“Lwandeka was a typical last child,” Mbale said at length. “She took advantage of Mam and Dad’s weakness and grew up thinking that the whole universe revolved around her.”
“We are told that the State Research Bureau arrested her for corresponding with German saboteurs. Why did she do that? Didn’t she know that Amin meant business? Didn’t she know that it was dangerous to write letters to Germans?” somebody asked.
“All of us who were raised right turned out right,” Padlock joined in. “You who had it easy are now paying for earlier freedom.” She looked at her second sister, Kasawo.
In Padlock’s eyes, both her sisters were whores. To begin with, Lwandeka had failed to find a man to marry her, shaming the family by breeding children in sin. Kasawo, the fatter and elder of the two, had not done any better. She ran amok during her teen days; she rebelled against her parents; and she eloped with a crooked man who drank heavily and beat her, almost killing her. She too had missed the honor of holy matrimony, and was now a market woman, that halfway station between a white-collar whore and an eternal mistress.
Padlock blamed her parents for neglecting their duty, especially for sparing the rod on the girls, and she felt that they deserved all the humiliations life dished out to them. At the peak of their rebellion, both girls had gone against parental will, returned home whenever they wanted, dated older men, dropped out of school and refused to do anything at home. Now they wallowed in sin like pigs in shit and made the same mistakes, like dogs eating their own vomit. Padlock was of the view that imprisonment could be the best thing that ever happened to her youngest sister, provided she didn’t get raped. Imprisonment would cure her of the urge to correspond with spoiled German women, most probably whores, who did not fear God and fomented rebellion.
Padlock went over her childhood days again. How she had worked for these people, washing, cooking, digging. How her back had creaked as she did chores they refused to do. How thorns had pricked her skin as she went to the forest to collect firewood for the family. How her neck had ached as she carried pots of water on her head. How her parents had always sided with the younger children, always blaming her for the mistakes others made. How she had got beaten for little errors. How her parents had refused to protect her against school and village bullies, rationalizing that it was her daily cross, meant to make her strong. And how, after all that, her parents had gone soft on the younger children!
Padlock now saw her role as that of financier, with much of her money going to pay Lwandeka’s ransom. Gratified by her monetary power, Padlock did not air her most radical views on the disintegration of her parents’ authority. It was the reason she never pursued the lead when Kasawo hit back and said, “We never had it easy. We just had the guts to rebel, and to stay in perpetual rebellion. That was where we beat you, who turned out according to Mam and Dad’s prescriptions. The good thing is that we are all parents now.”
“You disowned your first child because his father tried to kill you, so don’t talk to us about parenthood,” Mbale hit back.
“Your wife has never tried to kill you, has she? Before she raises a panga at you, leave that extremity to me, who has been there,” Kasawo said rather calmly, and Mbale kept quiet then.
“We are all getting too excited,” Padlock said tactfully. “Why not discuss whether the men we are going to entrust the ransom money to are reliable people?”
That defused the tension. Padlock, having made the most important contribution to the discussion, stopped listening to the chitchat which followed: talk about wives, her nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles … Her mind was already back home, worrying whether the roof was still on her house. She had a life to lead, dresses to make and children to think about.
Conversation, however, stubbornly went back to her past. Kasawo, still smarting from Mbale’s earlier comments, ganged up with her youngest brother and accused both Padlock and Mbale of childhood mistreatment. She mentioned pinching, name-calling, malicious abandonment when they went to the well at night or to the forest on firewood-gathering errands. Padlock felt like slapping them and forcing them to shut up or to say the rosary. She and Mbale kept quiet under the assault, and the duo’s anger was soon deflated and lighter conversation introduced. Laughter erupted, and the place shook with the weight of family history resurrected.
By the third day, Padlock had reached a sort of compromise with her family: she tolerated their chitchat as long as they did not expect her to participate wholeheartedly in it. It gave her a sense of superiority to watch mere mortals grovelling in the quagmires of memory. She was waiting for news about Lwandeka, which was not forthcoming. The carapace of her patience was gradually cracking up. It disintegrated totally with the arrival of the one person she had neither the intention nor the wish to meet: Aunt Nakibuka. The hydra of anger, hate and impotent disgust sank its teeth deep in her, and she had to fight hard to curb the violent upheaval inside. She somehow managed to sprinkle a sheen of civility onto her emotions.
Normally, nieces got on very well with aunts who had seen them to their bridal bed and stood by their side during the turbulent events which led to the first public celebration of womanhood. Nieces usually cherished these aunts, because they had held open for them the portals to womanhood and motherhood and proffered tips on how to control and manipulate a man without his awareness. These aunts were the first court of arbitration, and combined the role of defense lawyer, counsellor, conspirator and judge. Nieces often said things like “Our man has done this or that” or “Our man threatens to divorce us” or “Our man is seeing somebody else.” A niece’s marriage was also a bridal aunt’s marriage, in a sense, because both wanted it to work.
Padlock was not anyone’s average woman or niece: the nun in her never died.
She was uncomfortable with Nakibuka, who she felt knew too much about her. Nakibuka had seen her nakedness, which, in her convent days, was anathema. In those days, one never looked at oneself, even as one bathed or pulled devil hair. The body belonged to Christ, and to Christ alone. She felt that this woman also knew too much about Serenity: Had she not courted his erection? Had she not seen him impotent, afraid, defeated? Had she not bathed him when he made a fool of himself on their wedding night, cavorting with low-down drunks and common sinners who smeared him with vomit?
This woman had, worst of all, revealed family secrets to Serenity during the honeymoon period. For this Padlock felt she could never forgive her aunt. Hadn’t Nakibuka told Serenity everything about his wife’s early childhood, her nicknames, her attack on Mbale, her convent days, her desperation after expulsion from the convent, everything she did not want anybody to know? How dare she betray the family that way? People with loose tongues always got their punishment, and Padlock was sure that Nakibuka’s was waiting. Padlock also felt that her aunt was in league with the Devil and was going to destroy her family and marriage.