4.

As time passed and Suubi started to walk around the house, then the village, she discovered the world that was her new home.

The first thing she found out was that all the tenants disliked Kulata. However, they invited Suubi to their rooms. Sometimes, they asked her to run errands for them and gave her food. Suubi loved it when they chastised her. It made her feel like she was a proper child, like she belonged to them rather than to the corridor like a stray cat. Kulata locked her room in the day. She never left food for her. After school, Suubi came home to the corridor. Mostly she roamed the village, returning home just before Kulata arrived.

Bulange was a lethargic village, littered with modern but unfinished houses overgrown with shrubs or matooke gardens. In their unfinished state, the houses looked like ruins in a dying village. There were a few elderly houses, built between the 40s and 60s, which boasted of good days gone by. Tenants said that some of the old houses belonged to Kabaka Muteesa II’s elite men and the families who first bought into British administration; others belonged to the landed gentry.

The landlady insisted that in the early 70s Bulange had verve and ambition. At the time, the village was fast becoming an affluent residential area. The old houses belonged to the landowners and the unfinished structures mostly to their sons and a few people they sold to. But then Idi Amin came and one by one, the men erecting modern houses disappeared. Her own husband had disappeared in 1977. Sometimes, she pointed at the incomplete houses naming their owners and the dates they had disappeared and she would cry.

The landlady was fat. Though her fatness was an illness—her limbs had shrunk beneath rolls of fat—the tenants were unsympathetic. They whispered that it was rather paradoxical for a widow to be fat. In return, the landlady called them cockroaches. She said that when they first came to her for a room they were courteous and humble.

“As soon as you settle in you forget yourselves, making me beg for my money.”

This she said at the end of every month as she went around the rooms pointing fingers and threatening. The tenants, like cockroaches, would not stir. Once, overcome by fury over the non-payment of rent, the widow stood in the corridor and let off a high-pitched lament.

“This world is a blender,” she said. “Who would have thought that I, the wife of a high court judge, would beg for rent from cockroaches?”

If she saw a family eat fish or meat or even three proper meals a day, then they had better have her money ready at the end of the month.

“You’ve been feasting all month. I saw. You can’t live like a cockroach and dine like royalty. I want my money.”

The tenants called her unfinished house the Palace. Though an ordinary three-bedroomed bungalow, the Palace had over ten rooms. Each was rented by someone or by a family. The widow provided her tenants with a makeshift shelter, walls, a rough floor, and a door. There were also metallic frames in the windows but there were no panes. Some tenants filled the windows with bricks, some, like Kulata, boarded them up and the too-poor covered them with black polythene sheets.

A family of seven rented what should have been the sitting and dining rooms. They partitioned them with curtains and made a few more rooms. The kitchen and pantry were rented by a couple who behaved like strangers during the day, but the wife was always pregnant and nursing a baby.

Kulata rented one of the bedrooms.

The second bedroom was rented by a gaudy single mother, Balinda, who bleached her face. She had five kids who all looked about the same age. When she touched her face, Balinda’s unbleached hands seemed to belong to someone else. The tenants called Balinda Fanta-face, Cola-legs. Every morning, she painted her face, dressed up, and went to sell charcoal in the market.

The master bedroom, large and self-contained, was rented by a woman who brought home a different man every night and another during the day. She had a proper window with panes and curtains. She opened the window during the day and the curtain fluttered in the wind, like in a real house. The ceiling, en-suite bathroom, and toilet were painted white. Her room was painted a delicate cream. She had two beige sofas and her floor was covered with a brown carpet. She had wired her room with electricity and had a fridge, a TV, and a stereo. The landlady never quarrelled with her over rent. To Suubi, this was the queen’s chamber in the anthill but other tenants called it “the office.”

A youth, Toofa, rented what should have been the toilet, and a girl who slept during the day because she worked in a bar rented the would-be bathroom. There were pipes and gaping holes in the walls of the bathroom and the toilet. These holes were stuffed with newspaper; otherwise snakes looking for rats would crawl in.

A shy teenage girl lived in the garage, which faced away from the other rooms because it opened outside. She was kept by an old man who drove a sleek Mercedes. The girl had been in a boarding school when she stole herself away and came to Kampala with the old man who “parked” her in the garage. Apparently, her parents did not know where she was. When the old man came to see her, he hid his Mercedes behind the Palace. He never spent the night. Sometimes the girl was rich, sometimes she was broke, depending on how often the old man visited. In the evening, she sat on a stool at the door and stared at the road. When the Mercedes came, she jumped off the stool and ran into the garage. After parking the car out of view, the old man would go into the garage and lock the door. The women of the Palace would spit.

The evenings when the man did not come, the girl sat outside sighing. At around eleven at night, she would pick up her stool and lock herself in.

No one liked her, except Suubi—when she gave her food. The tenants whispered about the girl. Of course, they whispered about each other, but in the case of the shy girl, they whispered in unified anger. That a girl should escape from school, not let her parents know where she was and waste herself away on an old man was appalling. Even the slut allowed herself a piece of prejudice.

“Now that she has started with an old man, it will always be old men for her.”

The landlady lived in a three-roomed annex set apart from the Palace.