You would think that after Kirabo had hurt Grandmother so spectacularly, the teenagers would behave. Not Gayi. She must have thought You think Kirabo is wicked? Let me show you.
Gayi was born Nnaggayi. The daily bus service from Kampala was a Guy model, the unfortunate pun for Giibwa’s insinuation. Gayi was eighteen or nineteen, but she was only just taking her O levels because she kept repeating classes. She was kind and gentle with Kirabo, but Gayi was getting spoilt. Not spoilt like an indulged child; spoilt like milk going off. A girl going bad was so total, so irreversible, so disgusting, she became rubbish on the roadside. And people treated her as such. Men touched her anywhere, even in public. Any man – drunks, riff-raff, sweat-stinking labourers – would ask her for sex as if they were entitled to it. ‘Eh, Gayi?’ they would call. ‘When will you give me some?’ because she had turned herself into a communal plate. There was no salvation for Gayi whether she dropped out of school or got pregnant, both of which seemed inevitable.
But Gayi was indifferent. She carried on with her man like a bug had burrowed into her brain. For Kirabo, no matter what people said, Gayi was not responsible for her actions. Not with her floaty eyes that made her look like she was half asleep. Not with men calling her shapely backside ‘sakabuzoba spesulo’, shock-absorbers special. Not with her aubergine skin. When she fastened her school uniform belt, she looked like a black wasp. Ugly girls were good girls; they worked hard in school. But for Gayi, the world had stared and admired. She had noticed and her brain had stopped growing.
Once, Widow Diba came to talk to Gayi the way elderly women do when trying to save a wayward girl from self-destruction. Grandmother had talked and talked until she ran out of words. Diba said, ‘I am telling you, Gayi: that body of yours which makes you float above all of us will one day abandon you like a bad friend. Three births and that waistline will fill out and thicken. Then you will see your own stomach step out in front of you as if showing you the way. And that backside – chwe.’ She made a wiping gesture across her mouth. ‘Worn away. And that man will discard you like a used toilet wipe. All of us here were beautiful once, but where is that beauty now? Stay in school, add value to your looks and men will die to marry you.’
When Miiro found out Gayi had a man, he did not bother with that nonsense cajoling of Let us talk, let us reason. He pulled out a cane and flogged Gayi. Then he threatened to withdraw her from school and marry her off to an old man like they did in the past. But did Gayi learn? No. When her older brothers from the city, Tom and Uncle Ndiira, came to visit, Miiro told them about Gayi’s interest in ‘men’. Tom, being the eldest son, was so angry he flogged Gayi for wasting Grandfather’s money in school fees. But did the madness in Gayi budge? No. Instead, she mumbled between her tears, ‘What have I done that Tom did not do?’ and went back to seeing her man. Eventually Grandfather threw her out of the main house. ‘There is room for one woman in this house – your mother,’ he said. ‘Everyone else is a child.’
Gayi started to sleep in the biggest boys’ house, built separately for them so they could do whatever they wished in privacy. She no longer used the same bath basins as Grandmother and Grandfather because, as she had ‘started men’, her parents might catch that shaking condition, Parkinson’s. Another father would have withdrawn Gayi from school altogether. Some fathers threw such shameful girls out of the home entirely so as not to infect the younger ones. In the village, people laughed: ‘God gave Miiro bright children, but he gave him Gayi too, kdto. Not a flicker of light in that head of hers…’ ‘She repeats classes like a child returning to leftovers…’ ‘She has a mighty itch down there: Miiro can flog all he wants but it will not scratch an itch like that.’ But Grandfather kept Gayi in school, insisting he would rather she dropped out of school with at least an O-level certificate than abandon her to a gloomy future.
For a while, after Gayi was evicted from the main house, Grandfather and Grandmother thought she had stopped seeing her man. But Kirabo knew better. One moonlit night, when she went outside to toilet before bed, she heard whispering near the road. She sidled along the wall until she got to the front of the house. On the road, a man wheeled a motorbike silently. Gayi slunk from behind. They wheeled the motorbike up the road further away from the house. Kirabo followed. When they thought they were far enough away, the man swung a leg over the bike and kicked a pedal once, twice; the third time the bike burst into life and growled. The man sat astride it. Gayi swung a leg over, sat, pushed her pelvis into the man, wrapped her arms around his waist, laid her head against him and they set off. From that night onwards, Kirabo listened out for the motorcycle and when she heard it, she looked at Grandfather and felt guilty.
