Ikot ekpene - far from 'civilisation.'

I should have settled-in easily in Ikot ekpene - after all I came from a tiny one-horse town in Kerala. Thalassery, to be precise, on the coast of the Arabian sea, where in spite of all my wanderings, my heart resides, and I feel is the only place and people amongst whom I really belong.
  Just like my new home in Ikot ekpene, Thalassery did not have electricity when I was growing up and it did not boast running water either. Except the water that ran off the eaves in the monsoon, that is, enough to flood the front yard and the gullies behind the house. Many a rainy day, I have watched the water level rise slowly to reach the top steps to our veranda -- will it, won't it? With no television or radio, it was a pastime sitting on the torn up planter's chair, where us children had to create our own pastimes. 
  When that got boring I would run to the back of the house and watch the pink-brown flood-water gushing downhill from the rise at the back of that stretch of coastal land where the English had established a European Club (no Indians allowed). The water would bring with it upturned shit-pots, uprooted banana trees, coconut fronds and the odd dead goat, rushing at great speed to waste ground below.
  I was better off in Ikot ekpene; there was a water closet, if we could get the water connection to our house going. My husband, Balan, rushed off to the office, rounded up the caretaker, Sunday, and soon the water was flowing in the taps. Rust-coloured water, gradually getting lighter till it flowed colourless as I stood over it. It tasted metallic, but otherwise definitely like water.
  A messenger from the office, a young man called Solomon, went shopping and brought back bread and tea, blue-band margarine (that staple much-maligned substitute for butter) and other essentials. The milk came out of tins - we had a choice of Dutch Baby milk powder or Peak Milk. The kerosene 'frig with the pan-handle shaped kerosene container looked risky but had built up a frost overnight.
  Solomon also told us not to drink water without boiling it --for many minutes -- he insisted. I had to make an executive decision here. All my life I had drunk the water from our well at Thalassery without boiling. When it looked less than pristine, (i.e. when a dead frog or rat floated,my aunt dropped Potassium permanganate crystals in it and declared it clean after a day. Now I needed to get precious about this? I suspended that decision for then. Too many to make!
  I was rapidly feeling better. Now I could bathe the children who had gone to bed grimy, and wash the dust out of my hair. I battled with the beast of a stove in the kitchen, burning packing-paper in it, trying to light the bits of wood on top. After much smoke and tears and charcoal on my nose the water boiled (never mind the black kettle.) and I made Dutch Baby milk for the boys, and tea - lovely home-making tea for me. I was ready for Ikot ekpene.
  'I must get to the shops,' I said to Solomon who had hung around, and waded in with lighting the recalcitrant cooker, in moral support. He looked sheepish. 'Only market, Madam,' he said. 'No shops in Ikot Ekpene. For shop you go to Aba.'
  In the goody bag  brought by Solomon there were tins of meat balls and spam. We warmed them up for lunch. In the afternoon, we went to Aba, an hour away and came back loaded with everything we needed except fresh meat, and then some more. It was like preparing for a siege.
  At dusk, after the children went to bed, we sat out in the front of our house, the now-restored Tilly lamp casting a bright light in a corner of the sitting rooms. The garden was full of dappled shadows and it was very quiet. We did not talk; we were tired, but the life ahead had improved considerably from the previous day..


  



  

Fragments of a Life

Fragments of a Life

A strange life taking me to places and experiences I did not seek. So I pick bits; I examine them carefully. I have to be careful not to give too much of myself away.

  I was twenty-six years old when I made that uncertain leap from Sri-Lanka (Ceylon then) to the ‘bush’ in Eastern Nigeria. I remember that journey into the unknown.

I had two little boys in tow and a nervous husband. It was June of 1962 and there had been a slow exodus of professionals, mainly teachers and engineers from Ceylon to West Africa for two years.

  The salaries were way beyond what we could get in Ceylon and it would be hard currency, when it was sent to UK for safe-keeping in good old Barclays. For a while the Ceylon government impounded the passports of qualified engineers who were rumoured to leave. After a while they stopped, unable to plug that steady leak. Most of these men and women never went back to live in Ceylon; they ended up in the UK. They brought with them the aspirations of the parents to gain educational qualifications, work hard, buy homes and prosper. Their children put down roots in the UK and became as British as the locals, sometimes more. George Alagiah, for instance, was one of them.

