Mukasa-Oyet wore his vulnerability like a freshly circumcised coward – too honestly, and with too little pride.
His soul, it turned out, contained not enough of the impassive, immovable man to whom we had – over the few years of his young family’s tenancy in our little township – grown accustomed.
And on this particular evening, it did seem like some final, climaxing blow in a series of several such had eventually been dealt, so that an essential part of the man – his delicate courage, or his stubborn hope perhaps – had begun to leak-out through a small crack in his punctured soul.
Long-legged and bony of a frame, Oyet leaned against the soot-coated planks of the dank, smoky shebeen – and wept long and loud. Whether he wept for himself, or for his wife and young daughter – or perhaps for that nameless, faceless man who’d come to dwell inside Mukasa’s skin in those final few months – we’d never know.
Later than night, an incident was to follow whose ripples would reach beyond the harrowing tragedy that befell one small family – and its memory would scare us for life – haunting our nights for years on end.
On the morning following the horror – the news tiptoed inside our homes and roused the township quietly. We woke in silence, donned our clothes with heavyhearted dread, and followed each other obediently to the scene of sorrow.
And even as we shivered next to each other in that early dawn, bearing witness to the ceremony of grief – we secretly nursed the wounds of several, solemn questions: Had we overestimated the poor man? Had we overrated his resolve? Had we – in that deluge of blind optimism which afflicts all men – seen in him a tenacity that was but a mask for the suffering beneath? Or had we merely been unwilling to see the truth?
We never would know.
Mukasa had moved into Kifumbira with his young wife two years back, and it had taken them nearly as long to have their first baby – a girl, from what we gathered initially. So overcome with pride was Oyet, that from the day the child’s birth became public knowledge, he strutted around our little chaotic community, with an almost pompous air about him.
He began navigating the narrow footways of the township with – as a jocular character named Kyakabaale was heard to say – a pride and braggadocio fit for seven egos.
‘I am a man now. They won’t laugh at me anymore,’Oyet boasted, and often.
When, therefore, on that fateful day, he had reported to his drinking-haunt with more grief than words penciled on the flat-nosed face, the other men had nodded comprehendingly – and left the sorrowing man to his solitude.
A few feet away in the sheeben – left of where Mukasa sat sobbing – the dim flame of a kerosene-lamp flickered pungently, and its light rippled over a circle of low-talking men sucking thirstily at a dozen crooked wooden straws whose ends speared into a rotund, centrally-stationed pot.
One man, a drinker of redoubtable constancy, scratched under his bristly chin with roughened fingers; while another cleared his throat noisily, turned, and spat onto the ground – aiming for the shallow craters of absent floor where the cement had flaked and eventually peeled away.He missed, and a thick bob of phlegm congealed on an island of grey cement.
The other men turned and watched his discomfort with bored expressions.
‘Where is Mukaaka?’ – one of the men, another unfailing regular, suddenly croaked.
‘Outside.’
‘Outside where?’
‘Outside!’
‘Tell her we need the pot refilled …’
‘Musajja, you tell her yourself!’
A tense silence emerged.
Somewhere in the neighborhood, a loud whack was heard as one solid object bounced off another. There was a stampede of feet, and a dog yelped in agony.
Then all grew quiet again.
The silent tension returned as imperceptibly as it had vanished – a muscular spasm inside the skin of society. The man who’d spat earlier extended his foot and rubbed down his phlegm with the convex sole of a thick tire-sandal. The tension in the room ebbed away with the sound of the scraping lugabire. The man withdrew his foot.
Tension gone – only silence remained.
‘Mukaaka?’
It was the croaking voice, again.
‘Woman!’
No response.
‘Where is that old witch?’
Silence.
‘I’m going out to get her.’
Silence.
The man got up and went out to get her. On his way, he tripped on someone’s extended foot and almost fell. He insulted a nearby stool, and continued his way.
The remaining men stirred the pot with their straws.
‘Kikonkome is right. That woman must be a witch.’
‘Why?’
‘How else does she keep us coming here every evening?’
‘I don’t come here every evening.’
‘Of course not. You come every morning, UNTIL evening.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Why don’t you show me how?’
Long jeer.
One of the quieter men clutched his straw and took a long, audible sip. The others, in unspoken solidarity, joined him.
The circle was agreeing to its shared relationship with stupidity – or so it seemed.
‘Where is Oyet?’
‘He left.’
‘Mukasa left?’
‘He left.’
‘When did he leave?’
‘At six. His wife is having a baby.’
‘A baby? Wasn’t that last month?’
‘She’s having another one …’
‘The same wife?’
‘I’m not sure …’
‘What do you mean you’re not sure?’
‘Because a stupid question demands a similar answer.’
The questioner, realizing the direction things were taking, began to swell like an inflated frog.He turned on the responder, hands quivering like small earthquakes.But before he could strike, a guttural voice spoke up –
‘No, I think I saw Oyet around. He didn’t leave.’
Five wooly heads with bleary eyes looked around, lazily.The rest were half or fully asleep.
‘There he is. In that corner!’
The light was bad, so the ten wakeful eyes squinted in focus.
‘He is the one.’
‘No he isn’t. That is Isabirye.’
‘That’s Oyet. I know his red shirt with a black star on the back.’
The eyes tried to focus on the star.
All failed.
‘That is a star fish,’ volunteered a learned voice.
‘No, I think it’s a hexagon.’
All heads turned to the speaker.
‘Are you stupid?’ – one of the heads inquired, genuinely concerned.
‘On second thought, it’s actually a dodecagon.’
‘I said, are you stupid?’
‘You man, who are you calling stupid?’
‘Okay, are you foolish?’
‘Tumwebaze, I’m warning you …’
‘I only asked a question.’
‘Why are you calling me stupid and foolish?’
‘I didn’t call you either …’
‘You did, you shameless swine!’
The man, suddenly irate, looked around for moral support.‘Why is this nincompoop calling me stupid?’
‘Answer the question,’ offered a comrade-in-straws.
The insulted man gazed at each face, in turn, seeking some trace of sympathy.
None was to be found.
‘I hate you all. Your oblong heads are shaped like ugly tetrahedrons.’
The circle went on drinking.
They were friends once more.
*****
Half an hour before, the sky had yawned out a light drizzle, sending the merchants dashing for cover in the already crowded canopies of the storefronts.
Atwiine-Naluwombo shifted her daughter from the tight swaddle strapped about her back. She brought the sleepy infant around to her breast, cradling it in the pillow of her arms. She gazed at the still face adoringly – lost to everything around her.
The pursed little lips, the dark wooly hair, the throbbing nostrils – so much like Mukasa’s. Her tiny angel would grow to have the broad nose and flat temple of Oyet’s people, she realized.
Don’t blame me, little one. I did what I could, under the circumstances.
From above Naluwombo, a shadow suddenly fell over the baby’s face.
‘He’s sleeping peacefully, eh?’
A woman with wide hips, an orange face and a pin in her nose spoke over Atwiine’s shoulder. When she turned, the woman was smiling broadly. Her pinned-nose had a second painless hole accosted on all sides by an agitated phalanx of pimples, and the flaps of both nostrils were so translucent that inside them, small vessels could be seen.
The woman seemed to be waiting for an answer.
‘Yes, but it’s actually a girl.’
Naluwombo’s voice was low but proud. This was her first child.
Her and Oyet had been trying for close to five years – yet in all that time, he’d never once suggested the possibility of a second woman.
‘Oh, a girl. I seeee …’
‘Yes, a girl,’ repeated the younger woman.
‘Ohhh … Baambiii …a girl.’
The pinned-nose woman said the word as if it were an offense. Or a disability. She turned away and began looking at the slow drip from a nearby roof edge, through which the rain had now pooled generously around the verandah.
Naluwombo watched her for a moment, then returned to her daughter. The girl, now nearly a month-old, was beginning to waken. She yawned beautifully and opened two clear, fearless eyes – which studied her mother’s.
Atwiine gazed back at her daughter with a pair of yellow-flecked orbs. Naluwombo’seyes were recessed well into the cheek bones of the lined, work-worn face – and in that moment, they fluoresced with affection.
There was a crust of dried snot on the baby’s upper lip as it giggled with the delight of recognition –that palpable, tangible pleasure of a familiar face beholden; and the tender trust this bespoke.
The young mother stuck out the tip of her tongue and touched a finger to it. She rubbed at her daughter’s lip with the wet fingertip.The girl sneezed softly, and despite the chill of the rain, Naluwombo’s heart shivered with warmth.
For her, the tree of motherhood was finally leafing.
*****
The drowsiness would eventually morph into a spectrum of possibilities– lunatic ecstasy at one extreme – deathly lethargy at the other.
Sometimes, there were brawls over spouses or less than decorous attempts to collect unpaid debts.More infrequently, a gash to the body would yield a spurt of blood; or a well-aimed blow would relieve the lucky recipient of some excess teeth.
In these instances, the local constable, Sergeant Kibwatukira – who also frequented Mukaaka’sshebeen, and seldom on official duty – would suddenly remember his day job.Letting forth a stream of unintelligible Swahili phrases, the dutiful Sergeant would proceed to take the anarchy in hand.
‘WajingaYeye!’
‘Nani?’
‘Kamatahuyu!’
‘Huyupeke?’
‘Na Yeye!’
‘Pumbafu!’
‘NaaweTumbavu, musilugwe!’
Because the entire crowd would, to one extent or other, often be involved in the scuffle, Kibwatukira’s instructions were seldom heeded.
‘Piga Yeye!’
‘Fool!’
‘Idiot!’
‘Foolish fool!’
‘Idiotic foolishness!’
In this way – often – Kibwatukira himself would join in on the melee, his purported purpose of separating the combatants forgotten in the moment’s exertions.He usually ended up on the receiving end of a handsome thumping – and would have to go about his work for the next few weeks with multiple lesions and lumps in difficult-to-conceal parts of the face.
When his boss, therefore, the Officer-in-Charge or OC of Kifumbira Zone-Five constabulary – a towering, teak-skinned giant of a man named Wankoko– inquired sternly after the state of his junior man, the answer was always a feat of diplomatic gymnastics.
