During my second holiday, I saw a picture of the famous brigadier. It was again in that Good News Bible, where Aunt seemed to hide things dear to her. I had seen the man once on television and three times in the papers. I started suspecting that this was more than guerrilla business. Soldiers never gave photographs to civilians like that, except for very personal reasons. I felt excited and at the same time repelled by this move. So my maternal aunt was fucking one of the leading men in the country! What nerve! The picture had been taken with a Polaroid camera, a very convenient thing for such a man, who must have mistrusted photo studios. But why keep it in the house? Was that not the height of girlish folly? I remembered her fat, girlish handwriting. Was my family doomed to cross paths with soldiers? I was also consumed by hero worship. I would have given anything to know what this man was like as a person. What made him tick? What did it feel like to be in government and at the same time sympathize with guerrillas?
With Mr. Storm Crusher confined to his house, I felt secure in Aunt’s house. I no longer had reason to bully her children. I had grown to like them. I thought of them as the outspoken version of my old shitters, whom I had not seen in a long time.
Early in 1976 I went to the village for the first time in years. The hills and the swamps and the forests were as magnificent as ever. The village had shrunk. It was like a desert island eroded by gales, before being revitalized by a new population of pirates. The old part of the village was trapped in an abyss of desolation, while the new part exhaled the harsh air of dubious wealth. I found drinking places in the most unlikely spots. Loud dance music emanated from the obscure corner where Fingers, the leper, had his house. There was a new house now, with a new iron roof that glared like trapped lightning and a huge loudspeaker on the veranda that spread musical mayhem all around. Strange youths in bell-bottoms and large, ugly platform shoes swayed past me as they struggled with intoxication from imported liquors. Loud drunken boys walked with thick-bottomed drunken girls in thick shoes, Afro wigs and gaudy jewelry, mouthing obscenities formerly unknown in these swampy areas. Where had all these people come from?
A clutch of new houses with red bricks and iron roofs had loud advertisements dangling on the verandas: SUPERMARKET, HOTEL, RESTAURANT, CASINO. In front of these “supermarkets,” “hotels,” “restaurants” and “casinos,” youthful gamblers slapped smudged cards hard and loud on gaudy tables to the roar of the spectators. Expert nostrils produced double-barrelled nicotine fumes. Alcohol flowed among the tables. It impregnated brains with fights and groins with frustrated hard-ons. I glimpsed a mini-brawl. A card game had gone rancid. Cards flew in the air. The table lost its limbs. A platform heel ground the middle of a fallen face, to the cheers of the inebriated, thick-bottomed girls. Hard by, three youths were trying out small Honda motorcyles, revving them and pumping blue smoke into the eyes of the cheering girls. Somebody with a large hat was collecting money for a race as I walked past. Sodden noises tickled the back of my head, as though pulling me back into the fray. A little farther on, three motorcycles passed me in a bend, splashing me with mud as they tore past to the other end of the village. They were being followed by a puny Honda Civic filled with noisy youths banging the windows, the seats and the roof.
I hurried to the old village. The old people were cowering in the shadow of desolation. It seemed as if the explosions predicted by Grandpa had begun by sucking the village into whirlwinds of violent change, dividing it into irreconcilable parts. The nostalgia that had marked the early years, when the oracle of Grandma and Grandpa invoked stories from the lacuna, was gone, erased by the aggressive energy of the young smugglers and their friends. A touch of fear had crept into the area.
Serenity’s house was wrapped in webs of decay. The windows were sealed from the inside by termites, and the doors were being sawn off their hinges by ants. The roof was flaking and reddening in the incessant rain and sunshine. Serenity had obviously lost interest in the house, and in the village, and was ready to see the past crumble into the dust of decrepitude. I opened the house as I used to in the past when a visitor emerged from the lacuna. I was greeted by a musty cloud of heat, dust and bats. I handled the doors and the windows carefully lest they fall from their hinges. I did not remove the termite tracks. I did not sweep either. What was the point? I watched as the wind picked up the dust and swept it into the branches of the nearby trees. In the sitting room, tucked away in a corner where Padlock used to keep her mat, was a two-foot anthill. In Serenity’s bedroom a large snake had sloughed under the bed of memories. The bed was dusty but still on its legs, thanks to anti-termite varnish. I emerged into the backyard in a rush. Weeds had overrun the place, colonizing the bathroom and the fireplace where I used to boil water for Aunt Tiida’s four daily baths. Somewhere here I had received my first thrashing, somewhere there Grandma had stood, planning her intervention. The latrine from under which I had spied on Padlock’s genitalia had shrunk like a can in the fist of a giant.
Grandma’s place still bore the marks of the fire. The puny cottage built by a relative near the site of the old house was empty. The yard was overgrown and full of old leaves from the trees under which Grandma and Grandpa used to fight after lunch. I stood at the spot where the crowd was on the night of the fire. The bottom seemed to fall out of my bowels. I no longer belonged here. I had to find a new center of existence. Oppressed by the weight of the past and the brutality of change, I walked away.
Grandpa’s house still looked big and impressive, but carried the sulky air of a deteriorating monument. The coffee shamba was battling with weeds, the windbreakers with mistletoe, the terraces with erosion.
Grandpa had aged too. All those beatings, and the shooting, and the stabbing, and the turmoil of his political and personal life had taken a big toll. If you were looking for him, you could find his old warring self only in the eyes: the candid, questioning gaze was still there. His ears had weakened, especially the one slapped by goons in 1966. Now you had to shout a bit to be heard. He cocked his head to favor the better ear. We were very happy to see each other. He was struck by the fact that I had grown. He kept asking when I would conquer my lawyerly studies, and I kept explaining that I still had a long way to go.
We visited Grandma’s grave. Stiff-backed, Grandpa stood and watched as I effortlessly pulled weeds, rearranged stones moved by erosion and straightened the cross bent by the winds. The same unspoken question went through our minds: Who killed this woman? Who judged her, sentenced her and executed her? I remembered all those babies we delivered and all the herbs we collected in the forest, in the swamp, everywhere. I again felt like wetting my pants, a strange feeling after all those years. I waited for her ghost to rise and shake the leaves of my favorite jackfruit tree. I waited for some miracle to happen. Nothing happened. She had left me to finish the job she had begun. My medium of communication had changed from amniotic fluid and gore to lawyerly ink and saliva.
We left the burial ground. The coffee shamba could do with better maintenance. Many trees needed trimming. Grandpa relied on hired labor both to weed and to pick his coffee. He still got enough money from it to look after himself, although the mills took months to pay, blaming the government for the delays. It seemed as if Serenity’s dream had come true: Grandpa’s estate was no longer as profitable as before, but he did not mind. He had not wanted to go to Rome. He rarely travelled these days, except to attend funerals, important weddings and big clan meetings. Clan land had gone to other families. Grandpa was now free, no longer the arbiter of clan disputes, no longer the custodian of clan property. He was just a man who sat and watched the fluctuations of the political climate.