  The Ceylonese who came to the UK were mainly Tamils, eager to get away from the communal strife in Ceylon as well as the invisible discrimination against them in their professions. But my family was Indian, ironically, second generation Ceylonese who had emigrated from India when India and Ceylon were all colonies of the ubiquitous British..

  What no one told us was the fact that apart from three sizeable towns, Enugu, Port Harcourt and the half-way house of Aba, most of the rest of Eastern Nigeria were small settlements. We travelled to Ikot Ekpene, four hours by car from Enugu in the June of 1962. We had no idea what we would find at the other end.

  A Ministry of Works Jeep carried our scant luggage – the magic of possessing so little – two suitcases and a small crate of old kitchen objects and Indian spices. Most of the roads were red mud-roads, kicking up dust as the cars went, so we travelled in front of the Jeep, bestowing our dust to them.

  We reached the compound where we were to live late in the evening. Our home to be was a lovely colonial house, spread on one floor in an acre of untended land. A path past our house went to the home of the Scot my husband was taking over from – Gordon, the water engineer in residence.

  Our house had neither water supply nor electricity. The kitchen had a cast-iron Garran Dover stove, the walls black around it. Bricks and firewood were scattered on top; I took one look and closed the door on it. The boys were tired – Kitta, at four, had sat on the floor of the back of the car reciting ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’ through the journey, and Raghu, at two, had cried from start to end. He hated all this changing of homes and being whisked about. I sat in front and ignored both of them as I had my own issues.

 Our escorts in the Jeep rushed off to the local market and came back with bananas and bread. We ate that and washed it down with Fanta orange. I did not know how to light the Tilly lamp left by the previous resident. My husband tried, and the filter tore immediately. We pushed everything away and let the men who came with us drive back to Enugu, before opening suitcases and looking for sheets and pillowcases. Sleep was indicated, anything to escape all the questions about making a home.

Yet another excerpt from Shards of Sunlight.  Indu waits for her father to come back from jail.

 6

Three months passed quickly and Achan’s (father's) absence gradually became a fact of life.  Devi  (aunt) got up much earlier than Achan every morning, so Indu also stumbled out of bed at dawn. Her first job was to help Devi roll up the sleeping mat they shared and put it away in the corner of their room.

   Now Indu had plenty of time to day-dream between waking up and going to school. She was sitting on the edge of the veranda steps one day, watching the leaves of the jack-fruit tree drift to the ground in the cool November winds, when her grand mother grabbed her and pulled her up. Ammini clutched Indu’s hand in a tight, prehensile grip, as she shuffled forward, dragging the girl with her.

   ‘Va. Vegam va,’ she said. Come. Come quickly.  Ammini, gasped with the effort of pulling her along.

   They went down the short path from the veranda leading to the front gate. Indu looked up at the woman’s face. Ammini never ventured out of the house this early in the morning since as far back as she could remember; she wouldn’t even come out of her bed. It was the time when the parachi women, the untouchables, sneaked into the backs of houses to collect the shit pots and carry them to the municipal hand-cart, which they pushed along from street to street. Ammini hated seeing the night-soil women with their foul cargo walking past; she always said they were like a bad omen: if you started your day with seeing one, the remaining hours would be full of misfortunes.

   What was Ammini doing? Indu tried to slide her fingers out for a quick getaway, but this merely made the old woman tighten her grip and pull harder.

   Ammini was having trouble walking: she was bent over like a question mark, wincing as her arthritic stick-legs negotiated the uneven path. She wore a mundu, a soft, white ankle-length cloth, wrapped round and tucked tightly into the hollow of her concave waist, above which her shrivelled breasts dangled. This was all she would normally wear inside the house. However, today, a thorthu, a thin white towel made of coarse cotton, was thrown over her naked shoulders carelessly, a minor concession to the outside world of men. It hid nothing although she kept tugging it over her breasts as she walked.

   Indu kept looking back at the veranda of the house, hoping someone would notice, but no one did. Ammini reached the end of the walkway and hesitated at the iron gates, in front of the steps leading down to the dusty road. In the house opposite a young woman was drying her waist length hair in the morning sun, slowly, sensuously, as though she had the whole day to do this.