‘Sergeant!’
‘Sir?’
‘What happened?’
‘Sir?’
‘I said what happened!’
‘What happened WHERE, sir?’
‘What happened to you?’
‘To me … in what way, Sir?’
‘Are you deaf?’
‘No sir!’
‘I said what happened to YOU on the HEAD?’
‘Ah, you mean, Sir … what happened TO ME on the HEAD?’
Kibwatukira would then laugh casually – as if he’d just solved a complex riddle on Bukedde FM’s morning show.
‘Yes Sergeant, what happened to you?’
The OC’s voice would be a pond of calmness, his stare steady – revealing naught. A keener ear than Kibwatukira’s, though, would have detected a steely edge creeping into the steadily rising tone.
‘I said, what happened to you?’
On this occasion, Kibwatukira decided to take his chances.
‘When, sir?’
The OC, holding his breath for a few moments, exhaled deeply.His big hands opened and closed.
Kibwatukira stood as stiff as a week-old corpse, staring at the wall behind his boss’s desk.His senses, however, were as alert as those of a hunted wild pig as he mentally computed the distance between him and the door – and the time it would take to make good his escape when his eccentric boss leaped, as was the custom, at his throat.
And then he recalled something.
‘Damn it!’ thought Kibwatukira – ‘damn!’
The door to the boss’ office was faulty, and he’d been tasked to have it fixed four days past.The problem was with the locking mechanism, which stubbornly refused to disengage once it was closed.Kibwatukira had withdrawn the money for the service, as authorized by the OC, but then Fatuma, the curvy waitress at Hajji Sebankyaye’s, had demanded a new dress.
Also, his little boy’s school was demanding fees arrears of five terms. That disrespectful headmaster had even had the guts to embarrass him in front of his son last month – calling him a potato head.True, his head did have an intriguing shape, but still …
‘Kibwatukira, I will ask you one LAST time!’
‘I got hit by a speeding boda-boda, Sir!’
And thus, Kibwatukira – ever the deft contortionist – would worm his way out of nettlesome cul-de-sacs.
*****
On most nights the shebeen was an oasis of composure –flustered only by the occasional drunken comment on someone’s mother.Such a remark would almost instantly be replied by an observation on the shape of the commenter’s nose, or his grandmother’s intelligence, and then the score would be even– no violence necessary.
Mukaaka’s clients would later depart in small groups or singly, but all with eyes glazed and heads hanging like mangoes straining on weak stalks.
On the night of Oyet’s calamity, in the faint light of one corner right beneath a shadow cast by one of the drinking men – a small girl crouched low and tried to speedily finish the tumpeco of scalding porridge thrust into her hands only a few minutes before by her impatient grandmother, Mukaaka.
The girl had been watching the men in silence, as she always did after her evening’s chores were done. She was doing so when a sharp sting on the nape brought palm and skin quickly together –unceremoniously ending the life of one expectant mosquito and its unborn issue.
The unmourned and unattended mass funeral left a dull-red smear on the girl’s palm.She thought of the different blood from the mosquito’s victims – all human, now mixed-up to form the mosquito’s nonhuman one.
The tall man they called Mukasa was now snoring loudly in another corner, not too far from hers.Sometimes, she heard the other men calling him Oyet.
His friends seemed to have forgotten him, so he had also chosen to forget himself and sleep off.The girl, whose favorite subject at school was Numbers, counted the total number of men in the shack.Each man was allotted a finger on her small hand.
Ten.
All her fingers were sticking up in front of her, but she had only counted half the figures around the pots. There were the other half, and then the snoring man – the one they called Oyet.
She counted off the other ten on her fingers again, and then for Oyet, she tried to stick up a toe on her small foot.She counted the total fingers again, plus the toe that wouldn’t quite stick up.
Twenty, plus one.
Nineteen?
No, twenty-one.
‘When you add, you increase. When you subtract you reduce,’ she had to remind herself.The term’s final exams were only a few weeks away.
Twenty-one.
There had been more of them when the evening started, though – forty by an earlier count.They had congregated variously around the four muramba pots that comprised Mukaaka’s watering fountains – huddling close together for warmth, but also for that sense of community that tasted sweeter than any brew.
Hot words had been exchanged through the evening, but after, there had been much laughter and merrymaking.Also, the drinkers liked to regale each other with wild tales of village scandal, recounted with a hyperbole trademarked only to besotted raconteurs. It is these moments the girl looked forward to each evening.
Only one or two tales had been new, today – the rest had been told many times before.In fact, so many times had she heard some of the stories that she felt she knew the characters in each one personally.
The girl knew, for instance, that Mugwanya’s wife had left him and taken the children with her.He had been caught doing bad manners with the village nurse, Carolina.The girl also knew that the police constable, the one they called Kibwatukira, had been sleeping with her classmate’s grandmother.But his wife had forgiven him.
The girl liked Kibwatukira, though.He may have been a drunken policeman who groped women’s buttocks when he’d been at the straw long enough – but he was very funny, and gave her a coin when he could spare something.
‘Awinyo, are you done with that porridge?Come out here now!’
It was her grandmother.
Mukaaka’s hand, flicking aside the stained lace-curtain that hang limply in the narrow doorway, was followed shortly by her head – a black hairnet sitting atop the grey mop like some slum-queen’s crown.
‘I need help with those utensils. There’s a mountain of straws and pots and calabashes to be washed.’
Occasionally, some people chose to take their muramba– the brew Mukaakahad learnt to make at her mother’s knee in Gisoro – in round-bellied gourds we called ibyaanzi. Apparently, such solitary drinkers were unable to navigate the myriad social complexities of the central pot.
That aside – it was said that anyone who as much as sipped Mukaaka’sbrew always returned for a ‘confirmatory’ taste – allegedly to ascertain if their gustatory faculties had deceived them the first time around.Then again, and yet again.
The little girl knew clients who went back five years, never missing a single evening – but still claimed to be ‘confirming the taste.’ So magnetic was Mukaaka’s brewing charm that the women whose husbands had turned the shebeen into a second home, and Mukaaka into a surrogate wife, had on several occasions threatened to bewitch the old woman.
She would laugh derisively at each threat – assuring the cantankerous women that her sorcery was ten times as potent as any they might throw at her.I suspect they believed her, though none said it out loud – for Mukaaka’sestablishment had not only endured, but thrived where others in her line of work had met with a dismal and often ignominious end.
Police raids, arsonists, fires from illegal electricity connections; even grim-faced, law-touting public health officials – had all come, raved, and gone – butMukaaka’s had been left standing.
Truly – the shebeen was no more than a teetering ruin – its shell patched hastily together from wood-workshop off-cuts and construction site leftovers of damaged timber and dented nails. Its insides, now nearly as black with soot as the bottom of Mukaaka’s wide canoe-shaped brewing pan, was draped with cowhides where holes gaped to keep out the draught.
The empty space around the pygmy-pots was furnished with low stools. These had been supplied by a handsome Karamojong trader Mukaaka had paid nothing after getting him drunk.When the man had looked about to complain, Mukaaka had promptly accused him of having already consumed more than the stools’ worth.
The man, fleeing debt and the old woman’s wrath – had not been known to venture into Kifumbira since.Strangers reported sightings of him now and again – but it was always as a skulking figure with a suuka over his head, keeping to the backstreets.
Thus – Mukaaka became the unchallenged lady of the land – our own fearless queen of Kifumbira.
*****
One dusty boot rested on the seat of the small wooden chair. The other, laced to the long dangling foot of an outstretched leg, hung suspended over the chair’s back.
A Congolese tune from one of his favorites – Kanda Bongoman – came to him through the crackle of memory’s transistor.The music interrupted the sorrow of the sergeant’s thoughts; and he whistled out the tune slowly, trying hard to remember the full measure of the Lingala words.
‘Amuchanaaa … aiii …omucheleee …’went his own version of the lyrics.
Kibwatukira’s head – a black peaked cap perched on it –nodded back and forth to the rhythm.He began shaking his torso, imperceptibly at first, then more vigorously; and as he did so, he rubbed generously against the dust on the creaking desk.
Before the music had crept up on him, Kibwatukira had been mulling, quite unsuccessfully, over the many travails of his middle-aged life:
At forty-two, he was still a lowly sergeant in the Uganda Police Force – that infamous purveyor of unthinking public service.With no realistic prospects at promotion, he conceded that he was likely to retire at the same rank – earning peanuts in pension for all his patriotic toils.As things stood, however, even these peanuts would likely be lost to him, given the veritable signs of an impending demotion that loomed ominous over his shoulder.
Wankoko had already issued him seven warning letters, in supposed reprimand for‘improper’conduct.
Improper!
Kibwatukira scoffed.
Improper? Whatever that means! Who doesn’t have the occasional drink-up with old pals?
Even the nation’s President, the baldheaded and oafish H.E Kati-Mwaggala Nze-ngendewa, had been photographed by the country’s leading tabloid – TheScarlet Chili – hissing suggestively at malayas along Speke Road not many days past.
Why then is Wankoko being unfair to me?
Kibwatukira, swamped in lamentation – began now to think of his family.
‘At least my Nandera loves me,’ he consoled himself as a smirk broadened the leathery face.
Even after she unearthed his yearlong affair with Mama Mukiibi – a widow in the neighborhood twenty years his senior – Kibwatukira’s wife had remained loyal and unflustered.
That woman must be bewitching me, surely. Or perhaps, she’s planning on poison.
It must be one of the two! Or even both!
How could an original Musamya woman, in her right mind, let a man get away with a sin like that?
It was at that point in his musing that the tune had come to him – a welcome distraction before his dim thoughts succeeded in driving him to destruction.He was still gyrating to the rhythm, so he didn’t hear the door slowly open behind his back.
‘What do you think you’re doing, you lazy monkey!’
Kibwatukira tried to jump to his feet, but the effort was too much for the poor desk.The woodwork gave way beneath his weight, and man and timber struck the hard floor with much noise and little ceremony.
Kibwatukira sprung up like a teenage erection.
