elderly woman had soothed.
Isaac knelt before the coffin and peered through the glass above Nnayiga’s face. He ran his hand across it.
“Death titivated her, didn’t he?” Nnayiga’s mother asked, as if reading Isaac’s mind.
“Hmm,” he acknowledged her, stood up and walked out. He walked to the end of the corridor into the garage. Nnayiga’s wheelchair, pushed into a corner, looked like wasted effort. Women, mostly elderly, slept along the walls of the garage. Isaac walked through the double doors, out into the compound.
Outside, the number of mourners that had come for the vigil took Isaac by surprise. The compound heaved. In the middle of the yard was a makeshift tent, with hissing bright pressure lamps at its four corners. Close to the garage, Isaac’s mother sat with a group of women from the market where she worked. At the far end, clan elders and his father’s relatives camped. Away from the tent was the funeral hearth surrounded by teenagers, mostly Isaac’s cousins—for them, the funeral was a sleepover. Small groups of young men in thick jackets and women wrapped in colorful kangas were everywhere. Elderly men in mackintoshes sat together in more comfortable chairs under the tent talking in low tones or dozing. The hymn sung by the choir from Nnayiga’s church wobbled like a cassette on fading batteries. Closer to the gate was the MTN camp—Isaac’s colleagues were drinking.
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