    Ammini pushed at the gate feebly, glancing back to the house as she did so, and squeezed through, pulling the girl along with her. As she looked at the wide, endless-seeming road in front of her, she gulped and her breath quickened.

   On Indu’s left, the owner of the dabba next to her house, was dismantling his shop front, one plank at a time, ready to put out his wares.  He arranged the planks in a neat stack, leaning against the wall at one end of the shop. While Indu watched, he went inside for a moment and came out with a big aluminium pot. He peered into it, then rinsed the dregs left over from the previous day by swirling them around and threw the remnants on to the road.

   Indu glanced at the road uncertainly - she could step on it now if she wanted, something she was never allowed to do on her own. The most she ever managed was swing in a half-circle on the gate when no one was watching. Now Ammini had dumped her into this forbidden world where there was so much happening.

   ‘Poicko,’ she said, go, giving Indu a shove. ‘No need to wait. There is nothing here for you.’

   Indu tugged at her white night-slip in a sudden access of modesty now that she was standing on the road, and tested the dry, powdery soil with her bare feet. She put her right heel down and turned round on it, drawing a circle in the mud with her big toe. The soft, red dust rose, making Ammini sneeze as she darted quick, furtive glances left and right, then pushed the girl on to the tarmac, letting go of her hand.

   Down the hill, where the road levelled out towards the Kuyyali River, a bus screeched to an unscheduled stop to pick up a passenger who had held out his arm for it.

   ‘There,’ the old woman said. ‘They have tied your father behind that bus and they are dragging him. The police are killing him. Can’t you hear him screaming?’ She covered her ears with her hands as if to shut out that screaming, which Indu couldn’t hear. ‘He is not coming back,’ she added grimly, almost to herself.

   She pushed Indu again. ‘Poicko, vegam poicko.’ Go quickly¸ go. To your mother’s house. They will look after you.’

   Ammini looked around distractedly before shuffling off towards the house with the air of a job well done. Indu stayed on the edge of the road looking around, as the morning came into focus like a slow-developing film. She looked towards the bus, which had started moving again, searching for her father, but didn’t see anyone being dragged behind it.

   On the crest of the hill, Thalassery’s resident madman, Vasu, was doing his usual morning duties, picking up the litter from the sides of the road and depositing each find neatly in the middle. Occasionally, he kicked up the dust with his toes as he tried to dislodge plantain peels stuck into the dirt. He talked to himself all the time as he made his zigzag way up the hill, often going back some distance if he had missed an empty cigarette box or a torn banana leaf. Indu was engrossed watching his morning trail.

   As he approached, Indu got back on the walkway to the house, poised for a hasty retreat if he pursued her. Today had started badly, she decided, it was an anything-could- happen kind of day. However, Vasu did not look at Indu; he shuffled past muttering to himself, ‘Mahatma Gandhi, Sindabad, Congress Party, Sindabad,’ holding up a dry banana frond like a flag.

   ‘Mahatma Gandhi, Sindabad,’ Indu tried out tentatively. Not satisfactory at all. She picked up a banana frond from her garden and held it up as she marched back to the house. ‘Congress Party, Sindabad,’ she shouted more enthusiastically; now she had a flag to wave, it felt much better.

When Indu got back to the veranda, she sat down on the cement steps and laid her flag down carefully at her feet; something was bothering her, a stray unease like a hovering mosquito. So she poked her right thumb into the seam of her white sleep-in slip, where the stitches had come out. When Indu felt threatened in any way, the hole in that seam got bigger.

   She looked at the shards of sunlight dancing on the steps where she sat, as the leaves of the coconut palm overhanging the veranda moved in the wind. The cement floor under her near-naked behind was rough with grit and cold on her thighs. She cast a glance towards the south end of the veranda, which her father had made his domain. There he used to talk to his clients, bargain for fees and write up his files. The rickety wooden bench on which his clients sat had one front leg shorter than the others; it jumped up and came down with a thud when they sat on the end alerting Indu and Mani to be especially quiet as Gopalan worked with his clients..

