“Will you do something for me?” I asked her.
“What is it?”
“I want to introduce you to my father, our father, as my fiancée.”
“What do you want to do that for?”
“I have my reasons.”
“You do not believe that I will marry you, do you?”
“Well, of course not,” I said irritably.
“Then what are you up to?”
“Let us say there is some unfinished business between me and my father.”
“Why bring me in?” Her directness made me cringe. She was doing her best to look into the future; I was reluctant to abandon the mires of the present and the past.
“There is much unfinished business between you and him too,” I answered.
“Why would I want to meet him that way?”
“Are you not angry at how he treated your mother, and you in particular?”
“Of course I am. But that is not how I want to play it.”
“How do you want to play it?”
“By ignoring him the way he ignored me.”
“Don’t you want him to squirm with embarrassment?”
“What use would it be?”
“It would be something to me.”
“Give it up. There is no future in it.”
“What is your idea of revenge?”
“Marrying a rich man in a stunning wedding ceremony, with a motorcade, ten flower girls, a long bridal train, a troupe of traditional dancers and a feast for days.”
The conventionality of it! How could a girl so mistreated by her father be this conventional? She wanted to make Serenity feel a pauper vis-à-vis his son-in-law. What if Serenity did not give a damn about such things? What if he saw it as a waste of capital? It all sounded so shallow. Would Serenity not pity this girl, because such rich men usually had other wives and she would have to wait for him for days?
“Do you want to be one of several wives?” I was thinking of Lusanani, wondering whether these two women had the same views. A Hajj Gimbi look-alike, potbelly and all, handling this cute girl! I could see him sweating over her and wheezing like a steam engine. I could see him fighting hard to maintain his erection in her super-tight cunt. I felt both sick and angry.
“As long as a man gives me freedom to do what I want, I do not mind about the rest of his business.”
I felt quite rootless now. I could only drift into Lwendo’s claws. How lucky Serenity was! Once again he had escaped.
I met Lwendo at the Ministry of Rehabilitation office on Kampala Road. Everything was in disarray. There were dusty file cabinets, a few sticks of old furniture, an overused typewriter and a black telephone that made a very loud screeching sound. He took me outside to the General Post Office building, and we sat on the railing and talked.
“You don’t know how relieved I am,” he said. “The man was getting impatient and was about to suggest somebody else. But now we can go ahead.”
“Where do we go from here?” I asked. “Do I have to meet him?”
“No. He only has to have your particulars. Write an application for a job in the ministry, which I will deliver to him. Leave the rest to me.”
“To whom do we have to report?”
“A certain rehabilitation officer.”
“And what are we supposed to do?”
“To double-check the applications, the sites and the relevance of the materials requested. After that, to make sure that the goods have been delivered. Don’t worry about the rest; I will be in charge.”
We went to a restaurant on Luwum Street and had a lunch of matooke, meat and greens, washed down with a beer. Good start, I thought. At SIMC, there had been no lunch. Lwendo talked about his present girlfriend, but I was not too interested. She was older than him, a nurse at Mulago Hospital, and they were having their ups and downs.
After lunch, we went to the shops and bought foolscap paper. These were the Indians’, those pirates’, old haunts, which the IMF wanted returned to them. Time had frozen the stores in stagnancy. The tenants, knowing that they were dealing with other people’s property, had not effected repairs, and the Custodian Board, intent on getting its piece of the action, had not insisted on maintenance and repairs. The rust-streaked roofs, the cracked pavements, the grime-ridden windows, summed up the situation well.
Inside, a shop was shared by about twenty people, each with a small space at the counter. Many traders rented the space just to display their goods — imports from Dubai, sometimes from London — and when a customer came, they took him or her behind the shop, or to a place where the real stock was. A few people had made money here, but for most, it had been a question of improvising and surviving. Now the original owners were poised to return. The talk in town was what the traders in these shells were going to do about it. How were the Indians going to play it this time? Last time they had enjoyed complete monopoly, but now Africans had moved in on their turf. The whole thing was heating up.
The industrialists returned first. The small fry, the retailers and wholesalers, followed tentatively. You could see them in business suits or in light safari suits walking in groups, looking all over, trying to dredge up clogged memories, wondering how they were going to pick up old threads. The second generation, who were children at the time of the exodus and had grown up in Britain, were less impressed. You could see their parents desperately trying to kindle the dream in their skeptical hearts.
As one looked at the city, with some buildings hollowed out by bombs, others peeling in the sun and more bearing hurried face-lifts, one wondered how it was going to accommodate all the different forces bubbling inside it. Many among the trading class had hoped that the government would favor them and keep out the Indians because “everyone” had contributed to the guerrilla war and lost people; but the government was more concerned with long-term development, a thing which did not figure in most traders’ scheme of things.
Lwendo and I spent the first few weeks walking all over the city, visiting different sites connected with our job. We went to rehabilitation warehouses in the industrial area to study the invoicing system. We visited Radio Uganda offices, where one of our key people worked, and proceeded to other places.
I was relieved that Lwendo was in mufti: green trousers, a green shirt and black shoes. He did not carry a gun, and we walked through the busy streets just like any other people. Army jeeps now and then drove by, but they had no sirens and did not push vehicles off the road. The taxi vans were busy as usual, and now some took travellers to the Triangle, where they had not been in years.
Our first assignment was to cross-check an allocation of blankets destined for Nakaseke, a former guerrilla hideout deep in the Triangle. We got on a bus up to Luwero, forty kilometers from the city. Just ten kilometers from Kampala, we started seeing fruit stands along the road, with skulls arranged in neat lines at the front, shin and thigh bones and the rest in piles at the back. The skulls had no jawbones, and many had cracks and holes on top where bullets or axes had penetrated them. Polished by the rain and dried by the sun, they could have been playthings in a morbid ritual game; but with the ghostly, desecrated buildings directly behind them, where signs of life were just beginning to show, curious faces emerging from behind the ruins to peek at the passengers getting off buses, there was no fun in it. The bus stopped at every little skeletal town and dropped off a person or two, sometimes with a bundle, sometimes empty-handed. Heading toward the ruins, the arrival walked through paths and roads choked by five-year-old grass, some of which grew inside the hollow buildings and poured through the roofs and doorways, windows and ventilators. As one saw these individuals heading for old settlements hidden behind the bushes, one wondered what they would find there: Skulls to add to the collection on the fruit stands? Villages wiped out? Or a thing or two to hinge old memories on?