The film is over, but the projector whirs on. The names of everyone who did something in the film appear on the screen. There are soundmen, costume designers, and lots of other people. The playfield empties, but we hang around the film truck and watch them roll up the cables, bring down the screen. They pack the film reels in flat, round, silver cans and stack them in a wooden box. The corporation man hands us sweets before they all drive off.
Then we head for the railway overpass and on to Desai Street. The only sound is that of our feet against the asphalt, because none of us is talking.
We stop at the spot where we went through the hedge the last time we visited the ghost house. At least today we are not climbing any trees, so I don’t have to go in first.
“You have your magic water to protect you from ghosts, so you go first,” I tell Odush.
“It’s you who said you don’t believe in ghosts, so you go first,” he moves away from the hole in the hedge.
We are still arguing in whispers when Dado drops to his knees and crawls through. I follow closely and Mose is right behind me. Odush with his holy water follows last.
“Shhh,” Dado cautions.
“It’s cold out here,” Odush whispers.
“And where is that whistling sound coming from?” Mose’s hand touches my back, and I almost jump with fright.
“That’s the wind blowing through the leaves above. Now, if we want to find out what’s in there, we better shut up,” Dado warns.
“I don’t think it was a good idea to come here and mess with dead people’s spirits,” Odush laments. “And look at the way the moon is dancing between the dark clouds above. Evil spirits are active when the moon does that.”
“Shhh. If you didn’t want to come, you should have stayed at home,” Dado says, but now I’m also scared.
Images of a film we watched with Deno at Cameo Cinema, where some archaeologists opened up the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, flash through my mind. Tall mummies wound in stained bandages, their arms extended as they pursued the archaeologists who had disturbed their rest. Their eerie screams fill my ears.
“I think we should just leave, before something happens to us,” Mose’s whisper jolts me back to the present and, at that very moment, a creaking sound comes from the direction of the front door to the house, causing us to freeze.
A bright light flashes on and off, revealing a silhouette from behind one of the windows. However, it is the eerie, grinding sound from somewhere in the dark compound that spurs us to action and then we are off, fighting to get away from the scary place.
Odush is first out through the hole in the hedge. I bump into Mose as I try to squeeze through and we are stuck there for a while, and then I’m out on the deserted road, running. For the second time we are fleeing from the ghost house, only this time it is dark.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
***
“WHAT’S ALL THAT NOISE ABOUT? Can’t you see your father is trying to sleep? And all you can do is chatter away like monkeys,” Mama shouts out from the kitchen.
We are in the living room. I’m supposed to be doing my homework, but I have a comic book in between the pages of my history textbook. Mama is preparing supper.
“It’s Lumush who’s scaring me,” Awino says in her put-on girly tone.
“No! It’s Awino who is going on and on about ghosts,” I say.
“If I hear another word about ghosts, I will whack your bottom sore, Lumush, do you hear me? I don’t know what it is they teach you in that Hill School. And don’t forget that yesterday you crept back into this house at midnight, two hours after your brother returned from watching the open-air film. You think I didn’t hear him open the door for you? You think I’m deaf? Don’t you even think for a minute that because you have that dirty cast on your arm I will not be able to punish you. After all, you broke your arm stealing fruits,” Mama goes on and on and you would think that I robbed a bank. Mama is always connecting things, so that little things you have done over a long time become one huge thing and then she has a reason to punish you.
“BABA, do you think ghosts exist? Do you think the white house on Desai Street is haunted?” I ask, after we have eaten our supper.
“You mean the house that belonged to Mr. Swiney? The man they found dead in his car after his wife and child died? Ghosts are just one of the names we give to things we can’t explain. There’s a logical explanation to everything. One just has to find it,” Baba says.
CHAPTER TWELVE
***
I RETURN FROM SCHOOL one evening to find Uncle Owuoth in our living room.
“How was school?” he asks in his throaty voice, which Mama says is because of too much alcohol.
“Fine,” I say.
“I can see you no longer have your cast. How does your hand feel?”
“Fine,” I lift my arm up. “I had it removed yesterday.”
“Awino tells me you broke it at a haunted house?”
I nod and move a little closer. I know Uncle Owuoth has experience with lots of things and he might know something about haunted houses and ghosts.
“Spirits do exist,” Uncle does not wait for me to ask. “Once when I was in Mombasa I met a woman dressed in one of those black buibuis they love at the coast. She had a veil and her voice was as sweet as honey fresh from a hive. But it was the way she walked that made me suspicious. I glanced down under the hem of her buibui and where there should have been feet, there were hooves. Hooves like you see on cows and goats.” Uncle Owuoth raises his hand to his mouth as though he is living the moment all over again. “Her identity having been revealed, she melted away into the dark night. Oh, yes, ghosts and other spirits exist. At the coast they call them jinns.”
Uncle Owuoth is Baba’s real, elder brother, so Baba has to respect him, even when he gets drunk and makes a fool of himself by dancing and throwing up all over the living room floor. When he does that, Mama gives him one of those looks that say, Were it not for your brother, I would break your head with my rolling pin, and trust me, she would. But he is Baba’s elder brother, so everyone must respect him. After all, he paid Baba’s school fees.
