“I’ll do the best I can,” Valerie says.
Bella stares at her in disbelief. “And what if they don’t wish to see you?”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The two lock eyes, and for the first time since they began to talk, Bella really looks at her, taking in the face spotted with pimples — or are those mosquito bites? — and what seems to be an atypical paleness. Has she had malaria? Bella wonders. Perhaps it’s not that her skin is pale but that her eyes seem jaundiced.
“How long do you plan to stay in Nairobi?” she asks.
“It depends,” says Valerie.
“On what?”
Valerie looks around, as though others might overhear her, and when she speaks, it is almost in a whisper. “On how things pan out.”
“What things?”
This time Bella doesn’t get an answer. Instead, Valerie asks a question of her own. “Do they know that you are here?”
“They do,” says Bella.
With a touch of sarcasm, Valerie responds, “Lucky you!”
And Bella can’t resist adding, “But then, I’ve invested in them and you haven’t. I never lost touch.” Bella doesn’t like to hear herself speaking vengefully, rubbing more salt in Valerie’s open sore. And so she adds, a little more softly, “Not that anyone can guarantee it will be smooth sailing with teenagers.”
But her sympathy evaporates when Valerie responds, “I can’t wait to see them, my treasures!”
Bella doesn’t tell her what the children have said to her about their mother. She spares her this, not out of kindness, but because there is no point in getting into a scuffle.
Bella gets up, ready to show Valerie out, but just then the phone rings. It is Mahdi. She asks him to wait, then she says to Valerie, “Please see yourself out, if you don’t mind. I must take this call.”
At that, Valerie exits, slamming the door behind her.
After speaking briefly with Mahdi, Bella calls the hotel reception desk to ask that they prepare her bill since she will be checking out of the hotel in an hour or so. One less worry, she thinks, as she goes through the room, making sure she leaves nothing of hers behind. Then she rings the concierge, requesting to please have her car brought to the front and a bellboy sent up to her room to take her luggage to the vehicle.
—
Valerie walks out of the room and turns left past a fire door. She takes a lift to the ground floor and slips out a side entrance. In the gathering dusk, she makes her way along a tree-lined path until she comes to a low-built two-room chalet. She knocks three times on the door, then, without waiting for an answer, inserts the key and enters.
“It’s me, Pad,” she announces. “I’m back.”
Padmini has just stepped out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her head and another one around her waist. She stands not an inch shorter than six feet and is very proud of her height. At once serene, majestic, and beguiling, Padmini is ordinarily capable of stunning anyone, man or woman. But after two nights in a Kampala lockup being roughed up, humiliated, and bullied by corrupt police officers, she would not remind anyone of the famous actress for whom she is named. As part of their intimidation, the officers shaved her head with a dull razor in the basement of the jail. Then they made her sweep up her hair and take it back to the lockup to show to Valerie. Padmini will remember this mortification for the rest of her days. And it is compounded by the fact that Valerie was not subjected to similar treatment. Padmini knew the police goons had singled her out for this punishment in accordance with the Ugandan stereotype that Indian women take excessive care of their hair. Seemingly to go with her new look, she wears no makeup at all. Still, she is gorgeous—“to die for,” as the phrase has it.
Padmini struts to the standing mirror and examines a reddish spot — maybe a mosquito bite — between her breasts, each the size and shape of a plantain. The spot is sensitive to her touch and turning redder by the second. She is incensed, uncannily angry. She utters muffled curses, damning Africa and its malaria and wishing to get rid of everything to do with the continent. Padmini finds her handbag, fumbles in it, and brings out a tube of antibiotic ointment, which she applies to the spot. Then she swivels her head in Valerie’s direction.
“How have things panned out?”
“Let me see.” Valerie moves toward Padmini.
“Was she hostile?”
“What do you expect?”
Padmini turns to face her. “Surely the children are more yours than hers.”
“She was friendlier than I expected.”
“I wonder why.”
“Maybe she is up to one of her tricks.”
“And what might those be?”
“She knows something I don’t.”
“Something to do with her brother’s will?”
“Bella is no fool.”
“She is very smart. I’ll say that.”
“She hasn’t struck me as devious.”
“But she isn’t as straightforward as Aar.”
Valerie says, “Aar was an angel, the best man any woman could hope to find among the pack. Not an ounce of badness in him. I can’t say that about Bella.”
In the abrupt silence that follows, Padmini starts to turn her interest to another insect bite just below her right buttock. She relaxes her grip on the towel and cranes her neck, but she is unable to catch sight of it. She utters a salvo of damnations aimed at every insect that bites and then curses Africa, which has reared the lot, willing them to torment everyone who visits the damned continent.
She turns angrily on Valerie. “Look at what they’ve done. I tell you that Africa is out to disfigure my body.”
“Come, darling,” Valerie pleads.
“Take a good look. I am done for.”
Valerie parts the towel and sinks to her knees, as if in worship of a temple deity. She touches the swollen red spot and, going still redder herself, kisses it.
But the instant Padmini’s eyes clap on their bodies in the mirror, she snaps, “Don’t you start!”
“What’s with you lately, Pad?” Valerie says.
“I feel as if I’m being watched.”
“I’ll protect you!” cries Valerie. But when she follows Padmini’s gaze, she sees a man with a hose watering a neatly trimmed patch of the garden opposite, and she realizes that he is not so covertly staring at them. Stiffening, Padmini gets up to draw the curtains. They stare at each other, Padmini with a look of reproach and Valerie with a look that says, “So what, who cares? Let them look.” In India, Valerie remembers, it used to be the other way round. She should never have come to Uganda with Padmini, she thinks.
“You are in one of those moods,” Valerie says.
The two of them have been through a lot together, first as classmates at their boarding school in Ely, in East Anglia, then as friends enjoying a secret liaison while each of them was married. The question now is: Will their partnership survive the current challenges? No doubt, Kampala was a disaster. But will Valerie’s attempt to reclaim her children meet with success? It is too early to tell. In the company of those of similar sexual orientations in Europe and North America, Padmini and Valerie delight openly in their union and speak of their partnership as being on a par with marriage. Not so in India or Africa. When Padmini mentioned that she would love to mother Valerie’s teenagers, whom she’s known from birth, she added a caveat: that they move back to Britain, where they can live as a lesbian couple with full rights. Of course, who knows how Dahaba and Salif will react to this proposal.