‘JamboAfande!’ he saluted, lifting his knee high and stamping the mottled floor with practiced speed and exaggeration.
The action, which brought his feet together in the characteristic V of military precision, had the additional consequence of causing his trousers to lodge tightly between his buttocks. A viewer from behind would have noticed a map of dust on the seat of his khaki pants, roughly tracing the outline of New Guinea, or something.
‘I am here to know why my lock isn’t fixed!’growled the OC.
‘Sir?’
‘The lock to my door. The accountant told me he gave you the money after you demanded it angrily.’
Kibwatukira tried to open his mouth, but the jaws were clasped in place.That darned money again!
He had been planning to make it up at the end of the previous week, when the Public Service Ministry wired salaries to civil servants’ accounts.But there had been a delay, as often as not.Something to do with physical — the word had actually been fiscal— priorities.At least that’s what Kibwatukira remembered the Minister’s disgusting voice vomiting through the radio.
And here I am, looking like a fool in front of the same government!
His head felt uncommonly heavy, heavier than his now thundering heart.His ears had become small tom-toms.
‘Sir – the money is …’
‘Where is the money, sergeant?’
‘It is here, sir …’
‘Where?’ – came the impatient bark.
‘In my desk …’
Hardly were the words out than Kibwatukira remembered that his desk was presently a heap of firewood – so that even as he collapsed in a feigned faint onto the splinter-strewn floor – the melody of the Congolese tune from before abandoned him not, but was merely replaced by the wildest of cacophonies.
It was the war drums of debt come to collect.
*****
It had been a long day.
First, the repetitive drills of the afternoon parade in preparation for the upcoming Tarehe Sita celebrations, at which the presence of all security operatives in the country, public as well as private, was mandated – had sapped him to the marrow.
The drill-corporal, an obese toad of a man named Rwekishokye – had been at the most peevish Oyet had yet seen him.
‘Shot Kulia! Shot Kulia! MbeleTembeya! Kata Mgu! Shot Kulia! Shot!’
The fat instructor, with a wisp-haired navel showing above the lining of his tight trousers, had them marching for hours on end – and any request to drink water, or a perceived falter in step, was punished with a breakneck sprint round the assembly ground.
For the latter offence, Oyet himself had done five sprints in all – and by even fall, ten men had fainted and had to be resuscitated with cold showers helped along by a volley of the drill-corporal’s pummeling slaps. Of the ten victims, three had eventually been stretchered-off to the infirmary at a desperate dash when the corporal’s first-aid measures had proven ineffectual.
But despite his unfailing consistency in the past, today had been the most beastly Mukasa had seen of the middle-aged corporal’s ruthless persona.And not that Mukasa had witnessed said persona too few a time – for the young private had been under the corporal’s draconian stewardship for the past two and one-half years.
In fact, Oyet – lacking for none of the famed obstinacy of his Luo forbears – had locked horns with the notorious corporal on so many an occasion, that the junior man had been threatened with the sack more than once. So often did Mukasa have to contend with the man’s arrogance that it had grown as habitual to him as the straw-thin sips of his daily evening brew at Mukaaka’s.
Indeed – following close on the heels of that day’s parade, Mukasa had made a quick dash to that old hag’s shanty in Kifumbira for an emergency slaking of the pounding throb in his throat.
Allah w’akubar! How thirsty I’d been! I’d been away for what – two days?
He hadn’t been too long at the old woman’s though – what with his pockets’ unremitting emptiness that month, on top of his friend Bujjaga’s jailing on account of the latter’s suspected masterminding of a break-in at the parish’s condom depot a fortnight earlier.
It was Private Bujjaga who always extended Mukasa ‘drinking credit’ when times got as bumpy as the present. Alas, it wasn’t to be the case that evening– nor for many to come.
Oyet thus left Mukaaka’s she been earlier than was his wont, feeling all the thirstier from the five gourds he’d downed than when he had earlier come in with a soberer stare and a steadier gait.For – it was said among Mukasa’s clansmen – that a shallow drink only worsened the seasoned drinker’s thirst, and that no drink at all was oft to be preferred to the cursory imbibing.
As he plodded along the highway, Oyet whistled a remembered melody to the surrounding silence, and then kicked a few stray pebbles that lay lonely on the broad road.
‘Dipponazigala …nazigalaaaa … wheeewwww …’
The melody was rife with remorse and nostalgia.In moments of profound tragedy, of which this to him was one such, Oyet was predisposed to quoting Prince Paul Job Kafeero’s timeless lyrics.
The whistles soared into the thin night air, hovered briefly above the treetops, and then departed wistfully to seek the company of other sounds and music.And as he labored home, Mukasa’s shoulders stooped forward in a despondent slouch, and the tall man gradually became aware of his loneliness – for there was no walker on the highway excepting himself.
Even the thin vehicle traffic from the past half-hour had slowed to a trickle, and then eventually died-out altogether.
While he thought on this, a spot of light appeared in the distance; and as it grew larger and louder, a lone boda-boda came buzzing up. The helmeted rider favored Mukasa with a quick glance, revved up his engine, and then was gone just as fast. The buzz tapered to a distant hum and then drowned in the pervading silence.
Oyet drew in his breath, held it for a second, then sighed deeply. Keeping to the highway was going to mean a long, thoughtful walk.Plus, there was the unvoiced but no less real fear of encountering the dreaded Toka KwaBarabara gang. From them, the few streetlamps gawking over the broad highway in faint dimness would offer no help.
To be sure, even the local constabulary whose field-agents were headed by that lousy Sergeant they called Kibwatukira, were rumored to operate in mortal dread of the gang. It was said that whenever a distress call was made to Kibwatukira’s station, he and his men conveniently timed their arrival a good hour or so after the call had been logged.
Oyet of course – like any halfway decent Kifumbira resident – had his own notions on why OC Wankoko’s minions gave the notorious thugs a wide berth. At the citizens’ consultative meeting last month, however, he’d been clever enough to keep those thoughts to himself when the Mayor – concluding a rousing speech on the import of citizens’ participation in local democracy – had asked anyone with information regarding identities of the gang’s membership or accomplices to step forward.
Mukasa was a man who preferred not to court trouble where it could be avoided. Being branded a whistleblower was the very thing to put him on a collision course with it.
A small mammal disturbed some dry rushes by the roadside, recalling him to his present troubles. Oyet stopped walking, and gazed at the meters of tarmac stretching far ahead. The road may have been well-lit, but then it was too lonely. Plus – he had too much on his mind.
Now, not too long ago – when Mukasa had been forced to spend ten uninterrupted nights in a prison cell with nothing for company but a single, immodestly bright bulb – he’d decided he preferred the familiarity of shadows to any serving of loneliness, however amply lit.
Resolving to get home sooner, Oyet thus contrived to abandon the main road that would have taken him through the trading centre with its motley of retail shops, bars, and too-cheap-to-be-safe harlots. He’d hoped to secure a quarter-kilo of sugar from one of the shops – per Atwiine’s stern-faced instructions that morning. But that would have to wait till tomorrow.
I don’t have the money, anyway. And I’m too much in Wambuzi’s debt to ask for more credit from the man’s shop. He’ll just end up insulting and shaming me, as he often does. I’ve had enough shame for one day. Nedda –Naluwombo will understand. She must.
So instead, Mukasa decided to pick the rest of his way home via a scarce-used and now overgrown footpath that edged along the fences of an isolated cluster of upper-class domiciles, which had one morning sprouted like an islet of abundance amid Kifumbira’s sea of privation.
Once I reach the bottom of the hill, I can jump over Hajji Sekitooleko’s razor-wire fence, wait for the barking dog to grow quiet, and then tiptoe across the compound toward the hedge where his home ends and Kifumbira starts.
I know she won’t forgive me, but Naluwombo will have to bear unsweetened tea for tonight. It won’t be the first night anyhow, and I doubt it will be the last.
Then Mukasa realized that without the sugar, he was very likely also – nay, most certainly– to be denied other types of succulence that night.He cursed silently, feeling his spirit slump further in the instant. But then he decided to dismiss the depressing thought.
Was it not written, after all, that husbands should not live on nocturnal sweetness alone?
By now, Oyet was almost beyond the rich neighborhood’s perimeter wall, but then suddenly he felt a pressure swelling in his bladder.It’d been growing on him subtly.
He looked around at the silent hedges, and then up and down the path to ensure he was without company. He quickly leapt over a shallow gulley, nestled up to the high wall, and arranged himself over a small bush in one corner.
He then unzipped his fly-front and proceeded to hydrate the foliage generously. As he did so, waves of commingled relief and pleasure washed over his broad features. The tension in his groin waned drastically, and he felt his life’s many loads dramatically lighten.
‘Ah … life is good … soooo gooooddd …’
As the yellow stream finally died to a drip, Oyet expertly flicked the last droplets into the bush – for he could boast years of enviable experience at said task. But in the same instant that the final drop exploded onto some luckless green leaf, a blinding brightness sprouted on his face.
‘Wewe Mjinga! What do you think you’re doing! Why are you in that dark corner? Eh!’
The owner of the booming voice stood a few meters away, a powerful torch wielded in his outstretched hand. Mukasa froze, his softening member still held gingerly between the fingers of a trembling right hand. He recovered in a few seconds however, and fumbling desperately with the adamant belt buckle, strove to pack away the now-shrunken phallus and return it into the dignity of darkness.
The beam of the torch – likely satisfied with the unremarkableness of its current subject – chose in that moment to abandon Oyet’s face and descend rapidly, only to grind to a screeching halt at his midsection. It proceeded to hover there for what seemed like hours.
Mukasa, paralyzed again by embarrassment, hesitated long enough for full stock to be taken of the bright-red underwear and the flabby thing that peeped from his trousers’shadowy recesses.The thing was dark-headed and hung with the limpness of a surrendering soldier.
In a sudden resumption of his senses, Oyet attempted to take control of what threatened to deteriorate into a precarious situation – and yanked up his zip. In that same instant, as if one action had alerted the other before triggering – a shriek of agony rose from Oyet’s contorted lips.
