4.

Isaac was eight when Ziraba first saw him talking to someone invisible. He stood under the avocado tree next to their house. He waved a long stick angrily. Ziraba looked about but there was no one. She let it pass. Isaac was too young to have run mad. In any case, for once, he seemed passionate about something. There was nothing threatening about a child who talked to the wind. Even then, every time she saw him talking to himself, Ziraba looked about.

Then, one day, she heard Isaac arguing to the point of crying. No one had ever aroused such emotion in him. Ziraba came out to see. Isaac was pointing a finger at someone close by. Whoever it was, was taller than him because Isaac was looking up.

“You can go back wherever you came from, if you don’t want to play by the rules . . . I don’t care! Go away. I didn’t call you . . . Hmm hmm, not my fault . . . Not my problem, leave me alone!”

Ziraba ran out of the house, whisked Isaac off the ground, and ran back inside. After a while, she peered out of the window and listened. Nothing happened—nobody came, no sound but the wind. She turned to Isaac.

“Who was that?”

“Where?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Where?”

“Just now, there, outside.”

“I haven’t been talking to anyone.”

Now his grandmother’s fear frightened him.

“You were arguing.”

“Oh, that one,” Isaac wiggled out of her grip. “He’s my friend.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” Isaac shrugged.

“Where does he come from?”

“I don’t know. From around I think.”

“Do you know his name?”

Isaac shrugged again.

“When did he start coming?”

“He’s always been there.”

“Since when?”

“Always.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Where is he now?” Isaac looked at his grandmother with exasperation. “I don’t know. He’s gone, I shouted at him.”

From that day on, Ziraba watched Isaac closely. She must have whispered to her friends for they watched him as well. He heard the women saying, “Why don’t you find his roots? Take him to meet his people. Some clans have all sorts.”

“Especially undeclared children: blood cries out for its own.”

“It’s the burying of the dead close to the house that encourages them to return and haunt you,” Ziraba answered cryptically. “I’ve no money to find his clan.”

It was his friend’s coaxing that made Isaac leave his cozy corner in the house to go outside and play. The first time Ziraba saw him outside, she gasped, “Oh, my kapere is done now,” as if Isaac had been indulging in a particularly long sulk.

“Yes,” Isaac had said, holding onto a wall unsteadily.

“Then I suggest you spare the neighborhood your nudity.”

Isaac started walking and talking on the same day. But Ziraba had no time for indulgent notions of trauma. She only remarked to her friends, “Nnamata’s child is finally ready to face the world.” And that was that.

Ziraba had begun to doubt her fears about Isaac’s “friend” when one day she heard him giggling and whooping with laughter. There was no one else in the house to laugh with. Tendo was married—that is, she had fallen pregnant and moved into the guilty man’s room. The boys had long scattered. Besides, no human could elicit such merry laughter from Isaac. Ziraba went to see. The hair moved off her head.

There, on the floor of the lounge, was Isaac playing with an enormous snake. It wound itself around his waist as he crouched on the floor laughing merrily. Then he raised his torso off the floor and balanced on his toes and hands. The snake caressed him with its coils, around his stomach and down his chest until it was in his face. Isaac stuck his tongue out at it and once again collapsed into laughter as it copied him.

That was when Ziraba remembered to scream.

“What is it?” Katanga called.

“A snake is killing my child.”

Katanga was so close-knit that neighbors could hear each other farting. Everyone cared. As one of the men tried to get into the house, the snake balanced on its coils and widened its neck. It charged toward the steps and the men scattered. Isaac, now catching their terror, screamed too. Ziraba shouted in the window, “Don’t move, Isaac! Stay still,” but Isaac shrieked and shrunk into a corner.

When the men scattered, the snake pulled back its neck, sank to the ground, and turned to Isaac. The men regrouped and came back with more courage. This time, the snake coiled itself once and launched into the air. The men fled. The snake glided back to the house but turned, slithered along the wall, past the latrine and disappeared into the swamp.

The neighbors advised Ziraba to sprinkle her rooms with kerosene and to kill the rats because that was what brought snakes. But she was suspicious.

“Was that your friend, Isaac?” she asked.

“I thought he was but—”

“But what?”

“It was a snake, wasn’t it?”

“Was that the first time it visited you?”

“No. Sometimes he sleeps in my bed.

“Don’t worry, Ziraba,” a neighbor said. “In nature, snakes don’t harm children, especially ones that live in a house.”

“It’ll try to come back. Make sure you get a mason to cover all the holes and cracks in the wall, floor, and roof,” another advised.

“Don’t worry, snakes are like that. You can live with them for years and years without knowing. Once they get your sleeping pattern, they slither in and out unnoticed.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Could be family things, you know. Has the boy been taken home yet?”

“That’s why we don’t kill house snakes—you never know.”

“That boy has a strong taboo on his head. I’d be careful if I were you, Ziraba. He sat silent for seven years, then suddenly he walked and talked in one day?”

“No wonder it fought gallantly.”

As each resident shared their snake stories, Ziraba relaxed. That night, she sprinkled the house with kerosene and the following day a man filled in the holes in the wall. She planned to go to Luzira Maximum Prison to talk to Mr. Kintu the math teacher but she never got around to it.

That day, Isaac was not given the chance to tell them that they had got it wrong. His friend did not come as a snake only: sometimes he was a lizard, a bird—all forms. When he came, Isaac knew it was him. Once he was crying when a leaf floated through the window and fell on his hand. It was not an avocado leaf yet there were no other trees around. Isaac had stopped crying at once. Even though he had navigated childhood without the intimate touch of love—no one ever tickled him or rubbed their cheeks against his or blew into his tummy to make him laugh, he never fell asleep with his head cradled between a loving neck and shoulder—he instantly knew the love of his friend.

The following year, at ten years old, Isaac started primary school.