   The single chair with the adjustable back was Gopalan’s, and no one else used it except he, even when he was not around. The backrest had a top layer of plywood with a yellow flower design on it; the plywood was peeling off in places and sometimes it had left red imprints on her father’s pale skin. Looking at the chair Indu remembered his morning smell of Chandrika Sandalwood soap and Wills Navy Cut cigarettes.

   Indu walked over to the chair and looked more closely; her legs had taken her there without any conscious decision on her part. She passed a finger over the yellow design and climbed in, sniffing for her father’s smell as she did so, but all she got was dry wood.

   Lying back, she listened to the neighbour’s children getting ready for school at the well in their compound– the plop of the scoop made out of arecanut fronds as it hit the surface of the water, the clatter of old Ovaltine tins and zinc buckets as the children bathed, the shouts and admonitions of mothers as they coaxed and cajoled the tribe to clean their teeth, bathe and change for school. She curled herself into a ball, put her head down on the arm of the chair and closed her eyes.

Child's Play

 Another excerpt from SHARD OF SUNLIGHT: Indu with her best friend.

Thursdays and Sundays were holidays at Indu’s school, The Sacred Heart Convent. The state schools closed dutifully on Saturdays and Sundays like the rest of the working world, but the nuns had to do something different, if only to establish their superiority. Leela, Indu’s best friend, went to a local Primary school, so Sunday was the one day Indu had to spend with Leela.

   Some time in the evening on Saturdays, when her jutka clip-clopped home from school, Indu would start thinking about playing with Leela. Would Leela’s disagreeable father, Chathu, be at home to scream at them? It would be a good Sunday if he was sleeping off a drinking bout from the previous day; he would not emerge from his dark hole of a bedroom till mid-day, and then he would be half-asleep.

   Before she set off towards Leela’s house in the morning, Indu checked whether Mathu had started sweeping the front yard, making wide semicircles in the dust with her broom. And was Chathu up and about?

   Today Leela’s veranda was empty, so Indu wriggled through the fence at the kitchen end of her house and crossed the narrow path to Leela’s mud-brick hut. It still gave her a sense of wrongdoing. When her father was around, going to Leela’s house was strictly forbidden.  According to him they were “useless people” and her grandmother called them “the unwashed tribe next door.”

   Now, however, her father was in Vellore Jail, because he was something called a freedom fighter, and Indu could go where she wished. She tiptoed gingerly up the rickety quarry stones, which did duty for steps to Leela’s hut; They had a habit of tilting if you caught the edge; she had stubbed her little toe on those a few times. Chathu’s dilapidated deck chair was the only furniture on the veranda and his blue-and-white, crumpled lungi hung on the back as though he had thrown it there in a hurry. Indu gave the chair a wide berth though Leela’s grim father was not sitting in it just then.

   When she reached the front door she stopped for a moment and peered into the tiny, cramped corridor getting her eyes accustomed to the forbidding darkness inside.

   ‘Leela, where are you?’ she called uneasily, as she stepped inside. She could smell the mouth-watering farinaceous smell of roasting cassava, not something made in her own house very often. It was only in the houses of the poor that cassava was used as a staple instead of rice.

   ‘In the kitchen. Come,’ Leela shouted out.

   Indu heard the rustling of dry leaves and knew Leela was in front of the three-stone fireplace shovelling dry leaves into it with her hands. In the morning Leela was often to be found there, warming up yesterday’s fish curry or straining old rice from the cold water soak that kept it fresh.

   Indu forced herself to step into the dark passage; the floor felt gritty and uneven. There was a bedroom on either side and if you peered in, it was always night in there and smelled of unwashed clothes and damp. Once safe past the rooms, the kitchen was light-filled and airy with a door leading outside, though it hung loose on one hinge. Outside the door was the large half sphere of the bamboo basket under which Mathu kept her chickens. The leaves that Mathu swept up from the compounds where she worked, and the coconut fronds she begged off Indu’s aunt Devi for firewood, were heaped just outside the door. Some were spread on the mud floor in front of the hearth.

   Indu found the older girl squatting in front of the fire, blowing at the embers through a bamboo pipe. A fine patina of ash had settled on her matted shoulder length hair, which was more brown than black. Indu loved Leela’s hair, wavy and thick and long, unlike her own no-nonsense crop.