‘Maaaamaaaanzeee ….!’
It was said that three villages away, people would ask their sleepy neighbors in the stirring morning if they had heard a dying man’s shrieks in the middle of the night. Oyet’s hands abandoned the fly and rose to his convulsing face as the currents of pain spiraled from his bitten member to electrocute the entire body.
‘Ohhhh … Wuuuuu … aaiiiii … mamiiii …!’
He cupped his hands over his ears and pressed against his scalp for a few seconds. Then, releasing his grip on the pinched flesh, he wagged his fingers in the air like a child seared by hot-coals, or stung in the backside by an army of vindictive wasps.
The torch-holding figure, his shady face half-hid behind the upturned collar of an ash-colored jacket, quickly flicked off the light.
‘You fool, stop shouting! Do you want to wake the whole district?’
‘Arrggh … but it’s so painful …’
‘Stupid man, it serves you right. Don’t be overdramatic! Can you just calm down!’ The shrouded man was beginning to sound uneasy.
‘The thing is biting me, man! I think it’s bleeding …’
‘Shhhh! Quiet!’
‘Ohhhhh …’
The man depressed the switch again, and the blinding beam leapt once more from the powerful bulb behind the glass-visor of the torch’s plastic casing.
‘Okay man, hold the zip!’
‘I can’t … ohhh …’
‘Yes you can, you fool. Hold it, or I’ll leave you here to bleed to death!’
‘Come and help meee …’
‘Are you mad? Hold your own thing. Quickly, before it breaks off … it seems about to …’
It was as if a second jolt of current had surged through Oyet. The stranger’s talk of something breaking-off sobered him instantly.
‘What should I do, Sa?’
‘Hold the thing. No, not like that … with one hand. Yes. Now, pull down the zip.Slowly, you fool.’
‘Ohhh … awwwuu …’
‘Slowly, you idiot. Do you want to lose your wife? You know how useless men can become without that thing.’
The stranger’s face broke briefly into a smile, but one Oyet couldn’t see for obvious reasons. The zip was now moving down slowly.
‘Ahhh … it is bet …ternowww …’
There was palpable reprieve in Mukasa’s voice, having finally freed himself of the zip’s minatory teeth and their sanguinary appetites.And though a light perspiration pebbled his brow, he stood visibly relaxed.
The other man took this as a cue for a resumption of hostilities.
‘Now you man, what were you doing here?’
‘Ahhh …’
‘Stupid! Stop pretending now! I said what were you doing here?’
‘I am sorry brotha …but the pain.’
‘You man, I am not your brother!’
‘Forgive me … but the pain.’
‘Pain! What pain? That small thing there? I can kick you now and remind you what real pain is!’
Oyet considered his options.The stranger, though cloaked in darkness and a baggy jacket – was perhaps as tall, yet noticeably much wider about the shoulders than the lanky Mukasa. The man also had a strong, firm voice – and in Mukasa’s experience, throats that produced firm voices usually belonged to bodies possessed of hard fists.
‘I am sorry, Sa.’
‘So you just go around urinating on people’s fences, eh?’
‘No …no …no, I was just passing by …’
‘Passing by going where? Is this a road?’
‘It used to be a road …’
‘Don’t tell me about it USED to. I am asking – IS it a road?’
‘N …Nooo.’
‘So what were you doing here? Are you a thief?’
‘A thief?No ..no Sa.’
‘You must be a thief. What is your name?’
‘Mu …Mu …Mugaga …’
‘Your name is Mu ..Mu .. Are you lying to me?’
‘N .. Not at all, Sa. Mugaga is my name, Sa.’
‘Okay, show me your ID.’
‘ID?’
‘Yes. Give it here quickly!’
Mukasa realized that his luck was finally up.
Surely, he thought, urinating on a fence is not the greatest crime on earth; this fellow should be fair and just let me go.
But the man showed no signs of relenting. ‘Eh. Are you deaf? I said give me the ID?’
In his penniless state, having his ID captured was the last thing Oyet wanted. It might even land me in jail and cause more complications that I know. If I go to jail, that will be the end of my job. No, that can’t happen. I’ve been through too much already. What will happen to Atwiine and Birungi?
He took a step backward.
‘Eh, does it take that long to find an ID?’
Oyet pretended to fumble through first one pocket, and then another, and then another – each attempt registering less success than the one before.
‘You man, do you think this is a joke? So you are playing on my head? Kale, twende! Lez go!’
The man took a step toward Mukasa. He made to grab his arm, but missed. Oyet stumbled backward and struggled to keep his footing. The effort however, gained him a few precious seconds.
He sprung away from his questioner, twisting his body in the air like a serpent on fire. In the next instant, he was tearing through the shadows and shrubbery with a desperate rapidity.Behind him, the man uttered one cry of frustration and, leaping after the vanishing figure, gave chase.
A pink, shy dawn was beginning to bleach the horizon with morning’s mildness – but for Mukasa and his pursuer, the troubles of the night had the only just begun.
*****
Following an advert in Kamunye newspaper – an unerringly risqué and wildly popular local tabloid –two day’s prior, both men had on that day come to attend interviews for the Ministry’s long-awaited recruitment of Office Messengers.
Alongside ten thousand other hopefuls, they had queued under the hot tropical sun – PLE certificates clutched in sweaty hands –in a queue that stretched and wound for miles like a pregnant python afflicted with loose bowels.
The queue had brought half the city’s frenetic traffic to a halt that sweltry Monday. By the day’s end, however, since only five slots had been available at the Corruption Ministry, only the sun had managed to retire with his face still aglow.
Neither Oyet nor the thousands of other strangers – of whom Bujjaga was then still only one – had stood a cockroach’s liver of a chance.
The crestfallen men – united by worry, ill-fate, and the shared wrath of hopeful families awaiting each at home, all compounded by the dreadful prospect of impending confrontation – had turned on their heels and melted into the evening hive of homebound foot and wheel-speckled traffic that invariably swelled downtown Kampala at that time of day.
Oyet and Bujjaga had both wormed their way, albeit separately, through the milling droves in the Old Taxi Park. Each man had boarded a turtle-like minivan whose yelling tout claimed to be going three destinations at once.
‘Kamwokya, Ntinda, Bukoto! Nga ne Kasasiro tujakutwaala …’
The taxi had sneezed like a choking cat, and then, trembling to life as suddenly as a resurrected corpse – it had darted through the fume-shrouded gridlock and rolled fitfully towards its passengers’ multiple abodes.
Mukasa’s mind was bedeviled with anxiety. Where would he find work in this city? He had – as far as he was concerned – made every attempt humanly possible to land a job but to no avail. Atwiine had been no more successful, and they were lately borrowing salt and posho from neighbors just to get by, though even this generosity was beginning to thin.
Neither Oyet nor his wife, who was pregnant at the time, had any relative of note to speak of, in Kampala – or anywhere else for that matter.
Naluwombo’s cousin – the two families’ most successful individual – who had often come to their rescue, had been shot in a public demonstration only five months before, when the Walk-to-Work protests were at their height.
The policeman responsible had walked free, and no compensation had been made to the cousin’s family. The young widow and her three boys were now back in Ibanda, subsisting on the land.No hope would be forthcoming from the relatives’ quarter.
The landlord in Kifumbira had given Oyet a final notice pending summary eviction – though it had sounded more of a threat with undertones of bodily harm. If things went on like this much longer, Oyet worried he’d be forced to return to Katakwi with his expectant wife – and as far as he could tell, no fate could be worse.
Even beggary on Kampala Road was to be preferred to relocation to his ancestral home – where he owned neither a single goat nor patch of garden. They would become the laughing stock of the village, and it wasn’t beyond his elder brothers to chase them off with jembes and spears. No. Under no circumstances would Mukasa return to Katakwi.
Nearly an hour later – on the taxi – Oyet, looking up from an absent study of a peeling Motor Third-Party sticker on the van’s windshield had finally noticed the hairy-armed man squeezed between him and the plump driver.
The man looked grumpy – and his flat, plate-like forehead was congealed in thought. His head reminded Oyet of the yellow, heat-deformed twenty-litre jerrycan Atwiine used to ferry water at home.
Over his creased black trousers, the man had on a bright red shirt whose front was lined with multicolored, odd-sized buttons – and from his shirt pocket, the blue cover of a Bic biro showed.In one corner of the pocket, a patch of FDC-blue stain was beginning to spread where the pen’s ink had melted and overflowed its thin plastic tubing.
Oyet tapped the man’s shoulder, and pointed at the staining spot.
‘What?’
‘Look there.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
‘Ayyaaa…Ayayaaa …’
‘That shirt is gone. Even if you use Jik, it won’t help …’
‘Eh … I’m finished! What will my madam at home say? We had borrowed this shirt from her brother. I’m really finished … Are you sure it can’t wash out?’
‘I tell you from experience, man. I also faced it once …’
Thus – by a joint, and then separate strokes of ill-luck on the same day – Oyet’s and Bujjaga’s paths met, and there from proceeded as one.
Or nearly.
A bystander would have said it all started with emotional proximity – the tragic kind. Said proximity led to curiosity, and curiosity to concern. Concern had then led to chance remark on unsuccessful interview, chance remark to banter, and banter to complaint on national economy; which yielded eventual knowledge of, and empathy for the two men’s shared joblessness.
This river of empathy ultimately debouched in firm handshakes and exchanged mobile numbers – which trading of pleasantries was coupled with emphatic nods and severally reiterated assurances on future contact.
Six months later, both men stood on the same parade ground.
They were clad in neat, matching apparel – short-sleeved grey shirts tucked into white trousers buckled in place with orange belts. Their long feet were uniformly sheathed in the glistening leather of black, shin-high boots.
‘At ease!’
‘Attenshion!’
‘Attiz!’
The bellow of the drill-corporal rang loudly from his drum-like chest. Before him, standing in even rows of fives and threes – each ten-man column separated by an arms’ length of space – stood some forty odd men.
‘Do you know what the name of the firm is?’
‘YESSAA!’
‘What is it?’