But this time someone with twitchy lips must have seen Gayi sneak out with her man the previous night and tipped Grandfather off as they held a meeting of coffee growers at the koparativu stowa. Grandfather came home sparking like a faulty plug. He rode his bicycle to the house at speed. Normally, he dismounted at the road, wheeled it up the walkway, then pulled back the stand with a foot and leaned the bicycle against it. This time he asked, ‘Where is Nnaggayi?’ as he dismounted and let the bicycle fall to the ground.
No one answered.
‘Did she escape last night?’
Silence.
Grandfather marched to the coffee shrub near the kitchen and broke off a switch. While he plucked the twigs and leaves off, the teenagers vanished. In moments like that, you did not hang around. Grandfather might tell you to catch Gayi and hold her down while she was flogged. Despite her rebellious ways, Gayi was one of those girls who, at the sight of a cane, ran screaming.
As Grandfather prepared the whip, a window on the bigger boys’ block flew open. Gayi’s head popped up. She looked around and then climbed on to the sill. She paused for a moment and then plunged. She ran to the road and disappeared. Grandfather, cane in hand, walked to the road and looked it up and down – no sign of Gayi. He walked back to the house, threw the cane on to the rubbish heap outside the kitchen and went to his bedroom. In the kitchen, Grandmother’s eyes were red. Kirabo did the only thing she knew in moments like this. She sat with Grandmother and leaned against her in the quiet hope that it would soothe her. The teenagers did their homework and chores quickly. Grandfather did not come out to supper. Grandmother was quiet all through eating, all through clearing up and taking the wraps back to the kitchen. There were no prayers. No after-dinner blather for the teenagers. Soon after, all the tadooba candles and lanterns were blown out and the house fell silent. Gayi did not come home that night.
The following day Grandmother wept openly. The teenagers’ eyes were dark with worry. They whispered a lot. Grandfather was sullen. Kirabo, excluded from all conversation about Gayi, imagined the worst. At night, the murderous bull returned to torment her.
It was then that she found out Gayi was Grandmother and Grandfather’s real child, their youngest of five. People kept coming to commiserate. Grandmother did not say much, only wept. Grandfather would shake his head and sigh, ‘Children. They don’t belong to us. We only bring them into the world.’ No child brought up in that house – and there had been many – had ever rebelled, least of all a girl.
Three days later, Miiro’s older children, Aunts Abi and YA, Tom and quiet Uncle Ndiira, came and there was a family meeting in the diiro. Afterwards, they put announcements on the radio asking Gayi to come home because everyone was worried. Some of these notices said she could go to her siblings in the city, but so far, no Gayi. Then they put out other announcements threatening whoever was keeping her with kidnapping and child defilement – still nothing. Not even to say Stop worrying, I am fine.
Miiro’s brothers, Faaza Dewo, the priest and Jjajja Dokita, the doctor, came and they hugged, whispered and sighed. But horrible Jjajja Nsangi, Miiro’s only sister, stayed for a week. Nsangi was one of those women who were men in their brothers’ houses. She called Grandmother ‘Wife’. Grandmother knelt as she waited on her. Jjajja Nsangi claimed that in her brothers’ houses there was room to raise her voice and to stretch her legs. Miiro loved his sister too much to say anything. Grandmother was on her best behaviour whenever Nsangi visited. She reinforced her maleness by asking the teenagers, ‘Who am I?’
‘Ssenga,’ they replied.
‘And what does ssenga mean?’
‘It means if.’
‘Let me hear the whole saying.’
‘If you were not a woman,’ the teenagers would chorus, ‘you would be our father too.’
‘Don’t you ever forget it.’
After commiserating, Nsangi asked Miiro to buy her kangaali, her words for alcohol. ‘I need to engage the gears,’ she said as if she was a car. And Miiro bought her beer even though Nsangi had been diagnosed with rich people’s afflictions – high blood pressure and ulcers. She also suffered from sugars and had been told to eat small-small meals frequently, and to skip the rope. When Grandmother heard, she whispered, ‘By the time doctors tell you to skip a rope your laziness is so middle-aged it has grandchildren.’
After Nsangi left, no one talked about Gayi again. When Kirabo tried to, the teenagers elbowed her – Shut up – as if Gayi were worse than dead. But every time the bus went past, it flashed the word Guy and Kirabo’s heart turned.