   Leela nudged the roasting cassava out of the fire towards her and beat at it with the bamboo pipe, testing whether the skin had flaked, ready to split open. Satisfied it was done she left it on the floor to cool and turned to Indu who was now squatting beside her.

   ‘Play kottamkallu?’ she asked.

   It was Leela who generally took the lead in such important matters as what game to play each day. She was left so much to herself by her mother that she had grown beyond her years.

   Mathu did not have much choice except to leave Leela to her own devices. What Chathu gave her for rice and fish each month, after he had drunk most of his salary, did not stretch beyond the middle of the month. She supplemented this income with working in Indu’s house, sweeping and swabbing, spreading cow dung on the floors once a week, and beating the life out of clothes on the concrete slab at the back. For this she was given five rupees a month and food for her and Leela. Because of this work she knew her daughter would never go hungry.

   ‘Mmm…’ Indu murmured, too eager for the cassava to say anything properly. The two girls started beating at the hot cassava with their palms, loosening the burnt skin from the tuber, then peeling it off to bite greedily into the fluffy white flesh. They opened their mouths and blew ha-ha as the hot cassava threatened to burn their tongues. For Leela this would be breakfast but Indu had already eaten her conjee of well-cooked rice in its starchy water, and moong dhal curry, before she ventured out.

   The two girls were so engrossed in their cassava they did not hear the clumsy footsteps outside, the thump of an umbrella on the floor, followed by the shuffle of a weight collapsing on the deck chair. Then someone cleared his throat, hawked and spat noisily.

   ‘Father,’ Leela said, standing up quickly, in her haste dropping the remnants of the cassava she was eating. Indu scrambled up too, but before she could escape Chathu was in the kitchen glaring at her, and Leela was nowhere to be seen.

   ‘Where is the other one? Leela…’ he called.  His speech was slurred. ‘Where is that nayinde mole, koothicheende mole?’ He stretched out his arm to grab hold of Indu, and then thought better of it. In the process he lost his balance and fell back against the kitchen wall. Indu smelled his sour toddy breath as he glowered at her, and with it the stench of stale sweat.

   He heaved himself up and leaned towards Indu. ‘Eating my cassava! Mmm… Go, Go… Now – and don’t let me see you here again.’ The thick blob of mucous, which had hung under his left nostril was now smeared across his cheek.

   Indu heard the menace in his voice; no one had ever spoken to her like that. He must be the reason she was not allowed to go to Leela’s house. She ran out of the back door and across the path. Wriggling through the fence she scratched her arm on the wooden post, but didn’t stop till she reached her veranda. She was breathless and shaking, glad to be on familiar turf  but also certain there would not be any sympathy for her if Devi got to know she had sneaked off next door.

Leela wandered on to Indu’s veranda later. ‘Kothamkallu?’ she asked. In her right hand she loosely held a fistful of stones; they threatened to dribble through her fingers. She sat down carefully on the cement floor, at the edge of the veranda – she would never come further in, as though there were some invisible lines that stopped her. She scattered the stones in her hand in a small spread in front of her. Then she selected her master stone and threw it up to head height in front of her, testing its path. Not satisfied, she repeated the action, scooping up five small stones from off the floor, as the big stone started to descend. She caught her master stone neatly with the same hand and smiled at Indu. Leela was very good at this game.

   To Indu, Leela seemed almost a grown-up. Self-sufficient, because she made her own rules, and did not care what the adults thought or did. When she was younger she used to follow Mathu around when she came to work, always a few paces behind, left thumb firmly stuck in mouth. These days the thumb was definitely not in the mouth and Mathu came to work alone.

   Indu knew there was no point asking Leela where she had been and why her father was so angry. Leela never said much about what happened in her home, concentrating on the games they played together. It was always Indu who asked  questions. When the questions became oppressive Leela would merely get up and saunter away.

   ‘I thought he was going to hit me,’ Indu volunteered, taking care not to ask anything this time.

   ‘He won’t hit you. Only Amma and me. He’s scared of your father.’

   One angry shout from her father was enough to make Indu want to pee, but he had never hit her, even that time when she had accidentally pushed one of his law books off the veranda ledge and into the rain. He said he didn’t believe in hitting anyone, there were better ways to make children behave.

