9.

It was as if Mr. Puti Kintu had been alerted that Nnamata was coming to Masaka to find him. He stood, as if posed, near the garbage heap, a few meters away from where the taxi stopped. Nnamata recognized him immediately. He had the kind of face she would never forget. She stepped out of the taxi, stood, and stared. Mr. Kintu had a receding hairline, and what hair remained was cut short. His two-day-old stubble was totally gray. His shirt and trousers were grimy as if he slept on the pile of garbage next to him. Three pens—red, blue, and black—their tops clipped to his breast pocket, were neatly arranged as if he were a professional going to work. He carried a filthy satchel on his shoulders but held a pile of exercise books in his hands. Still Nnamata stared. He turned his head slightly to the right and a smile started to form. Nnamata almost choked; Isaac turns his head and smiles just like that. Mr. Kintu was listening. He replied something and picked his nose unconsciously as he listened again, nodding all the time. Then he burst out laughing.

Nnamata looked for some place to sit down. Across the road was a restaurant. She walked toward it. Inside, there were no other customers. The woman behind the counter smiled her relief when Nnamata walked in.

“We make our tea with fresh milk,” the woman smiled.

Nnamata stared.

“What will you have, nyabo?”

She ordered a Fanta and paid. She did not see the surprise on the woman’s face at someone ordering a cold drink so early in the morning. Nnamata sat down on the bench. The woman brought a bottle sweating with condensation, she placed it in front of Nnamata, picked an opener off a bunch of keys around her waist and opened it. The bottle hissed and the woman passed her a pack of straws. Namata picked one, tossed it into the bottle, but did not lift the bottle to drink.

“Would you like something to eat with that?”

Nnamata shook her head and the woman walked away disappointed. When Nnamata saw the woman step outside the shop, she allowed her tears to flow silently. She took a handkerchief out of her handbag, opened it, and covered her face. In the tears flowed many things—the past, Isaac, madness, guilt, pain—but they all rushed at once, not giving her time to work out what hurt most. Then one thing became clearer. She was to blame for Isaac having a mentally ill father. Isaac would hate her more. It was not like Mr. Kintu had killed her: was she the first woman to be forced? Mr. Kintu’s family would be hostile after what she did to him. Nnamata did not understand why life would not cease flogging her son. She left Masaka without drinking the Fanta.

Nnamata had been putting off finding Mr. Kintu for a long time. When she returned from Kisumu, where she had lived all that time, and found Isaac struggling on his own to make himself better, she had thought of ways to make amends. Finding his father would show how ashamed she was. But when she got to Luzira Prison, she was told that Mr. Kintu had been transferred to Butabika Hospital in 1970. Nnamata did not know what to feel about the news that Mr. Kintu was mentally unwell. She had not fully decided who Mr. Kintu was to her now—the man who destroyed her future or Isaac’s father. That day she went home and refused to think about Mr. Kintu again.

Then Isaac opened that shop, fully stocked, and told her how much to spend and what to put away in the bank and she stopped hassling in the market. Guilt propelled her again. She would find Mr. Kintu, insane or not, with all the pride and confidence that comes from having a son who was not only studying for his A-levels but who had set up his mother with a grocery shop and had a booming disco business. However, Isaac was not yet talking to her. This made it difficult to enjoy his success, knowing that he had scraped that achievement from the depths to which she had flung him. Why add to his struggles by bringing a mentally ill father into it? Nnamata gave up her quest.

When Isaac brought a pregnant woman to his house, Nnamata realized that whatever the circumstances of Mr. Kintu, Isaac needed to know his roots as he was starting a family. She went to Butabika Psychiatric Hospital. There, all the administrators could find were notes that Mr. Kintu had been in and out of the hospital until 1985. His sister who lived in Masaka had looked after him whenever he was released. Nnamata asked for the name and address of the sister. All she had to do was go and find her because, as the nurses told her, “A home with a mentally insane person is not hard to find.”

Still Nnamata procrastinated. Part of her hoped that Mr. Kintu was dead so that Isaac did not have to meet him. It would be a neat ending—Isaac not meeting him and she not meeting his family. When Isaac’s twins died, she decided there was no rush. Recently she had decided to put herself out of her misery. This time there was no specific reason. She had been lying in bed when the thought came to her. She would face the situation the way a woman faces childbirth. She would wake up early, not open the shop, go to town, catch a taxi to Masaka, and look for Mr. Puti Kintu.

She had not expected to find him standing at a garbage heap, in the middle of Masaka Town, as if he had been tipped off that she was coming so that he could confound any sense of achievement she felt.

Nnamata decided to write a letter first. She did not post it—letters had a way of getting lost on the way. She got in a taxi, went back to the restaurant in Masaka, and asked the woman whether she knew Mr. Puti Kintu’s family.

“Who doesn’t? He is a son of the village that one. He was born here and when his head muddled up, he returned.”