The corporal swayed slightly on his feet, as if he’d had a little something on top of his wife’s tea for his morning beverage.Those who knew him from the younger days, when he was still a fast-rising Major in the National Redundant Army (NRA) – would be hard-pressed to corroborate the suspicion.
He had, however, only a month before being awarded the Nalufenya Medal that would have been almost certainly followed by a quick promotion, been caught inside an old army tank lying in the army junkyard at Mbuya barracks, with the first daughter.
Whatever activity the two were up to, it so turned-out, was nowhere listed in the army’s manual on national defense tasks expected of officers inside the barracks.
It was said that His Excellency Kati-Mwaggala Nze-ngendewa, the girl’s father and country’s self-declared eternal president, had demanded that the Major be brought to him – threatening to shoot the ‘disrespect fulson of a syphilitic leopardess’ on the spot.
Only immense pleading and the intervention of the soft-spoken first lady, who everyone knew was the actual decision maker in the presidential homestead, had saved the Major’s life.
It was rumored that, looking straight at Kati-Mwaggala Nze-ngendewa’s chubby-cheeked and ageing face, his intrepid lady wife had argued, ‘Honashi Kisheijja, twarenzya! We have enough blood on our hands as it is. Let the man live.’
She had put her soft, forceful foot on the hard ground, and Major Rwekishokye had been spared.
The respite though, wasn’t entirely bereft of consequence.A dishonorable dismissal, many years, and several tankfuls of Uganda Waragi later, the once mighty Major was now a low-grade, obese corporal in an obscure private security firm headquartered somewhere in the warren of Kampala’s back alleys.
It is these thoughts, many of them operating subconsciously, which had motored his not-too-sober tongue that humid afternoon.
‘You smart fools are our newest recruits, and that means you must understand the firm’s culture!’
‘YESSAA!’
‘Let us go back to the name of the company. Do you know it?’
‘YESSAA!’
‘Okay. Tell me what it is …’
‘TIGER’S RECTUM SECURIKO GROUP!’
‘Repeat louder!’
‘TIGER’S RECTUM SECURIKO GROUP!’
‘Good! And what is our credo?’
In response, there was a general murmur of uncertainty before the men fell silent. A few of the men tried to open their mouths but could think of nothing to say.
‘I said, what is our credo?’ the corporal reiterated furiously.
The men mumbled amongst themselves yet again, until one voice at the back gained enough courage to confess:
‘But sir, we don’t know what you mean by KLEDO!’
The corporal craned his neck and stood on his toes, trying to make out whose the voice was.
‘Who said that!’
The inquisition – fraught as it was with peril – was understandably greeted by uncooperative silence. And seeing no volunteer offer themselves, Rwekishokye resorted to his favored antidote – insults.
‘You guinea fowls are more ignorant than I thought. Didn’t you go to school? Eh!’
The men stared at the sky and shifted their weights from foot to foot, none brave enough to offer a retort. The corporal, taking their unease for victory, softened his stance:
‘Anyway – I’m not responsible for English lessons. So, what I meant was – WHAT IS OUR MOTTO?’
‘Our motto is – IF YOU PUT A FINGER IN US, YOU LOSE IT, Sir!’
‘Very good! One more thing, from now on, I am your new boss! Is that understood? Anyone calling me anything else, apart from BOSS, shall face the rock music!’
The corporal scanned the rows of standing men with squinted eyes, straining to focus under the pulsing glare. Pebbles of sweat clung tenuously to his flared, saucer-shaped nostrils.
‘Is that understood? You will face the music of the rock!’
‘Yes, BOSHH…SS!’The chorus was disjointed, and the answering voices sounded blank and hungry.
A hunting eagle – brown of feather – circled overhead, and despite the afternoon swelter, a short fellow in the front-row began to shiver like a sodden cockerel.
The corporal’s gaze was directed straight at him now.
‘When I speak to you buffaloes on heat, I want you to look straight at me!’
Incidentally, the fellow whose attention was sought had terribly squinted eyes. As he endeavored to return the demanded stare, he appeared to be looking – simultaneously – at both the corporal’s baldhead and his rotund paunch.
The fat man’s cheeks contracted into a broad, maize-toothed grin.
‘Ahehehe … they have also brought us confused ducklings … ahehehe …’
Two of the other recruits, misreading the signs, dared to join-in on the amusement.
‘Ohi … ohihihi …ahh, but Sir you are funny …ohihihi …’
The corporal’s tummy, jiggling from his temblor-like belly laugh, stilled abruptly as he turned on the guffawing pair.
‘You monitor lizards! Shut up now! You are nothing but buttocks of a warthog. Why are you laughing?’
‘We ar…we are sorry, Sir,’ one of the poor victim’s stammered.
‘Eh! Did you pay me to entertain you?’
‘Nooo…Noo sir.’
‘Am I a clown? Am I a comedian? You think I am Afande Kelekele?’
‘Noo …’
‘Shut up, now! Go down for two thousand pushups!’
The two men, their faces resembling shrunken pumpkins, looked at each other helplessly.
‘I said, now!’
Oyet-Mukasa, standing as straight as a young breast, averted his gaze momentarily from the man immediately in front of him, at the back of whose head his eyes had been unwaveringly trained for the past half-hour.
Two rows away, he held Bujjaga’s quick backward glance for a second, and each man – between gritted teeth – painfully swallowed a tongueful of thin saliva.
*****
And because his was the uncanny fate of being both Indian and Sikh, the merchant constantly chewed on mouthfuls of khat, and smothered his sizeable head in a saffron turban which many who regularly dealt with him suspected was irreconcilably opposed to conversations with water – never having seen him once take it off, or wear another in its place.
As he waited for his appointment with Wankoko, Officer-in-Charge of a local constabulary he infrequently did business with, Singa-Singa tried to recall when last he had been to the Sikh temple in downtown Kampala for the weekly prayer ritual.
It bored him, anyway – and he had come to Equatorial Africa with one objective in mind; to make a fortune off of these darkies.Prayers could always be had back in Punjab, and as his first cousin Kishore was wont to say – of man’s countless gods, our Ik-Onkar is most patient.
It was Kishore who’d been responsible for persuadingSinga-Singa to sell his father’s five buffalo back home, so they could afford boat-tickets from Mumbai to Mombasa.
Part of their inland journey had been made on the roof of a train, perched precariously atop the cargo rack from Rajpurar to Mumbai, with hour-long stops in Mohali and Jalandhar.
The twelve-hour ride through the bumpy and dusty roads of the Indian countryside had been made with about two-thousand other hitchhikers; most of whom – like Singa-Singa and Kishore – were bound for some part or other of tropical Africa.
Exactly where, none of them knew. At least not yet.
But they’d been required – and quickly – to make their minds up once the large boat, its curved hull stenciled with the letters MV Krishna– had docked at Mombasa following five sickening days of heaving upon the open ocean.
No sooner had the ship come into port than a crisp-uniformed, mid-level official from the Indian Overseas’ Employment Bureau (IOEB) leapt onto its lowering gangway, and proceeded to – in a chatter of mixed Hindi and Swahili – furnish them a list of destination-options whose reliability was premised on vague government statistics and the verbal reports of returning countrymen previously dispersed among the new continent’s several equatorial cities.
‘Singa-Singa … so you finally came, eh?’
A rumbling baritone jostled into the trader’s thoughts – shoving aside his reminiscing with the dismissive nonchalance of the present moment’s exigencies.The sepia-toned walkways of memory were all very well in their tranquil cloisters, but the chaotic highway of today was loud with interruption and bright with discomfort.
‘Yes my friend OC, me is coming when you call me, no?’
Singa-Singa made himself grin – his head bobbing like a yo-yo on the thick, fat-girdled neck.
‘So why do you supply rubbish, India-man!?’
The OC’s tone changed in an instant, arching toward the accusatory. Singa-Singa, very a typically, was caught off his guard.
‘Rubbish? Where is rubbish my friend?’
The tall policeman ground his teeth audibly, as though refining his response with dental friction.
‘The boots you supplied my men. They are made of polythene paper, not leather …’
‘Paper? Ahh, no paper, my friend. No paper on shoe … that is shoe for dolls maybe.’
Singa-Singa essayed a giggle, thinking to slacken the room’s rigid emotion.
‘I’m telling you, India-man! Those shoes are rubbish!’
Officer Wankoko’s voice had lost none of its unfriendliness, and Singa-Singa – noticing that the growl-voiced policeman still insisted on referring to him by geographical descent, as if a man’s country of birth were a thing to be ashamed of – decided to play along.
‘And I’m telling you also, Uganda-man, my shoes is not paper. I bring straight from Gujarat … world quality shoe. India police use that shoe.’
‘I don’t give a damn about India police!’
‘Okay, my friend, OC. Just relax now, yes? Why don’t you show me this shoe, no?’
The big man gazed down at the mustard-skinned merchant, his eyes a simmer with distaste.Then he flicked his head, motioning the Indian toward the entrance door.
They went outside.
Apart from the main station house, the dusty police compound was almost bereft of shelter. A few paces away, to the right of the entrance doorway whose cracked wooden frames were burdened with a creaking rusty ensemble,which upon closer inspection might have passed for a door – stood a fabricated-metal hut.
One could have, and forgivably so, easily mistaken the hut for a privy – were the latter not conspicuously identifiable in a remote corner of the compound on account of its clinging odor’s pungency, which accosted the first-time visitor with an unwelcome loyalty akin to that of a roasting-sun’s rays on a cloudless day.
And as though intent on defying all ambiguity, or perhaps merely as an additional mark of distinction – a pall of blowflies congregated over the latrine in a round-the-clock swarm of droning that would’ve put the noisiest bee hive to grave shame, if not eternal disrepute.
As Singa-Singa and Wankoko strode toward the storehouse, the Indian noticed that the small hut’s walls, roof, and floor were made from the same type of material – like a steel cube that had been preordered from a box-making factory.
A new padlock of gleaming silver, with the label SOLEX thinly engraved on its face, hung idly from the door.
The OC, halting abruptly in his march, trumpeted – ‘Muwonge, bring me the store keys!’
