“We are the only remaining true foresters. We care more about the forest than those trained to name the trees. We know where the animals are, where the people live. The name ‘surgeon’ does us an injustice,” he said at the beginning of the journey. But nobody had been in the mood to appreciate his sense of humour.
Light gradually dimmed, little insects started screeching, the forest floor felt thicker, softer, with dead leaves. The silence of the people seemed to make the ambience grimmer. When they had walked for a long time, a change in smell warned them of what lay ahead. As they drew nearer, the intensity rose, attaining a well-nigh physical pressure. The “forester” just marched on, a man in his element, a vulture surveying his domains. Suddenly, they were there. He turned around to face the group, as if asking them if they had the nerve to get down to business.
They were lying on their backs, on their sides, on their faces, some in coils like pricked millipedes. They were lying on top of each other, arms and heads over their neighbours, as if for fun or in ritual. They were lying singly, in twos, or in bigger bunches. They were dressed, naked, half-naked, sheathed only in coats of blood. There were those who seemed to have dozed off midway in prayer, rapture, boredom, disgust, dirtied as if they had failed to find the time or patience to wash. There were the faceless, the half-faced, the ones daring you to blow their cover. There were the fresh ones, with heat seeping out, and the stone-cold, with collapsed skin coats betraying bones. He guided them through them, past them, over them. With his gloved hand he pulled, exposed, unveiled, rearranged. He went on and on, a conductor musically twitching; a surgeon rubbing, probing; a history teacher selling faces, fictions. At the end of the exercise, with his bloodied glove and impassive face, he spread his hands like a priest at mass beckoning the congregation to embrace the Lord and told them that he could do no more for them. He wished them well, studying their faces, as if checking as to who had vomited most, who mourned most, who couldn’t wait to get away. He brought his hands down by his sides, shrugged his shoulders like a doctor who has failed in his duties, and one by one the group turned around ready to get out of the forest and go to meet another appointment, another fisher of men.
The final search occurred on a riverbank turning to marsh. In the razor-sharp bulrushes, as if looking for floating baskets with babies, water up to their shins, they surveyed bodies surfeited with sun and cordite. Most faces were upturned in supplication, mortification, abortion. Weeds and flowers bent in the wind and touched the faces, as though to wipe snot from runny noses, or pus from sick eyes. Here and there was a trouser-ripping erection, obscenely captured in death in all its glory. Tortured by hope and despair, they retired to spend the night listening to exploding bullets and grinding out new plans, better ways to handle the present and confront the unknown.
In the morning Mafuta, Sister and Babit went to Entebbe to attack the phone in search of the elusive British politician. Sister wanted to give him the news. She dialled away, working through a cacophony of honking faulty connections, snorting disconnections, and a ringing, echoing maze of failure sounds. It was towards late evening when she got somebody on the line. Emergency. A British emergency in Uganda? She tried to explain that it was about her brother. The woman at the other end wanted to cut her off. Too many weird callers these days, some threatening violence to her boss, some saying obscene things to her or anybody else answering the phone. Sister held her ground. She insisted; she demanded; she informed. She came away with the promise that the politician would call her back. She spent a bad night loaded with doubt, hope, fear.
Much to her surprise the man did return her call, and expressed deep regret. He chatted. Bat had called him to congratulate him on becoming MP. He had sent Bat greetings on a few occasions. He promised to study the case.
THE FIRST TWO WEEKS in detention slipped by steeped in suspense, boredom, fear. His spirit felt compressed, cut off, strangled by the weight of isolation. A candle starved of oxygen slowly going out. His own company depressed him. His mind tried to roam outside, a bird without a song or a worm. He kept thinking that man was a strange animaclass="underline" in a group he often sought isolation; isolated, he did his best to fit into the group. How many hours did he spend thinking about people he normally fled or whose company he found mediocre? How many hours did he spend re-creating banal conversations, images he had found boring at the time? He tried to concentrate on clinical things, reasoning his way out of the maze.
The knowledge that government was doing business just a few floors above him brought with it a crushing sense of redundancy, insignificance. The thugs could do their demolition job without his forlorn efforts to keep some things running. The Ministry of Power hadn’t collapsed: delegations were being sent abroad, deals were being cut, the machinery grinding on, just a few blocks away, in his own office. As he wasted away, he tried to imagine what he would do if suddenly released. It had happened to others. Would he go abroad and seek asylum in Britain or America? Did he want to leave the country? No. He wanted to stay.
He wasted hours going over calculus, various mathematical theorems, geometry. He remembered that when he was young he used to believe that it was the British who had discovered mathematics and was later surprised to learn that it had started in Arabia. And that writing began in Baghdad. He remembered the sand of the Arabian Peninsula as he constructed tunnels, calculating the depth, the width, the time it would take to dig so much each day. He devised the most efficient means of waste disposal. He planned escape attempts using a climber’s gear, helicopter rescue, smoke grenades, massive shoot-outs in which he would have to depend on the expertise of other people, as other people depended on his own expertise at the office.
He felt no bitterness towards the General; it cost too much precious energy. He just excised him from his mind, his life. He liked to think of his tormentors as a group in order to avoid hating them too much, seeing their faces in his sleep. From the flimsy residues of his Catholicism, he dredged enough stoicism, saintly resignation, to accept his punishment. Good people got punished; so did bad ones. That was the beauty of it. He now and then went over his life, the class wall he had built to protect him and his interests, and tried not to lose hope. He tried to look for those moments which would fortify him, keep his spirits up. They kept shifting, changing position according to mood.
He thought a lot about justice; it did not make much sense. He was living outside the bounds of book justice; most Ugandans, most people groaning under dictatorships of all sorts, did. In many places it was the criminals handling the apparatus of justice, meting out their version of book justice. I am also compromised. By accepting the Saudi prince’s money I participated in corruption, albeit involuntarily. Now I am being punished by criminals, killers with dripping hands. It did not make much sense. Salvation lay in the passivity and patience of a crocodile. Maybe something will happen and I will be free to go and do my work.
In the fourth month, when he had quit thinking about Babit, his family, his former life, because it disturbed his equilibrium, a soldier entered his room deep in the night. He switched on the light and barked at him to wake up.