“I am going to open a carpentry workshop and hire a manager to run it. I can’t stay there all the time,” he said. “I have to hustle some money from these returning Indians. I need to do something intellectual.”
“How?”
“Well, they won’t find the necessary papers to reclaim their property waiting for them. It is a mess in those offices, and many Indians are afraid to go there. Many fear they will be attacked or robbed or exploited, which plays into my hands. They need people to chase their documents and contact people for them. I have the expertise.”
“Sounds like you will be working harder than at the Rehabilitation office.”
“I can pick and choose my clients,” he said smugly.
“Then what?”
“Look at the streets. What do you see? Haven’t you seen the hundreds of Development Aid Organization vehicles all over the place? They are like sharks following the smell of blood. Many come here but don’t know how to chase work permits. I can do it for them, as long as they are ready to pay.”
It was a brilliant idea, actually. Peace was indeed a bringer of foreigners: during Amin’s time, you hardly saw a white face on the street. During Obote II, whites started coming, tentatively. Now it was a wave: tourists with backpacks, white women in mini-skirts, men in shorts and boots, groups in tourist vans, Japanese men in business suits and more. The city was abuzz with American charismatic preachers who addressed frenzied crowds planted with preprogrammed fainters and swooners. They spiced the show up with spectacular miracles in which the lame broke their crutches, the blind ground their spectacles into the floorboards, and the deaf, who had nothing to destroy, shouted like lunatics with ants up their assholes. Some preachers promised to cure the viral plague by the power of Jesus; others promised to eradicate every affliction from the face of the earth. For the first time, there were vigils where Pentecostals and Baptists congregated and prayed and sang all night long under the watchful eye of video cameras. The traditional churches found themselves in competition with lay preachers in expensive suits who jumped, danced and rolled on the floor for effect. The era of televangelism had dawned, and the old padres, stiff as arthritics, were worried because they had been caught snoring and left in the blocks.
Fortune hunters — seekers of gold, copper, diamonds, red mercury (illegally dug out of meteorological towers), animal hides, rhino horn, parrots from Sese Island; merchants of inferior goods; toxic waste dumpers; passport and dollar counterfeiters — all came disguised in one form or other. Africa was represented by the flamboyant Senegalese, who came dressed in gold-thread boubous with wide trousers and big watches. They bought legal and illegal merchandise, and exchanged both real and counterfeit dollars.
Lwendo was right: money was there to be made.
I did not play any part in his new plans. They were too peripatetic for my liking. I also knew the mess he was getting into. The story in most offices was the same. The filing system was horrible. Documents had been heaped on top of each other for years like tobacco leaves at a market. Everyone who touched them had to be offered something for his trouble. That was how the system worked. There was sense in it, too, since the salaries were horrible and everyone knew that the Indians had come to make money. If one did not want to pay, as some Indians did not at first, one could stay in one’s hotel for weeks without anything getting done; but once money changed hands, and somebody’s lunch and supper were assured, then the piles of dusty files and loose paper were ungummed for the first time in fifteen years, and one got what one wanted.
Lwendo fed me stories of his adventures with Indian returnees. He often accompanied them to inspect their property. Some were moved to tears. Others were angry that the edifices were run-down. Most were glad, because they already had a game plan. It had performed miracles for those who had arrived before them, and it still worked: renovation, rent-hiking and eviction. The city was slowly washing its face. The rust-streaked roofs got a gloss. The old pirate haunts took on the look of cherished sea chests bursting with fresh consumer life. What had come on the wings of piracy was leaving by the same means.
In the meantime, the brigadier — who was actually a major in the new army, although friends addressed him by his old title — again, officially, proposed to Aunt Lwandeka. One evening, she asked me whether she should accept the proposal. What did she expect me to say? I told her to accept if she was happy with it.
“I have already accepted,” she said, beaming. For many weeks, our life was turned upside down. The impending wedding consumed all our time and energy. I was exhausted from travelling to buy a thousand and one things, to inform relatives and her friends, to do this and that.
The women in the area took over the cooking, cleaning and caring for her children. Everywhere one turned, there were people eating, drinking, singing, arguing, ironing, bringing in or carrying out things. We woke up early and went to bed late. The affair became bigger than it should have been because the women of the area decided to celebrate liberation from past oppression on the same day. In her joy, Aunt had allowed people to hijack her day and turn it into a community affair.
The couple got married at Christ the King Church in Kampala. Mbale, Padlock, Kasawo, Serenity and Tiida were all present. Aunt was as happy as I had ever seen her, radiant through her layers of tulle. The makeup and the occasion had made her look very young, her naturally very smooth skin glowing. I caught Aunt Kasawo saying, “Who would have thought!” The tone betrayed her — it was punctured by too much envy. She was digesting the fact that she was the only one of the trio of sisters who had never wed. She saw Pangaman and his successors as vampires who had sucked the life out of her without even honoring her with an official ceremony. She fantasized regularly about turning down a marriage proposal, but no man had ever put himself in the position to be rejected by her, and the one she was seeing currently had made it clear that marriage had never crossed his mind. “I would buy a pickup van or build a good house with the money people waste on weddings,” he always said. His reaction to this wedding had been no less cynicaclass="underline" “The government tells us that there is no money for reconstructing the country, yet soldiers are wedding every Sunday.” Kasawo felt that her love life had been a potholed plain with one or two molehills but no real high points. She felt the hole at her center palpitate with unrequited ambition.
The brigadier’s army friends attended in big numbers, and the bridal pair walked through a glittering arch of swords on their way in and out of the church. The place was filled with light and music and the smells of incense and well-tended bodies.
The most redeeming thing about this wedding was that the reception took place at the Sheraton Hotel. I had nothing to do except enjoy myself. I was happy for Aunt. She seemed to have it alclass="underline" money, fame, power, love. For a girl who had come to the city with nothing, she had risen to the top the hard way. She could now snap her fingers and get what she wanted. She was thirty-six, a stage of life when most of her contemporaries were bogged down in dreary, diaper-ridden lives, and yet she was just getting married. And not to just anybody: the brigadier was a good-looking, presentable, powerful man. He reminded me of my former rector, and I could not help wondering whether he did not run a small spy organization. He was a mystery to me. Despite his dating Aunt for some time, I had never come to know him. Since Aunt did most of the travelling, we had met only during the preparations for the wedding. “I hear good things about you,” he had said on two separate occasions. Beyond that, he was a closed book. They both looked very happy as they cut the cake. As they distributed bits of it, I thought about Jo Nakabiri.