Uncle Owuoth shows up from shaggs at the end of the month for what Mama calls “handouts.” Even after he has received the handouts he is in no hurry to leave. He spends the afternoon drinking at Maskani, which is what people call Apima’s drinking den. Mama sends Apondi to go check if he is spending Baba’s “hard-earned money” on women with big backsides and painted lips. Apondi never gets past Mwachuma’s scrapyard before returning to lie that he is already drunk and is buying drinks for anyone who so much as flashes a smile at him. She does that because it is what Mama expects her to say.
Uncle once worked at Mombasa’s port. People would trip over each other to buy him a bottle of Allsopps, which was understandable. Who didn’t want to be a friend of the first African crane operator? Yes, Uncle claims he was the first African to learn how to operate a crane at the port. It was a honor just to be seen with him. But that was before he married a second wife and began to drink the local mnazi brew. Soon enough he lost his job.
Uncle Owuoth has lots of stories of the places he’s been to and the things he’s done. He has been a sailor, a musician, a magician, and even a smuggler. He doesn’t talk about the part of being a smuggler when Baba is around. He once even joined a seminary to be a priest, but cut short his studies when he realized that all those hypocrites studying to be priests were nothing but whiskey-drinking womanizers.
Uncle’s stories always begin with, “When I was . . .” and are all about things that happened a long time ago, when he was still “a Somebody.” He has been to Congo, Zanzibar, Pemba, and even Sri Lanka, where he says the people are blacker than him. He can play a guitar and blow a saxophone, and once played in a club called Casablanca on the coast. He was also a damn good footballer.
Baba just smiles and says nothing when Uncle recounts his escapades. Mama, on the other hand, says that the only game Uncle plays is
at Apima’s with Baba’s money.
IT’S SUNDAY NIGHT. Baba’s Grundig record player is playing a song called “Lek” by Kabaselleh. He croons out how a dream led him from his home in Ujimbe to a place he had never been to before. He sings of finding ten sacks full of hundred-shilling notes, and while hauling the loot back, he awakens to the rude reality; it is only a dream.
Though his foot is tapping to the beat, Baba is not humming along. I know he loves Kabaselleh and swears the guy sings better than Jim Reeves. That’s the dead musician who sang “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through. . . .” Such a compliment coming from Baba is no small thing, because he loves Jim Reeves.
Today, Baba’s head is buried behind his Standard newspaper. He is reading about how Idi Amin expelled the muhindis from Uganda. He starts to read out loud:
“They were not making the journey of their own volition. Their crinkled saris, crumpled dhoti-pants and Punjabi suits attested to it. The overnight bags tightly clutched to their sides, was proof of it. The dark rings under their eyes showed they had barely slept. Who sleeps when they have only ninety days to leave their homes and country for unknown destinations?”
Baba looks up, clucks his tongue, and continues:
“Experienced in trade and industry, these forlorn men and women had been the drivers of the economy of the country they had been forced out of. Who would have predicted the very same railway their forebears had broken their backs for, and lost their lives building, some three generations ago, would be the very same one transporting them to uncertain futures.”
“Amin is mad to chase away the Asians,” Baba says and folds his newspaper.
“Serves them right for living cloistered lives and keeping to themselves,” says Uncle Owuoth.
“Uganda’s economy is finished,” Baba says.
Mama too is in the living room, but she doesn’t say a word. She never says anything when Uncle Owuoth is around. It’s only after he is gone that she will talk about him. Even though Uncle Owuoth only has six children, Mama will ask why he would have a dozen children when he has no job. She’s always exaggerating like that. Other times she will blame Baba for Uncle’s wayward behavior. But now that Uncle is in the living room, she is silent.
“Everything that works belongs to the Asians. The economy will certainly collapse.”
Baba always talks about this economy thing, and how it can grow or collapse. It seems it is the Asians who know how to grow it.
“They are nothing but cheating dukawalas who send all their profits back home,” Uncle says.
“Which home? Most of them were born in Uganda.”
Uncle does not respond, but Baba goes on about a Mr. D’souza, who speaks better Kiswahili than most Africans. “The man often jokes about how his people find themselves between the insensitive mortar of the whites and the angry pestle of the Black Africans, how they have lived their lives dodging the blows that have never ceased.”
Uncle remains quiet.
“There was this Asian man called Abdul Khan. People called him Simba Mbili. He was a sub-permanent railway inspector, who rode a small pump trolley along the railway line to ensure that the line was undamaged and secure. One time his party was attacked by a pride of lions, and he shot them down one after the other until only two remained. By then he had only one bullet in his rifle. Taking careful aim, Abdul shot the lead lion and the bullet went clean through its body and lodged into the head of the other, killing them both. That’s how he got the name Simba Mbili.”
“I’ve heard the story before. It doesn’t mean it is true.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is one can’t ignore the massive contribution the Asians have made toward the building of the railway and the two countries it traverses. Did you also know that Kenya’s own motto, the word “Harambee,” was borrowed from them? It was their rallying call while building the railway.”
This time Uncle seems surprised, but his brow is now bunched. It is obvious he is only listening because he has to. If it were not for the money Baba dishes out to him at the end of every month, he’d probably walk away.