   ‘But he’s not here now.’ Indu voice trembled on the now; suddenly she wanted her father.  Chathu, she was certain, would not have dared shout at her if her father was around.

   ‘That’s right. So don’t wait for him to save you. We just have to run fast when my father comes back from work. He’s always too drunk to chase us.’

   For Leela all of this appeared to be totally normal. Indu knew her friend lived in a more precarious and uncertain world, but she had never imagined she needed to run away and hide from her own father. Now Indu had to learn to run as well. And hide?

   ‘Hide where?’ Indu asked, bemused. There was nowhere to hide in Leela’s little house with two rooms and a kitchen.

   ‘In the gully at the back. There is a drumstick tree there and I sit behind it.’

   Indu had always known there was a narrow path there; it was the place where Chathu’s household went to shit since their old stone-and-thatch latrine came down in the last monsoon. Indu wondered what happened when it rained and you had to go. Did you hold an umbrella up with one hand while you did your business? The narrow channel flooded during the rains, bringing all the sewage from up the hill. You could see turds and the odd dead, bloated goat floating in that water. Leela in there? Sometimes Leela’s world seemed so distant from hers.

   ‘It’s filthy,’ Indu said.

   Leela tossed her head, throwing the comment to the winds. It seemed this was not a worry for her. Indu thought about the elaborate cleaning rituals in her own home: rooms swept daily by Mathu, new cow dung spread on the floors every Friday and women in pristine white clothes, with shining, newly washed hair down their backs, to dry in the mornings.

   No, Indu did not want to hide anywhere near that filthy gully; she must find another place for herself.

Kampala - 1988

I am aghast looking back at the situations I got myself into in Kampala, back in 1988, by my lack of judgement. I could have rejected that invitation to Cathy's house-warming party, I could have gone and left earlier when the roads were still full of people. But no...

   Mind you, we, expatriates. were all stir-crazy by 1989. From the day I arrived in Kampala on a bright December morning in 1988, all of us British Council Advisers had been confined to our homes after dark. There were no visits, parties or other entertainment allowed. When we travelled out of town to the North, which was still unstable, we had to get a Jeep-load of British Military Police to accompany us. All this in the name of security.

   Us career expatriates in Africa were used to manufacturing our own fun in any case, with visits, dinner parties, clubs and so on. You can imagine how desperate I must have been because I nearly joined the British Women's Association. Dire! My friend, Brian, rather cruelly,called it the Bitches and Witches. Mmm. I was saved in the nick of time when the chair-lady announced that my contribution to the Christmas fair would be knitted doilies and a tea-cosy. Knitting? Me? 'I can offer some free Maths tuitions,' I volunteered, tongue in cheek. That didn't go down too well.

   Looking back, Kampala, after dusk, was near-dead anyway in 1988 and most of 1989. When the sunlight began to fade, Ugandans hurried home to houses where dim electric lights flickered. They rushed through their evening chores before the uncertain power finally went. Salt, sugar, match boxes, petrol, all were in short supply; the local people learned to manage. 'We are all managers now,' my colleague, David, used to say. 'We have to learn to manage everything.' The rich travelled to Nairobi and came back with car-boots loaded up. The poor did without. It was another year before an Indian businessman started supplying salt and sugar, matches, and all things essential for the local market.

   So when Cathy invited me to her house-warming, I got the glad rags out, practised using my Kohl again and went to her house. It was a huge, happy crowd, milling around, downing beer and talking as though they had not talked to anyone in years. I floated in, greeted the few I knew and looked around Cathy's new house. Beautiful. By ten I had found my corner and my group of other desperate expatriates and settled in for the duration. Which turned out to be till 2 in the morning.

   Driving back to my house on the Kyambogo Teacher Training Campus, I was high on adrenalin from talking non-stop. The Jinja Road was well-maintained and I reached my turn-off in about twenty minutes.  There would be a road-block some days on that dirt road, but most days the soldiers packed up with the rest of Kampala.

   As I turned, the head lights picked up a dead animal in front. I reversed to avoid it. As I turned in again I had another look. The animal now looked like a human being and there was a dark liquid pooling around it. It was pitch dark on the road apart from my lights and I was scared to get out and take a second look. But that person could be alive,needing help. I had no way of knowing.