Back at the reception table, a young man in the tight-fitting khakis of police-uniform dropped the handset he’d been twiddling with his fingers – a TECNO 1840– and leapt to rapt attention.He had just been in the process of texting a neighbor’s housemaid in his Kawempe home-suburb, over WhatsApp. He had just typed‘I will show you my live-wire later tonight’, and was protracting his thumb to press the send icon, when the OC’s call had startled him.
‘Yessa?’ Muwonge whined in reply to his boss’s unregistered demand. Understandably, the young fellow’s mind had been elsewhere.
‘I said get me the keys, you bearded tortoise!’
‘Okay Sir!’
Corporal Muwonge had a pimply face that looked to have been permanently colonized by puberty, and as he dashed to the key-cabinet in the adjoining anteroom, he knocked over a waiting-bench and groaned in pain – hopping from one foot to another in comical fashion.The fallen TECNO 1840 went momentarily forgotten, its battery and back-cover dispersed across the floor.
As they waited under the broiling sun, the OC turned to the shoe merchant with a slight frown – ‘Singa, do you see how your substandard shoes are causing trouble?’
‘No trouble, my friend. No trouble at all. Just show me this polythene shoe you are saying …’
He had a confident air about him, and he stroked his silver whiskers compulsively as he spoke. Wankoko was clearly unimpressed.
‘Sir, the keys are here …’ the young constable, rescuing the situation, jogged-up panting.
Without so much as a grateful nod, Wankoko grabbed the jingling bunch, sorted through it for the right key, and unsnapped the padlock.
The darkness inside the storehouse was thicker than that of five combined nights. Even as the men stared blankly into it – two plump, grey-colored rats leapt from the abyss, fell at Wankoko’s booted foot, and scurried off into some overgrown shrubbery nearby – shrieking with agitation at being disturbed.
The senior policeman snorted in contempt and, tossing the clinking keys from his left to right hand, stepped inside the store. He squinted fruitlessly until his eyes adjusted to the noon shadows, and then he peered at the scattered boots.
‘Ahhhaaaa Singa, come in here! This is the rubbish I was talking about …’
Singa-Singa ascended the few steps leading into the storehouse with labored breath, and the sleeves of his shirt were damp with sweat where they touched his armpits. He stepped over the hut’s threshold with a brown-sandaled foot.
He then gazed slowly around the gloomy room, trying to keep himself from staggering under the dizzying heat. His eyes followed Wankoko’s pointing hand, to rest upon a mass of tar-black objects that lay strewn across the damp floor.
The merchant bent over with apparent effort and, picking up one of the boots, carried it outside.The shoe was iced in a thin film of dirt, so he blew over it forcibly, causing the waiting Muwonge – into whose eggplant-shaped eyes the dust had flown – to squeal in protest.
Singa-Singa ignored him.His focus was on the shoe in his hand, which he was now studying with a child’s keenness.
‘Wangogo, is thiz the shoes you was calling me about my friend?’
‘Ya, these are the ones …’assented the OC, who had by then rejoined the merchant under the sizzling afternoon.
Singa-Singa’s nicked and stained teeth flashed, his brown face constricting into a sudden smirk.
‘Hahaha!’
The OC tensed with apprehension.‘Is this a joke, India-man?’
‘Ohh … my friend, Uganda-man, where are your eyes? Eh! This not be my shoes. This be nonsense shu—shoes…’
Sing-Singa was a little breathless from his newfound laughter, the effort too much for his heaving breast.
‘These are not the shoes you supplied?’
Puzzlement stampeded across the gigantic policeman’s face. He gazed quizzically at the Indian, suspicion shrinking his normally indifferent eyes.
‘Ahhh …no, my friend.These shoes is not from me, I tell you. From someone else.’
‘What do you mean from someone else? That cannot be, because you are our only supplier …’
Singa-Singa shook his head meaningfully, as if he were privy to some secret knowledge yet unsurmised by Wankoko.
‘I don’t know, my friend. I don’t really know. But mine is brown shoe. This one is black shoe. I don’t know is from where.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘More than sure, my friend OC. I tell you me is making brown shoes only at factory.’
His head danced back and forth, rather like a malfunctioning toy.
Wankoko felt a tide of heat surging through his blood – and with good reason,he was almost certain it wasn’t the humid afternoon to blame.
Someone is going to pay, and pay dearly.The words echoed off the walls of his mind like ricocheting bullets.
He turned away from Singa-Singa so suddenly that the plump trader was left midsentence – volunteering some guessed-at explanation of things.
Wankoko loped the short distance to the timid-looking station
house, and ducked through its gaping doorway.The Indian followed at his heels like a giddy child anticipating a no-holds-barred debacle between rivaling adults.
Wankoko paused at the front desk, placed two massive hands on the table, and glowering at the absent-minded constable who’d subtly fled the scene outside upon sensing imminent trouble.
‘Muwonge, get off that phone now!’ thundered Wankoko.
The constable let out a frightened gasp, and stumbled-off the low chair. He reached for the wall just in time to keep his bottom from bumping onto the ground, but was already so gone in his fall that he cut a pause as awkward as it was dramatic.
‘Get up now, stupid!’
‘I am sorry, Sir …’
‘Who bought the new shoes?’
‘I’m sorry, boss … which shoes …’
Wankoko’s response was an unblinking glare – murder peeping out through the dilated pupils of the close-set eyelids.
For some inexplicable reason, Muwonge’s memory of the shoes in question returned to him instantly. On the Sunday that followed he would be overheard narrating the incident during a testimony at his local Pentecostal church, as proof for the existence of miracles.
In that moment however, it may well have secured him his life – whose palpable risk of termination he labored under no illusions about.
‘Oh, you mean the new shoes, Sir … The boots in the store. Oh, those ones …’
‘Who!’
‘Sergeant Kibwatukira, Sir …’
‘Who?’
‘The Sergeant, Sir. SeargentKibwatukira …’
Wankoko felt his head swelling like a hastily inflated balloon, and was certain it would rupture there and then.
‘How did … since when … who gave Kibwatukira permission to buy shoes at this station!’
‘But Sir, he told us that you put him in charge of purchases this month. Because the accountant was sick …’
‘What did HE say?’
‘Yes Sir, Kibwatukira told us that YOU authorized him last week to buy shoes. Before he went on leave.’
The senior policeman was so furious he began trembling. He had to settle himself upon the waiting-bench and take several deep breaths to regain composure.He swiveled toward the smirking Indian who was perched in the doorway, grinning like a resurrected dodo:
‘Singa, it is fine. You are free to go. I will handle this situation. Just leave it to me.’
Then, turning to Muwonge, Wankokocalmly instructed –
‘Call the Rapid Response Unit. There is a thieving fugitive we need to find.’
*****
She placed the cloth on top of the neat pile at her feet.
The day’s selling was done, and with the fast-approaching dusk, vendor and customer alike were seeking the quickest paths home.
From the heaviness of the air, the massing dusk promised a quenching downpour, and the desperate hooting of the jam-locked cars was becoming more insistent with each moment. Atwiine tied up the bulging bundle, doing the knot twice just to make sure it was secure.
‘The truck is at the roadside, let’s get some boys to ferry the loads for us.’
The voice belonged to Naluwombo’s close friend and partner of two years, Mukyala Mulungi. Their joint-dealership in second-hand clothes stretched back to the days Atwiine had first come to the city and was prospecting for an income – any income, really.
At the time, Naluwombo had just been brought by Oyet from her village in Ibanda, to – as men oft so bluntly put it – cook for him.
But while the women’s business dealings were young, their friendship was much older and had first been kindled in the budding of their girlhood when their families had been neighbors in Ibanda. This was long before either of them belonged to any man, or carried parts of him in her body.
‘I’ve finished tying up the last one,’Atwiine declared, her voice throbbing with a tired triumph slightly blended with relief.
‘So how many do we have in total?’
‘Five.’
‘Five?’
‘Yes. Two for blouses and bras.Three for leggings and belts.’
‘What about the inner buthings?’
‘The inner buthings?’
‘Yes, those small ones inside …’
‘Ahhh … the inner buthingsss …’
Naluwombo smiled shyly, suddenly self-conscious.
‘I placed them under the leggings,’ came the quiet reply.
‘Okay, call those boys to load these heavy ones on the truck. Quickly, it’s about to rain.’
Before she could ask Mukyala Mulungi where the ‘boys’ were, her partner had vanished within the field of black-brown faces and dizzying colors that peopled the market square – a small bundle of clothes hugged tightly under one arm.
By the time the women were done loading and the truck driver, Ssula, had been paid his deposit on strict condition that the labeled bundles be promptly delivered to the Kamwokya Traders’ Central Stores in Kyebando – the square was near abandoned and the sun so long-sunk that the only light they were able to see-by was the darting play of headlamps from passing traffic.
‘Kaale Nyabo, I am off. Nze, I will take the taxi to town. Say hello to Oyet and baby for me.’
‘I will do that, Nyabo. And you also, tell Mwami Mulungi ntimutumiidde.’
Out of old-habit, Naluwombo almost said, ‘greet for me the twins too’ – but she recalled that the couple’s two little boys had died in a boda-boda accident almost a year back, and stopped herself.
Mukyala Mulungi smiled back a sad smile at her partner.
‘Okay. I will. And don’t forget that we must be at Kalerwe on Sunday for the morning market.’
‘I won’t forget. See you on Sunday.’
‘Okay. See you too on Sunday. By the way, did you leave the baby at your neighbor’s, oba what?’
‘Ahh, neddaaa … you know my young sister Megga came from Ibanda. So she’s now at home with the baby. She will also help with cooking for Mukasa, so that I can have time to rest …’
‘Oh I see … Kaale, bye.’
With that, Mukyala Mulungi waved to Atwiine, and as they parted, an excited breeze snatched each woman’s hem and flapped it fiercely against her bare legs. The women, grateful for a day of business well spent, held their skirts against their thighs and headed their separate ways – to enjoy the pleasures and suffer the agonies of each’s waiting family.