“IDI AMIN IS A MADMAN,” Mama says after Uncle Owuoth has retired to bed and she is alone with Baba. “The scoundrel sent all those Asians away because they would not allow him to marry one of their daughters.”
“That’s cheap propaganda,” Baba says.
“What of the stories of trucks dumping helpless, disabled people into the lake? Is that also propaganda? And you, where are your manners sitting there listening to grown-up talk?” Mama turns in my direction, and I’m off like a bat from the rafters of Grandpa’s house in shaggs.
THE NEXT EVENING, Uncle Owuoth eats his supper and retires to bed early. Baba has yet to get his salary, so Uncle will be around for a while.
“Shhh!” Baba calls for silence and adjusts the volume of his Grundig two-in-one radio. The nine o’clock obituary announcements are on:
“We regret to announce the deaths of . . .” The radio announcer drones on in his sad tone. He reels off the names of dead people and their close relatives. Some are in other countries in far-off lands. He mentions Germany, the USA, England, France, and some places I’ve never even heard of. In-laws and other not-too-close relatives are mentioned last. Baba’s eyes are pinched and his lips pressed together in concentration.
The announcements are over. Baba usually knows one or two of the dead people or their relatives, and he’ll ramble on about how they were schoolmates, or how they married from the same place. He often says, the older you get, the more friends and relatives you have, some through marriage and others through work. Today, Baba hasn’t heard a name he knows.
BABA RETURNS HOME from work one evening and slaps his Standard newspaper hard on the table. There is a picture of one of his workmates on the front page. The man was pulled out of a train in Uganda and was whipped by Amin’s soldiers. He is lucky he didn’t get shot because that’s what they do to people they disagree with. No one knows exactly what happened. Whatever it was, the man was beaten up and has awful, angry welts on his back.
From then on, Idi Amin becomes Baba’s enemy.
But Amin doesn’t know Baba, and even if he did he wouldn’t care less. He is busy doing more important things, like naming himself Conqueror of the British Empire, or claiming parts of Kenya. His smiling face is always in the papers. He is a field marshal, a boxer, a champion swimmer, and a musician. He tries his hand at rallying. His smart uniform is always full of medals, most of which he awarded himself. But medals or no medals, the man looks huge and fearsome. He even makes white people carry him on their shoulders. He looks like he could fight a war on his own, and win.
“AND WHAT DO YOU EXPECT of Amin? I’ve heard that the crazy guy even keeps human hearts in his fridge and eats human liver for breakfast,” Mose says, after I tell him that Amin’s soldiers whipped Baba’s friend. It’s Saturday morning, and I’m with Mose in our courtyard watching Deno’s pigeons flap about under the awning of our house. They shoot up into the clear sky, their wings beating—tapa, tapa, tapa, before they swoop back into a wooden box that Deno built.
“There is nothing wrong with Amin. It’s the Asians that are a problem. They carry away all their profits,” I echo what I heard Uncle Owuoth say.
“So now Amin is a hero?”
“Of course he is a hero! His only mistake is chasing away the Asians,” I say and wonder if what I’ve said even makes sense.
“Make sure you clean the pigeon house. Mum has been complaining about the foul smell,” Deno says, appearing from nowhere before sauntering off to the Railway Club to play football.
Deno has six pigeons. One is gray, two are brown, and the rest are white. I can never tell the white ones apart. The scraping noise they make from inside their box is irritating, but their cooing is cool.
“Better tap the box with this before you shove your hand in there,” I hand Mose a broom h
andle .
“Why?”
“We once found a shiny snake in there,” I say, and Mose almost falls off the metal garbage bin he is perched on.
He eyes the box for a long time, then bangs its sides.
I climb up next to him to scrape the bird droppings, before we head for the old Zephyr.
“My father says the Asians have contributed greatly to this country,” I slide up on the hood of the Zephyr. “If you expel them like Amin did in Uganda, the economy would collapse, and the factories would shut down, and the whole country would be in trouble,” I say, even though I’m not sure why that would happen.
“I think they should stay. I love their laddus, samosas, and the way they play cricket,” Mose strikes a batting pose and hits an imaginary ball.
“Those Asians built the railway and this here is their country.” I tilt my head like Baba does when he is saying something important.
“But why do they always keep to themselves like they have another country of their own, right here?”
“In Hill School they mix pretty well. There is this tall boy in our class called Jaswant Singh, who can do crazy things with a cricket ball,” I say and immediately regret it because I should know better than to discuss Hill School stuff with Mose or the others.
“That’s just school. If he invited you home, their guard would probably never let you past the gate. And why do the guards and gardeners get angrier than their Asian employers?”
“They could get sacked if they didn’t get angry.”
“Who employs anyone just to get angry? If I was one of them I would make angry faces, but I would never be angry.”
“That’s why you will never be a guard.”
“Who says I can’t be an angry guard or gardener? Look at my angry guard face,” Mose says and shuts his eyes and mouth so tight he looks like a constipated baby trying to poop. “Now it’s your turn to be an angry gardener,” he says.
Playing a Dangerous Game Page 5