   I drove to the College care-taker's home near by and tried to wake him up with my horn and my lights. He did not stir. I drove quickly to my colleague, David's house. I was reversing in small areas and soft mud, but had no way of knowing where the boundaries were on those little plots full of Matoke trees.

   At that moment I would have given anything for a decent torch or even one of those dry coconut-frond chootahs we used in villages in India. As I turned away and drove the short distance home, I wondered how a middle-aged Malayalee woman could find herself in this kind of predicament. Thoughts of that sad bundle on the dirt road kept me awake all night

   Nothing in my careful Kerala upbringing had prepared me for corpses on the road that disappeared the next morning without trace. No one believed me when I mentioned the man lying dead on the road. I went back and forth on that road searching. Was the soil a bit darker in places? I couldn't be sure.

   Next morning in College, David told me off for going to his house to wake him up. 'Don't you know that no Ugandan will open his front-door after dark?' As for the corpse, he insisted there was none.

The Police at their very Best!

Another excerpt from SHARDS OF SUNLIGHT

The Police arrive. I am terrified:

Next week, Indu woke up on Monday morning with a sense of momentous events, larger than herself, larger than any one person, looming. Instead of her slow, dopey shuffle around the house and compound, she skipped and ran around making Shinnu ask, ‘Why are you acting like a kitten before a storm – lifting your fluffed up tail and darting about?’

   As she walked through to the kitchen Indu could hear the excited chatter of the milk boy as Shinnu held out the lotta for the day’s milk.

   Kodathi, she heard, and pathaka.  The Courts and the flag. She went to the back door to listen.

   ‘Enthada?’ What is it, boy? ‘Noise and chatter when people are still sleeping,’ Devi said to the boy.

   ‘Devi ammey, kettilley.’ Haven’t you heard?

   ‘Heard what?’ Devi sounded offhand.

   ‘The Court grounds are crawling with policemen. Even the beach in front is crowded with people watching. Can you believe it? The flag flying on top of the building is ours.’ The ‘ours’ had a jubilant, almost uxorious ring to it.

   The boy was pouring milk into the lotta, looking up at the women as he talked, and the milk overflowed from the top of the brass pot.

   ‘Look at the milk,’ Shinnu shouted.

   The boy sobered up and tried to wipe the side of the lotta with a piece of multi-purpose rag that adorned his neck as a sweat band; normally he carried it on the seat of his bicycle to cushion his bony buttocks. Shinnu pulled the milk-pot away in disgust.

   As the boy went to the gate, Vijayan  (neighbour and activist) scurried in. ‘The police are on their way,’ he said to Devi and sprinted off breathlessly. ‘Don’t want to be seen here. Keep the door to Ammini Amma’s room closed.’

   He reached the gate, stopped a moment and rushed back breathlessly. His sleek, pomaded hair was dishevelled for once. ‘Don’t let them go too quickly from here.’

   ‘That’s great,’ Devi started sarcastically, but Vijayan had already disappeared.

   Indu and Mani ran to the gate to have a look.

  Marching down the Court Road, the police, they saw, had gathered a tail of urchins. The neighbours spilled out to the edge of their compounds, pretending to look at the coconut trees, hang out clothes on the line, beat the door mats on the veranda steps… Anything to join the mela. The Inspector leading the group of policemen opened Indu’s front gate and the men filed through. The last policeman shooed away the boys. ‘Poda,’ he said almost in a whisper, go. He raised his lathi, his swagger stick, in threat and the boys hung back for a moment, feigning fear. As soon as he turned away they came closer, whispering to each other.

   Devi saw them coming but went inside. Her thin joyless lips were set into an even thinner line and she pulled her top-cloth over her shoulders. She intoned a few quick ramaramaramas under her breath. Indu knew all about those ramaramas. Devi needed her God because the problems were beyond her.

   ‘Shinnu,’ Devi called out as she walked to the door, ‘Don’t come to the veranda.’

   The two girls, Indu and Mani, had followed the policemen to the veranda but escaped Devi’s X-ray eyes. When Devi came out, the policemen were gathering in an uneasy group on the steps of the veranda, with the Inspector on the top step. Devi watched impassively.

