I was installed in a small hotel opposite Central Station, and from my window I could see thousands of people pouring out of the station gate. They reminded me of the crowds at the taxi park in Kampala. Cars, trams, buses and trains rumbled on in a ceaseless hubbub that was occasionally penetrated by the roar of a monster motorcycle. Old, thin-faced buildings with gables mounted on them like magic triangles lined the canals in the grim manner of eighteenth-century soldiers awaiting another looming battle.
My euphoria lasted only till the following morning: flies had ambushed my new paradise. And like Dr. Ssali, Aunt Tiida’s husband, who had to deal with the terrorism of those terrible creatures with a raw circumcision wound, I found myself fighting a war on two or more fronts. The irony of travelling in luxury, only to arrive and not only confront flies but also have to recount fly-bejewelled tragedies on the first day of work, was not lost on me. The harsh anti-climax gave me nervous diarrhea. The worst in international beggary, image pillage and necrophilic exploitation waited for my seal of approval. Pictures of children more dead than alive, with flies in their eyes, on their mouths, in their nostrils, on their clothes, ambushed me. The loud pleas for help festooning their heads like demonic halos completely deflated my ego. I found myself trembling and in need of a stiff drink.
My opinion of my hosts took a U-turn. The crassness of the propaganda said volumes about both them and their audience. I was in the midst of pirates far more cold-blooded than I was, and I felt the need to revise and jettison much of my old knowledge. I tried to place myself in the shoes of their so-called donors. If somebody came to me with those pictures, especially the ones with children twisted like constipated chicks, I would have asked them why they had waited that long to act. But then the business was run on expedience and was meant not to prevent but to patch up festering wounds, with flimsy, pus-soaked bandages. I had made the mistake of coming at the end of the feeding frenzy which had peaked in the eighties, when fund-raising organizations wielded powers of life and death over nameless millions and did whatever was necessary to extract money from the calculated indifference of the wealthy West. They not only targeted geriatrics, but also spread the shrapnel over a wide field, hitting the constituency they believed had to be rubbed with shit and flies before releasing a dollar here, a dime there. The caustic magnesium burst of Reaganomics and Thatcherite liberalism had penetrated deep into the aid cartels and empires, and finding myself in its residual glare did my eyes and my sensibilities no good.
The cartels and the sharks of the aid industry had fed to surfeit and at the same time nailed their backs against the wall. The indifferent had become super-indifferent, numbed by the necrophilia, the fly-bejewelled beggary and the grandiloquent appeals to crippled magnanimity. Some sharks had, in the meantime, put two and two together and were trying to inject a humane element into their necrophilia and fly-flaunting extravaganzas. I felt that it was the duty of my hosts and their colleagues to rectify what they had demolished. Yet I did not feel in any way inclined or obligated to lend them a hand. I enjoyed the spite of not telling them that I was taking no further part in their plans. They showed me the fund-raising schedule, packed with activity like a tin of beans. I was scheduled to make twenty speaking appearances and do a dozen newspaper interviews. I endorsed it all, and even thanked them for caring so much about the faceless millions. I called them the Good Samaritans, and they blushed; the irony was not totally lost on them.
Back in my hotel room, I buried my face in the pillow and screamed. How could anyone expect me to sell Aunt Lwandeka down the road? It was not the dead children that had impelled me to withdraw. It was the picture of a young skeletal woman, set with huge letters — screaming, begging, nightmare messages — that had taken the will out of me. In the picture, she was lying on a mat, her cadaverous face upturned, her eyes swimming in mucusy holes, her knees rudely exposed, her stick limbs a perfect picture of a slow, torture-ridden death. The money this cadaver would raise would trickle down to the continent, and then it would double back in the form of international debt servicing and repayment. So the continent was like Aunt in her last days: the little sustenance that went in via the mouth oozed out of the rectum. I now wished Lwendo had squeezed the pedophile very hard and kicked other aid organizations in the groin. These were not essentially evil people, at least not comparable to some of our murderers ranging free in these climes, but they were keeping bad company, company I no longer wanted to be part of, even for a day longer.
I packed my bags the same night. I went down to a phone booth outside the hotel and made a call to the ghetto. As the phone rang on the other side, my heart raced. I was banishing myself from a hostile Eden. As the phone rang I could hear flies buzzing, jumping off the pictures awaiting my fund-raising saliva in the morning and colliding with each other. The vision of blue-green flies and the small black ones colonizing carrion, shit and putrescence filled the booth with a cadaverous stench and made me nauseated. Alas, I had left nothing behind. I had buried nothing in the clouds. I had brought it all with me, coded secretly, gnawing away in the dark like the virus that had killed Aunt Lwandeka. I felt beleaguered, encumbered, enervated. I was too aware of the whiteness of the people around me, on the streets, in the buildings facing Central Station, in the bistros on the Damrak, everywhere. I wanted to find my feet, and to put the horror of the flies behind me. I felt the money in my pocket. How much worse did it feel out here if one was penniless? Or if one had to scrape it off the floor? Or if one had to sit out one’s hell in detention camps awaiting acceptance or rejection following pleas for political asylum? As I ruminated on this somebody said, “Aallo?” Yes, it was the flat, Lugandanized English of our people. I felt like jumping up and knocking myself out on the booth ceiling. Little Uganda, that cocoon of Ugandans in exile, was calling right in the heart of white Holland! This was what returning Indians must have felt when talking to people in Gujarati or Urdu in the middle of Kampala.
“Osiibye otya nnyabo?” (How are you, madam?)
“Bulungi ssebo” (All right, sir), the voice replied. How sweet it sounded in the cold night air! And what a relief to know that Action II had given me real addresses! The rest of the conversation, and the introductions, and the inquiries about where I could rent a room for some time, occurred in a dream. I could already see the flushed faces of my hosts on discovering that I had disappeared, especially since they hadn’t a clue that I hated what they did, and how they did it. I left the booth laughing, the taste of revenge burning like liquor in my breast, the prospect of staying with people from my country lending wings to my limbs. Outside the hotel, the canals were gleaming with multi-colored light emanating from the windows and the streetlamps stationed along the banks. The dark, glittering water was moving, wriggling like a serpent pinned at both ends. I had pinned mine, and I felt invincible.
The map of the metro track that chiselled through the sprawling ghetto looked like the letter Y or a broken rosary, the beads forming the sprawling ghetto. In summer, the sight of the towering buildings is softened by the lush green of the roadside vegetation: flowering bushes, trees and grass that lead the way from the steel track. In winter, the trees are stricken bare like fleshless limbs, the sky as gray as the concrete in its brutal upward thrust. I arrived in summer, and the green bewitched me, coloring my first impression of the place. I emerged from the metro, bags in hand, and surveyed the vista — the hulking buildings, the trees along the paved roads and the walkways. It was not bad, at least not as bad as the word “ghetto” had first intimated. There were groups of youths in baggy clothes with canvas shoes and baseball caps turned back to front standing along the metro station, under the culverts and beside the buildings like soldiers contemplating an advancing war. I was excited as I walked past them. I kept thinking that these should have been my students at Sam Igat Memorial College. But what kind of students?