Nnamata noted that the woman had left Mr. Kintu’s incarceration out of the story and was glad she had chosen to write rather than meet the family. The woman gave the letter to a boy of six or seven, who sprinted out of the restaurant to deliver it. Nnamata guessed that Mr. Kintu’s family was not far from the town center if the child ran that fast. She said to the woman that she would have her drink outside but instead caught a taxi out of Masaka in case the child came back with Mr. Kintu’s family asking about who had brought the letter.

Two days later, an elder from Mr. Kintu’s family arrived at her shop. There were no questions of how, when, or but—not in the elder’s demeanor, not in his words. Everything was about “the child” as if Isaac was a toddler, as if the presence of “a child” had atoned everything. When Nnamata realized that there was no accusation in the elder’s attitude, she got the courage to ask, “What is your relation to Mr. Kintu?”

That was the only time a shadow crossed the man’s eyes. He pointed at himself: “Me?” as if Nnamata could be possibly talking to anyone else. “We are his parents.”

As the elder had used the plural “we,” it meant that he was an uncle. The real parent would have used the singular in spite of the shame that comes with acknowledging that a rapist is your own.

Even after all the trouble she had taken to find Mr. Kintu, Nnamata had not plucked up the courage to tell Isaac that she had found his father and that he was mentally ill and that he lived in Masaka and that he was filthy. Nnamata told the elder that Isaac, who worked for a telephone company, had traveled upcountry for mast maintenance. He could not meet him yet. The elder told her to bring Isaac “home” to Masaka as soon as he returned.

A lot of family members were waiting at the family home, where Mr. Puti Kintu was born. When Isaac entered they all stood up, the women ululating, the men’s relief clear on their faces, the stares, the yiiyii and ehe eh bannange, isn’t this real blood? Isn’t this child Puti himself? And Mr. Puti Kintu’s mother broke down and cried. And she took the first turn to hold Isaac. And she made Isaac sit on the floor so she could sit him on her lap and hold his head into her bosom as if making up for the lost childhood she did not have with him. Then she apologized for the tears because it was a happy day. Then all the elders took their turns saying, You call me Jjaja because when your grandfather Puti’s father let go of our mother’s breast, I grabbed it. Puti is our eldest in this house. Sometimes it would be, Puti’s father came right after me, right on my back, or, this is our very eldest sister, look at her properly, when she speaks up the rest of us shut up; even your grandfather Puti’s father who is already asleep, even when he was still with us he never talked back to her, and it went on until it was Puti’s siblings’ and cousins’ turn, until it was Isaac’s brothers and sisters, born to Mr. Puti Kintu’s brothers. Then the: Thank you for bringing him up properly, to Nnamata began, and He loves mathematics just like Puti! Oh, ohhhhhh, who has ever seen that? And, Thank you for having the heart to bring him home to us munnaffe, and, Did you hear he has had twins as well? Do you see the nature of blood? And everyone was happy because Isaac was Mr. Puti Kintu’s real child.

But Mr. Kintu burst into tears when Isaac was introduced to him.

“He’s mine, you say?” and he got agitated refusing to sit down, clutching his books as if someone was trying to take them from him. “I swear I’ve got no child.”

There was uncomfortable silence as Mr. Kintu cried.

“Do you remember Nnamata?” a relative asked.

Mr. Kintu stopped crying. He went to a desk, sat down, and picked up a book.

“Silence. I am marking homework,” he said. But a mischievous child was not put off by the stern voice.

“What time’s your first lesson, Uncle Puti?”

“I’ve told you—math is the first lesson in the morning, double period. Always.” Then he turned to Isaac and asked, “Is Nnamata all right? She has problems with fractions, but I think she’ll pass.”

“I agree,” Isaac nodded.

Mr. Kintu was quiet for a while. Then he turned his head, contemplating.

“She’s in trouble. Have you heard?” He pulled his chair nearer to Isaac and looked at him earnestly.

“Is she?” Isaac whispered.

“Yes, but don’t tell anyone.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“You know, with girls.”

“Hmm?”

Mr. Kintu looked at Isaac like he was seeing him for the first time. “You haven’t heard, have you?”

“Heard what?”

“You won’t set the police on me?”

“I am not that kind of person.”

“She’s pregnant.”

Isaac nodded then asked, “Do you know who the father is?”

Mr. Kintu sprung up as if suddenly alert. He peered through the windows fearfully as if he had heard someone coming to take his life. Then he bolted through the back door leaving his satchel and books behind.

“That’s it! We’re not going to see him again for at least three days.” Mr. Kintu’s sister said. “He will be hiding in the bushes around the house watching for the police.”

Silence fell after those words. It was as if the word “rape” had fallen large and loud in the center of the room.

Isaac looked at the chair where his father had sat. He had only seen such an old man sprint like a young man once during the war. Army men were chasing the man when he had whizzed past Isaac as if his gray hair was a wig. Now a thick anger gripped him. What was the use of imprisoning a man who was going to be a father? Did they think about the child? But then shame overcame him and he blinked the tears back. He decided that no human being should ever be as torn between right and wrong, fair and unfair as he was at that moment. He needed someone, some object, something to blame but all he could find in that room was sadness.