   ‘Entha?’ she asked as though policemen on the doorstep were a daily event. What is it?

   The Inspector took his time answering. Indu could not decide whether it was embarrassment that made him hesitate, or pompousness. Maybe he is waiting for Devi to be afraid, she thought.

   ‘We need to search the house,’ he said.

   ‘What for?’

   The Inspector clearly did not know what he was looking for. ‘Search means looking for anything, everything. Move aside from the doorway.’

   Devi was blocking the doorway, but she didn’t move. The man took a step forward. Indu got a little closer to Mani.

   ‘Mani,’ she whispered.

   Mani clutched Indu’s hand tight in hers.

   The policeman made as if to push Devi away to enter inside, but Devi stood her ground, staring at him, as though challenging him.

   ‘Stop there,’ a breathless voice commanded from behind the police. ‘Have you got a search warrant?’

   It was Damu, from down the lane. He was wearing only a dothi and a vest and must have sprinted down the road. The dothi was doubled up and tucked into his waist for running.

   ‘I don’t need a search warrant. These are special times.’

   ‘Yes, yes. Special time indeed when policemen can come and threaten women in houses where there are no men. Shameless lot. Go find some men to frighten.’

   The Inspector took a step back from the doorway.

   The lawyer turned to Devi. ‘Don’t open the door to anyone without letting me know. Search indeed!’

   The Inspector stood back for a moment and then signalled to his entourage. They filed out of the veranda in an untidy group as the urchins turned round and giggled at them.

   Devi breathed a sigh of relief; Indu and Mani followed her inside. Her courage lasted only till she reached the kitchen; there she collapsed in an untidy heap and started trembling.

   ‘Keep that scum here indeed. What did Vijayan think I was going to do?’

The Quality of the Day.

Yesterday I thought about Kampala. It was the quality of light here in Croydon on a bright winter's day that reminded me of the time I spent in my garden on the Kyambogo campus in the late eighties. I didn't have to do much; there was my gardener, Sam, to do all the digging and the planting. Sam, who died before he got to twenty years, like a great many Ugandans who did not know about AIDS, and believed what their culture said - that it was essential to sleep with many women as soon as possible after initiation to test out the skills learned at the boot camp.

   Sam was one of the world's innocents, fiercely loyal to the garden and me, in that order. He did not know a word of English when he came to me, but was fluent by the time I left.

   It was a huge garden, a half-acre of the kind of Kampala land on which you could stick a twig and it sprouted leaves, and just cutting the grass took forever. There we grew elephant grass or paspalam, which grows sideways and does not have to be cut too often. It is sturdy and does not get diseased like the more precious Mexican grass, a real prima-donna, that most people have on their lawns in India. In England it is an egalitarian mixture of weeds and grass of all kinds that I disguise as a lawn by keeping it short. I don't have a Sam around to keep my lawn primped in Purley.

   If you got up early in the morning after a rainy night on the campus, there was this translucent quality to the light. There are no words to describe it. You felt like staying in the garden forever forsaking house and work and everything else; it was other-worldly as though the benediction in the morning made everything right with your world - even when the pipes ran out of water, the power blinked off and the neighbour's dog had put down its morning offering in front of your gate.

   I considered it a pity I had to go to work on those days. But I came back at break for coffee, at lunch time, and early in the evening after lectures finished. All those times I wandered happily in my garden, sometimes with my dogs Leone and Makeni named after Sierra Leone and Makeni, a small town up North, where I taught from '83-'86. I took my dogs for a romp in the Secondary School grounds that were also situated on our campus. In the evenings it would be deserted and peaceful.

   Grace, my cook and general factotum, would have cooked my evening meal - all Indian food that she learned to do better than me. She also died of AIDS soon after I left. When I look back, so many of the people who were part of my life: the English Lecturer who planned a play with me, my Head of Department, that lovely man, David Nyakairu. my colleague Helen Akwanga... and five or six from my Maths class each year.




   They simply did not know.

   Then again, there was the other Kampala: looting and and killing ten minutes walk away from the campus on Jinja Road, the famous Jinja (an hour's drive away) where the Nile begins its long journey to the sea far away to the North. 

   Of all that, in my next blog. Africa beckons as it does now and then.