On her way home, Atwiine bought some vegetables, spices and other culinary oddments to supplement Megga’s cooking; which from experience she knew was typical of the girl’s singular village upbringing – and thus bland and unseasoned.
‘And please give me a half-kilo of sugar as well,’ she reminded the surly shopkeeper. ‘My husband forgot to buy some last week, so we’ve been having dry tea these past few days.’
As she descended the hill into the sprawling plain of darkness across which Kifumbira reposed like a sea blanketed with night – Naluwombo felt a twinge of anxiety slither up her nerves. The township appeared as would a crater of shadows, and the only glimpses of light she could catch were like far-off stars in an ink-black sky.
Twenty minutes later, she stood before the door of the room she called home. Beneath the door, a crack of dim light peeped, so Naluwombo knew Megga was still awake. On listening closely, she could hear footfalls move about, and the clink of utensils punctuated by notes of gentle singing.
That could only mean Mukasa wasn’t home yet.
‘Megga, I am the one.’
‘Aniii?’
‘Yenzee …’
A key turned in the lock, and the dim light leapt weakly from the room to fall upon Atwiine’s slim frame. The young girl inside smiled at her.
‘Welcome home, Ssenga…’she quipped, employing her people’s peculiar mode of universal address for female relations older than oneself.
‘Nvuddeyo. Did you give Amoding her milk?’
‘Yes Ssenga, she is even already asleep.’
Naluwombo walked to the single bed in the room, walled-off from the family’s living area with blue mosquito netting. She lifted the net gently to reveal her baby’s sleeping form.
‘When did she sleep?Sawameka?’
‘Around sawa emu, Ssenga …’
Atwiine checked the aged clock that hung above the utensil-rack. It read twenty past ten, but from the lonely way it clung onto the bare wall, Atwiine thought it looked a little sad – as though it felt a certain pity for those who looked at it, or rather, upon whom it looked.
She blinked thrice to make sure the hands of the clock were actually moving. Many times, Mukasa’s recklessness had caused her to miss appointments with clients and activities around the house –he often forgot to replace the drained batteries.
‘What about Kojja Oyet? He hasn’t come home yet?’
‘Yes Senga, he came and went away …’
It is then that Naluwombo noticed Oyet’s muddy boots in the corner of the room where they kept the shoes.
‘Megga, why haven’t you cleaned those shoes? You know Kojja needs to use them tomorrow …’
‘But Ssenga, Kojja told me not to clean the boots. He said he doesn’t need them anymore.’
‘That he doesn’t need them anymore? Magga, are you joking with me? Why do you mean by that?’
‘I am not joking Auntie, that’s what Kojja Oyet said. He came in and removed his uniform, then he put on his red shirt, the one with a black star on the back, and went out.’
Atwiine continued to stare at her sister, slightly puzzled. Why would Mukasa come home early and then leave so suddenly? He often went straight to the bar on his way from work. He had never come home first, and then left.
‘Oh, he even gave me this chit for you …’
The girl fished under the bed, and pulled out a bag. From the bag, she pulled out a red, leather-bound copy of The African Bible of Black Christianity. She flipped within its pages, going back and forth several times until she seemed to find what she wanted.
‘Here is Kojja’s note.’
Naluwombo’s pulse quickened with anxiety. Oyet leaving a note? He had never done that before. Yes, he knew how to write and all – but wasn’t he the one who usually said education in this country was useless? Isn’t he the one who had promised to send their daughter to a tailoring school the moment she was of age, instead of a ‘good for nothing’ kindergarten?
She took the note from Megga’s hand with a great deal of apprehension. I hope this girl isn’t playing a trick on me, she prayed. She unfolded the chit with trembling hands:
‘My darling Nalu, they chased me from work today. You know very well that this job was my last hope.I’m so sorry. This is the end of the road for me. I wish you well. Please check inside my black shirt for some money I left. That is all I could save since we got married. Take care of our sweet Amoding. When she grows up, tell her that her father loved her. And if you can, please take her to school. Yours in eternal shame, OM.’
No one remembers how long it took Carolina to arrive. But by the time the stout nurse elbowed through the astounded crowd, the small corpse that greeted her eyes had been lifeless for almost an hour.
The body lay awkwardly on the ground, the feet unshod and the dress carelessly ridden up to reveal bloody gashes on the thighs where the car had struck it.
—
Oyet, gone? Why would he just walk out on us like that? How could he? After all we’ve been through? But I thought he had toughened up? I thought things were getting better … I expected … I …
Megga didn’t see when her elder sister burst forth from the stupor, but before the girl could move to stop her, Atwiine had rushed through the door and into the street – running over stones and broken glass on only her bare feet, and splashing through puddles with a blind desperation.
She had to find her Oyet. Before he could leave them.Before he could do anything silly. Before he could leave their daughter.Yes, I’ll tell him about our sweet Birungi. I’ll remind him of her sweet name.
—
On the death certificate at Mulago, the young doctor – a recent graduate of the hospital’s medical school named Achelam– would fill in the death certificate in impeccable cursive:
Name: Naluwombo Atwiine, nee Jennifer.
Age: 23 yrs.
Nationality: Ugandan.
Cause of Death: Motor accident (cranial hemorrhage).
Occupation: Tradeswoman.
Husband: Oyet Mukasa (whereabouts unknown).
Survived by: Amoding Birungi (girl, ten weeks old).
*****
It was two o’clock of a misty morning, and the night-bus on whose speeding wheels the sixty-some men, women and children found themselves travelling – hoed through the sleeping savannahs of silent Buganda country with a sense of man-like purpose.
It almost felt as if the bus had consciously taken upon its spinning shoulders the combined urgency of its passengers, vowing to reach its destination in far fewer hours than the customary ten it took to complete one half of the round-trip along its daily Kampala-Nakaseke route.
The driver – a clean-shaven, prim man with several years of motoring experience tucked under his narrow leather belt – kept his foot gingerly on the pedal, and trained his eyes on the waves of tarmac rushing up at him from the sweep of the bus’s beaming headlights. He knew the route like the back of his veined hands – both now steadily wrapped around the black plastic of the steering wheel – and gently turning it left and right to navigate the bounding bus along its course.
Somewhere above him, in the open sky beyond the bus’s carpet-lined metal roof – a chorus of nocturnal birds screamed raucously into the black night as they flapped past. Strangely, the cawing had a nostalgic note to it – and the driver was reminded of older, simpler days when the road under him had been a mere clearing in the grasslands, pebbly and powdery with dust.
Since then, changes had overtaken each other in fast succession – and to the mulling driver, the new layers of tarmac that now cloaked the old road he had grown to know and love – represented only a fraction of the tectonic shifts that had rocked his country.
The President’s right-hand man, a one Colonel Maaso-Mpiira Ajagenda, had since gone rogue, breaking ranks with the intransigent H.E Kati-Mwaggala Nze-ngendewa in a dramatic letter published in the driver’s favorite daily, The Scarlet Chili.
The driver recalled fondly that the decade-long counterinsurgency against the Bakooko rebels in the country’s North had also, in that time, been prosecuted to completion.
Far to the back of the bus, and from the driver’s estimation quite close to the rear – a small child woke and raised a hungry cry, piercing the stillness. Its mother shushed it quickly, rummaging through her bag for a milk bottle. As she did so, she hummed a soft song that lulled the child and those it’d woken back to gentle sleep.
Nearer to the front, about five rows to the back of him – the driver perceived a passenger clearing his throat with strained control. The driver didn’t see it, but after evacuating his clogged respiratory passageway, the passenger – a man of some forty and few years – stretched a stiff left leg out into the narrow aisle to cure himself of a numbness that’d began to creep up his thigh.
The man’s name was Kibwatukira.
The police sergeant, now barely recognizable in layer upon layer of ill-fitting civilian clothing, was outfitted in perhaps the most obscure of garments. His coat – which had once upon a day been cream-colored, had with age and unremitting rough-use accumulated countless of the visible spectrum’s darker shades – so that it now looked to have been dyed with the myriad colors of night.
To conceal the disheveled outgrowth on his scalp, Kibwatukira had pulled a smoke-colored Gatsby-cap so low over his eyes that only part of the slim, reed-like nose was visible above the briary moustache.
On his chest and arms, three shirts rested one on top of the other, as if it had been too much of a choice to pick amongst the riot of green, pink and vermillion hues – and a fraying scarf of bristly wool lined the space between his neck and the shirts’ crowded collars.
His feet were gloved in five sets of mismatching socks, over which reigned a pair of pale goat-skin Safari boots of the type – in that part of the country – popularly christened Malachi.
Kibwatukira was bound for his ancestral Luweero District, once a coffee-growing stronghold in the country’s central province – but transformed by neglect and dereliction into a graveyard of wild shambas and bushy, desolate homesteads.
So densely-clothed was he that as the roaring bus on each of whose flanks were spray-painted the bolded phrase, AWAKULA ENUUME, spirited them through the small hours – of the numerous risks to life and limb that lay in potential ambush along the tortuous trail, death from cold was undoubtedly the least and last of the fugitive policeman’s worries.
Which is not to say, of course, that for the apparently recumbent Kibwatukira, all was rosy with carefreeness and green with the levity of a clear-conscience.Far from it. Indeed, behind the unflinching exterior and tight-lipped eyelids – a stew of troubled thought was brewing.
They will not think to find me in Luweero. Surely, the distance is too far from the city for them to even bother.
Wankoko won’t come after me anyway – I know too much about his secret dealings. He’ll fear that I will reveal all if threatened. Yes, I think I am safe. But does that idiot Wankoko even know where my village is? That reptile has never asked about my personal life. I am now glad he never did, because to prove my loyalty to him, I may have ended up narrating the fame of my grandfather’s name, and even revealed the names of our hunting dogs.
I’m so glad the fool didn’t ask. By the way, he doesn’t even know where I stay in Kampala – despite all the secret missions I’ve conducted for him.
Eiii, I wish I had taken all the money and bought not even a single boot. I could have easily started that timber business I’ve always wanted. I should have even sold that new desk in my office and lied that it had been stolen. But maybe that would have been too risky?That treacherous Wankoko may have used it as an excuse to come after me and cover his own tracks.
