Moses Isegawa: Abyssinian Chronicles

Uncle Kawayida pricked my imagination so much that I wanted to verify some of his stories by visiting the places and the characters he talked about. For example, what sort of parents did whatever they did in bed with children snoring, falsely, on the floor? Were they Catholics? If not, did Protestantism, Islam or traditional religion allow such behavior? Were such people educated and well-bred? Unable to tame my raging curiosities and doubts, I begged Uncle Kawayida to take me with him, at least just once, but each time he refused, bolstered by Grandma and Grandpa. Most annoying were their weak excuses. Later I found out the real reason why: Kawayida’s wife, a woman from a very large, polygamous household, was not on good terms with my mother, who came from a very Catholic family, and none of the trio was ready to risk Padlock’s anger by sending her son to the house of a person she disliked and disapproved of so much.

The tension between their wives had driven the brothers apart. My mother despised Kawayida’s wife’s background because she believed there was no morality and no salvation in a household with thirty girls and ten boys born of so many “whore” mothers in a climate of perpetual sin. Kawayida’s wife despised Padlock for the poverty of her parental home, and for her guava-switch-wielding propensities. A cousin called her disciplinary activities “beating children like drums.” She also accused Padlock of standing in the way of Kawayida’s progress by stopping Serenity from helping his brother to get loans from the bank and able individuals. Kawayida’s ambition was to own a business and make and spend his own money, but he lacked capital and needed his brother’s recommendation. The truth was that Serenity, who had helped Kawayida get his current job, did not believe in retail business, hated it for personal reasons, and would not help anyone get into it. Because he had remained very laconic about his stand, Serenity’s position got interpreted ad libitum by each of the warring parties.

Nowadays, the brothers met at weddings, funerals and when Muhammad Ali fights took place. Uncle Kawayida conveyed to us the details, wreathed in the sheen of his saliva, redolent with tricks of his imagination, on the wings of the blue-bellied eagle. Grandma listened to the endless accounts with the same vague irony that had entertained Serenity’s revelations about the Fiddler’s burden, and the same sparing laugh that had rewarded the famous duck walk. Kawayida took us through Ali’s flashy arsenal of jabs, hooks and wiggles with the same appetite that animated his usual stories. Behind his back Grandma called him “Ali,” a name which never stuck because, apart from us, only one family, the Stefanos, knew of Muhammad Ali’s exploits, and they could not see the appeal of this lanky substitute.

Aunt Tiida, Serenity’s eldest sister, was the most unpopular, albeit imposing, visitor we received all year round. Her visits put everyone on edge, especially when she first arrived. In order to blunt the arrogance of his eldest child, Grandpa would greet her with generous, half-mocking cheer. Grandma, a great believer in countering vanity with candor, would receive her with an indifference which diminished only in direct proportion to Tiida’s arrogance. Both strategies had their limitations, for as soon as Tiida opened her bags, she made sure that things were done her own way. I always had the impression that we were being visited by a government health inspector in mufti.

Tiida was like a member of an endangered species threatened with extinction, her life made more precarious by this inevitable contact with our backward village environment. She never came unannounced. Days before her arrival, Serenity’s house had to be aired all day, swept, and the bed doused in insecticide. I had to combat the prolific spiders, dismantling their nets, puncturing their webs, destroying their eggs. I broke the veins the termites built on doors and windows. I scraped bat shit from the floor and windowsills with a knife. It was my duty to smoke the latrine with heaps of dry banana leaves, a duty I detested most of all because it reminded me of my first proper thrashing at the hands of Padlock.

During these visits, Aunt Tiida bathed four times a day, and I had to make sure that there was enough water for all her ablutions. This was a record performance in a place where one bath a day was enough, and where some went through the seven days of the week with only foot, armpit and groin washes. Little wonder that the villagers called her Miss Sunlight Soap or Miss Etiquette. Tiida was not happy with the first name because of its insinuation of odor, and also because the only other fanatic bather from the village, an air hostess, was only called Miss Aeroplane.

Unlike Miss Aeroplane, Tiida was very elegant, very attractive and very articulate, and despite her fussiness, I felt proud when I was with her. If the Virgin Mary had been black, it would not have been hard for Tiida to claim that they were sisters. At night I saw her wrapped in frothy muslin clouds, her white nightie blowing softly in the breeze, her long slim fingers intertwined below the belly, her regal grooved neck bent in the direction where dreams merged with reality. But my awe did not last long: it became dented courtesy of Grandma and Grandpa’s after-lunch conversations. Tiida had not been a virgin when she married. She had lost her virginity to a married village friend. This man’s daughter was famous for sitting with her legs open and letting passersby see her exposed genitalia. Grandpa was angry with the man for jeopardizing his daughter’s marriage chances. I remember that Aunt Tiida once asked me whether this man was still married to the same ugly wife. I said yes and she laughed victoriously. I wanted to tell her that I knew her secret, but those were adult matters — I could not insinuate with impunity. As I boiled her bathwater, the smoke getting into my eyes, I would try to imagine what she had looked like at the time when men had rejected her. How did she fight back? I could see her telling a man that he’d refused her because he was impotent and not because he preferred virgins.

It was logical that Tiida got married to a doctor who, we found out years later, was only a medical assistant. Grandma had her on the run on a number of occasions. “He is not a real doctor, is he?” she would prod for the umpteenth time. “He could not prescribe a cure for my sugar.”

“You and your sugar,” Tiida, chafed, would fire back. “It is as if everyone was going to put it in tea and drink it.”

“Don’t get angry, Tiida. You are the one who started it. Why did you lie to us that he was a doctor?”

“A medical assistant with his experience is as good as any doctor. My man can do everything a doctor does. He also wears an immaculate white gown. Who can tell the difference?”

“You mean you cannot tell the difference!”

“My man is progressive, admit it. He is always looking for chances to improve his lot. That is more than you can say for many men who married into this family.”

“I know, but still we would have accepted him as he was. He did not have to pull that snobbish stuff on us.”

“He is always looking for the edge.”

“Let him not try too hard.” Grandma relented and then laughed. “Poor devil, how can you be married to Miss Sunlight Soap and not look for edges?”

“Don’t start, Aunt,” Tiida said uneasily.

The strange thing about Tiida’s visits was that by the time they ended and she departed in a cloud of bottled perfume, I got the feeling that we had lost something.

This time a year passed without hearing any news from Tiida. Grandpa missed her, not least because she resembled her mother very much. She was the only daughter who, in his mind, reflected the nebulous shades of a love that had ended with so many unanswered questions. He talked about her almost every day. It was Uncle Kawayida who solved the riddle of the missing Tiida. Dr. Ssali, Tiida’s husband, had converted from Protestantism to Islam! In the sixties, this was considered downward mobility, because in the political scheme of things, the Christians were on top, with the Protestants having the lion’s share of the cake, the Catholics the hyena’s, and the Muslims the vulture’s scrawny pickings. With the phantoms of his defeat at the hands of a Protestant rival reawakened by this bizarre conversion, Grandpa fumed, “Impossible. How could he do that?” He got the feeling that his daughter was going to tumble down into the abyss. After all, the doctor now had license to marry four wives, and Tiida was most likely going to have to contend with younger co-wives, jealousy and witchcraft. If it had been in his power, Grandpa would have precipitated her divorce. Tiida did not seem the type of woman to share a husband. The whole conversion nonsense did not seem the kind of phenomenon that would occur in her world. Loyalty was not a quality I associated with her, and I still expected to see her gliding down Mpande Hill in a car loaded with her rich leather bags. We were all wrong: Tiida remained at her husband’s side.