3.

BULANGE VILLAGE, 1980

Whoever had dumped Suubi that April evening brought her early, for Kulata was not home to throw the child back. Kulata, who worked in Owino Market, arrived home at around six o’ clock. At her doorstep sat five-year-old Suubi dozing like a chick dying of coccidiosis. On hearing Kulata’s footsteps, Suubi looked up. Her eyes sat deep inside the sockets. She had no cheeks. The shape of her head was the shape of her skull. Kulata recognized her as her dead sister’s child and sucked her teeth long and hard. She took Suubi’s hand as if it were a diseased chick’s wing, dragged her down the corridor to the back door, and dumped her below the steps. She then walked back and opened the door to her room. Thankfully, she needed the light coming through the doorway, otherwise she would have closed her door.

After drinking a glass of water, Kulata raised her voice. She demanded to know how the child came to her doorstep. When no answer came from the other tenants, she threatened to throw Suubi on the garbage bin. An irritated woman quipped, “Are you waiting for permission?”

Kulata burst into tears.

“Do you know why they picked on me?”

The tenants did not answer. “They” were her family.

“Because I don’t have a child.” She blew her nose. “Did they ask why I don’t have children? No.”

Now the tenants, some wearing concerned faces, some not bothering to pretend, came out of their rooms to hear the story.

“They presumed I didn’t know how to make them,” Kulata carried on. “Last time I went home to visit, they tried to force that child on me but I said no, I have problems of my own. Today they waited until I was away and dumped her here like garbage.”

The tenants, now slightly sympathetic, swore they had not seen anyone abandon the child.

“If she is your blood,” one of them said, “there is nothing you can do. Give her food while fate makes up its mind. Look at her: she looks half-dead already.”

“What is she suffering from?” another asked.

“Who knows?” Kulata said. “She looked like that when she was born. Perhaps because she was the runt.”

“She is a twin?”

“She is the Nnakato. Babirye was born full of life, but then suddenly ppu,” Kulata snapped her fingers, “Just like that, she went. Then my sister also died. We waited for that one to die but wa! She is still here, blinking.”

“What about the father?”

“The father?” Kulata made a contemptuous face, as if to ask: How can anything like that have a father?

“Hmm?” a woman prompted, anticipating a salacious story.

“I tell you my sister chose a family with the kind of madness that goes beyond having children with. And I am saying badly wired, short-circuiting, fuse-blowing mental kind of madness.” Now she drew closer to the tenants and whispered, “The father, Wasswa, hacked his twin Kato to death.”

The tenants gasped, “Oooh,” as if it were a chorus.

“Asked: Why did you kill your twin?” Kulata carried on whispering, “Because they were coming for him. Who was coming for him? They. That kind of madness.”

Everyone’s face turned and stared at Suubi as if her father killing his twin was written on her body. Kulata continued to whisper, “The following day, thankfully, Wasswa committed suicide. And to me that was the best solution because what do you do with that?”

The tenants did not answer.

“The last I heard, this child was taken on by the grandmother, Wasswa’s mother, but as the saying goes: When it rains on a pauper, it does not stop to allow his clothes to dry. The other day I heard that the grandmother had also died and I said to myself, what kind of misfortune does that family have? I did not expect this child to be still alive. I mean, look at her.”

“Uhm uhm,” a man shook his head and whispered. “She won’t live. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is it true that dead twins collect the living one?” someone asked.

“If they do,” Kulata answered as she made to enter her room, “then Babirye had better hurry up because I am not going to be saddled with this one.”

Fate being fate, it started to rain. Suubi sat out in the rain without flinching. Kulata pretended not to see it until a tenant came to get Suubi in a manner suggesting that she was not a beast like some people. Before the woman got to Suubi, Kulata shouted, “Are you going to sit under the rain until you melt?”

Suubi stood up. For a gaunt child, her step was strong and steady. Despite being sunken, her eyes too were alert but no one noticed. She stepped into Kulata’s world.

It was dark. Kulata lived in a single room in an unfinished house. The window was boarded up; sunlight from the corridor was thin. Soon, however, Suubi’s eyes adjusted to the dark. In one corner of the room were pans, plates, and other kitchen essentials. In another were basins, soap, and bathroom objects. The other two corners accommodated Kulata’s bed, screened by a net curtain. All the spaces along the walls housed bits and pieces of some sort. In the middle of the room were two basket stools, but Suubi sat on the floor. There was no ceiling above. Two electrical wires snaked along the beams to the wall and came down. One ended in a hanging socket, the other in a switch also unattached to the wall. Both were covered in dust and cobwebs. On another beam, a suspended wire ended in a lamp holder without a bulb. Kulata saw Suubi looking up.

“Don’t you ever touch the electricity. Except when Babirye calls,” she laughed. “Electricity hurts but it’s a tidy way to go.”

The following day, Kulata took Suubi to Mothers’ Union Nursery School. She asked the teachers to keep her all day.