Anyway, I think I will be safe in Luweero for a few months. As they say – South or North, home is a loyal mouth.
Sprouting from the reassurance of sapient-thought and what to him sounded to be rock-solid logic, a thin smile kissed his lips. But only for a moment, for in the next instant – the rodents of doubt were yet gnawing at Kibwatukira’s conscience.
But I know that man hates me. He may decide to ask Opolot about my whereabouts. Opolot may take him to that old woman’s place, and the old woman knows everything!
Or even Muwonge. That Muwonge is a cowardly womanizer… I know he will betray me for two packets of condoms!
Man! Why did I ever take him to my drinking joint? I should never have trusted him even when he tried to befriend me. I let my guard down because he promised to connect me to that juicykyana who came to report that her husband had abandoned her with two children in the house.
I am such a trusting fool!See where all this trust has led me?
But if they come for me, I will tell about Wankoko. He is the one who recruited me into the business in the first place. Yes, I will tell.
The bus gradually began to slow in speed, and as the column of recessed ceiling lights came on – the passengers could be heard groaning with stiffness and stirring from various depths of fatigued slumber.
A murmur of gossip had begun to spread down the aisle that there was something ahead.
An accident?
Maybe thugs trying to rob us?
A fallen tree?
Kibwatukira’s mind was awhirl with anxiety, and as he puffed though the press of bodies crowding the aisle to try and make sense of what was happening, a voice shouted something that buckled his pulse.
‘Road-block. Police check!’
Passengers scrambled back to their seats, a fear of the unknown sweeping through the bus.
‘What is happening? What’s wrong?’
A rugged-faced man with disgust in his eyes, who had made it to the front ahead of the others, strolled back down the cramped aisle and slumped into the seat across from Kibwatukira.
‘They claim to be looking for someone.’
*****
She felt it was time to call it a night, or more accurately in her case – a day.She needed to count her money and put it in the savings’ box hidden under a rock in one corner of the shack.
One of the customers sat right in that corner, staring up at the roof, apparently deep in meditation. The man had been by himself all evening, not mixing with the other drinkers. He seemed to have had something grave on his mind.
He was the rangy one they called Mukasa-Oyet. From what she knew – and she knew a thing or two about every man who’d ever sucked from her pots – he was a night guard with a private security firm called Tiger’s something.
He often came to drink in full uniform, which she suspected was against his job regulations, but then – she wasn’t a law enforcer. Her role was to make men drink and forget their inner worries, not worry about their outer appearance.
She faintly recalled that the man had been mourning over something when he came in earlier that evening, but had grown gradually quiet as the hours passed; very probably as the brew finally settled into his system.
It had that enigmatic quality, did the old woman’s brew – it wiped men’s tears away.
Mukaaka walked up to him.
‘Ssebo, it is time to go. Help me wake up your friend sleeping in my pot and go out with him. It is dangerous at this time. Best to walk together.’
The man remained motionless for what seemed a century, then – lowering his bloodshot eyes slowly – he gazed wearily into the old woman’s face.He turned to look at the other man lying on the floor. The man’s head was pocketed inside the drinking-pot from which his group had been sucking, and he could as easily have drowned in dregs of brew for all they knew.
Oyet stood up so suddenly that Mukaaka thought he meant her harm. She uttered a reflexive gasp.
‘That man is not my friend. I have no friends,’Mukasa said firmly, before hunching his shoulders and staggering out.
In Oyet’s back pocket, the old woman thought she spied what appeared to be the knotted loop of rope. Mukaaka shrugged her old shoulders and, taking a long guava branch from where it reclined on the wall, proceeded to flog the sleeping man awake.
*****
His salary had just been paid, so he felt especially lighthearted that morning.
Muwonge’s boss was away on ‘official duty,’ so the young corporal – not one to waste an opportunity for good gossip – sauntered around to the holding cells at the back of the station-house, where the outpost’s lone prisoner was cooling his heels.
Officer Wankoko had gone – as the state’s key witness – to Nakawa Magistrates’ Court two hours earlier, to testify in a criminal trial involving Sergeant Fulgencio Kibwatukira– that notorious colleague of theirs accused of theft, embezzlement, and masterminding organized crime.
The Sergeant was being arraigned alongside ten others of similar rank, from several other police stations around the city. Apparently, the officers – alleged accomplices – had had a corruption syndicate spanning several years and channels of ‘business.’ Among these numbered fake procurements and shop robberies, on top of orchestrating vehicle and laptop thefts.
‘But Kibwatukira was a broke guy. How can he be responsible for all those things? Where was he putting the money? Hmmm …’ wondered Muwonge to himself.
He disregarded the mismatching facts, and instead focused on narrating the more dramatic parts of the story to the prisoner.
Muwonge had heard, from both pseudo-official and gossip-based sources – that the operation in which Kibwatukira had been netted had been a spectacle to behold.
That after passing the first police checkpoint undetected, Kibwatukira had decided to take no more chances. He had thus tricked an unsuspecting female passenger in the bus on which he was traveling to leave her bag with him long enough for him to pilfer a busuuti and makeup-set.
When the officers at the next police-checkpoint had thus noticed a strange-looking character in a loose-fitting gomesi – inside whose capacious confines had taken occupancy a pair each of too-large-to-be-real breasts and buttocks – their antennae of suspicion had naturally beeped in high alert.
The mysterious ‘female’ – her scarlet-glossed lips smiling unctuously on a face pale as a ghost’s from the hastily applied butter-thick coating of powder – had promptly been ‘requested’to step outside for brief questioning, the details of which were of an unspecified nature.
It was said that Kibwatukira – sensing certain discovery, had in that desperate moment lost all nerve and, casting all circumspection to the monsoon winds, attempted to make a run for it. He’d been drinking all through the journey however, and thus didn’t get far into the bushes before the soberer and more athletic Rapid-Response-Unit men caught up. He had been dragged kicking and screaming all the way back to Kampala, from where his initial non-cooperation and repeated blabbering of the name ‘Wankoko’ had earned him a referral to Kireka Special Interrogation Unit of Impossible Cases (KSIUIC).
It was said that the moment he was driven through the infamous KSIUIC gates and he realized where he was, Kibwatukira – before he was even asked so much as a single question – had yielded more information than anyone had ever offered in the long and illustrious history of the facility’s suspect interrogation. With one exception – his story had changed from naming Wankoko, to accepting vehemently that he was the supreme leader of the racket.
Muwonge slapped his thighs and laughed heartily, causing Bujjaga – the prisoner to whom he had been narrating all this, to snort in derision.Why would a man laugh at another’s shame?
Bujjaga saw that the immature, wooly-headed policeman had a folded copy of that day’s The Sacrlet Chilliin his hand. In all the time he’d been locked up, Bujjaga realized that he hadn’t had any meaningful contact with the outside world. His wife had left him years back, so no family visits had been expected. His friend Oyet had come once, three weeks back – but then the man had looked so troubled and unwell that Bujjaga had firmly told him not to bother returning, and instead take as much time as possible to rest. They’d joked about the days they used to eat Molokonyi at Naloongo’s.
Since his capture, the only snippets of goings-on in the outside Bujjaga had been able to catch, were gleaned from Muwonge’s rumors. A week ago, the man had been talking about some crazed fellow who’d taken his own life in the neighborhood. The poor man’s wife had also been knocked down by a speeding truck shortly after.
‘It will be good to read a recent paper,’ Bujjaga thought. He asked Muwonge for his copy of The Chili.
The corporal’s bulbous eyes narrowed warily.
Why would this prisoner want to read his newspaper? Did he even know how to read? Or was it one of those tricks he planned to use to escape from jail.Not on his watch!
‘I haven’t been watching all those PRISON BREAK episodes for nothing,’ determined Muwonge silently, and then out loud – ‘You man, what do you want from the newspaper?’
‘Is it a crime to read a newspaper?’
The man was clearly arrogant. Muwonge gazed distastefully at Bujjaga’s arms and chest with their coarse mantle of black hair. Wasn’t this the man who had tried to rob the condom depot?
The policeman decided that this was an opportunity to display his oft underappreciated superior intelligence. Instead of simply refusing the request, he would show the man that he was not your average brainless policeman whose only weapon was brute force. He had a brain he was proud of, and he could use it. He hadn’t earned a Division-four in his Primary Seven exams for nothing!
He would show the lumpen.
‘By the way you man, do you know how to read? Most of you petty criminals are illiterate. You wasted your parents’ school fees. If you can read, I’ll give you the paper,’he said, evidently impressed by his own quick wit. The corporal held up the front page of the paper a few meters from the jail bars behind which the prisoner’s eyes gazed indifferently.
‘You see. This headline talks about the national budget,’ continued Muwonge.
The man read the headline and entire front-page article in fluent English, stopping not for as much as a second’s breather. And it wasn’t about the budget, but about promotions in the army.
Apparently, it was Muwonge who’d done the wasting of fees.But luckily for him, he conceded before further damage could be inflicted to his ‘superior’ intelligence.
‘Make sure you give it back after five minutes. I also need to read it.’
And what have you been waiting for all along, you gossipy fool! The words went through Bujjaga’s mind, but what his mouth voiced was – ‘Yes Corporal.’
Bujjaga straightened-out the newspaper, passing his palms over the creased pages to flatten them. It felt good to finally come out of the darkness. He smiled in amusement at the avalanche of scandalous stories shaming adulterous spouses, corrupt ministers and poverty-stricken celebrities. And then – as he thumbed over the glossed centerfold of a scant-clad damsel, a small square-framed advertorial caught his sharp eye.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN The general public is duly notified that the child named Amoding Birungi, an orphan of eleven weeks, has been adopted from Musana Babies’ Home by Mr. and Mrs. Mulungi of Makindye, Kitembeyi Zone. The child’s parents, formerly residents of Kifumbira Zone in Kampala, both died within a few hours of each other last month. The adopting couple, who lost their own children a year ago, are grateful for the fresh glint of sunshine in their lives.
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