A. M. K

The aftermath of Naaka’s dismissal was like the others, a disgruntled upheaval, a cycle of distaste for everything that revealed any tendency for displaying an authentic glow of happiness.

She was not the first, but it was highly likely that she would not be the last. Many others had been sent packing in the wee hours of the morning and the fourteen year old who constantly burst into trickles of childish unblemished laughter had not gone without a scene. She had been driven out like a demon. The answer was always the same. She didn’t want them in her house. She could do without them.

Naaka’s troubles had began with a few mishaps. She smiled too much, she had too many clothes, she laughed recklessly, she watered the plants when it was raining. Finally, she forgot to cook food without being reminded and for this she was threatened with a saucepan-sponsored head smashing.

The start of Naaka’s demise began the night that the woman who wasn’t supposed to be came around. The woman, daughter of the Head Smasher, had come home that evening to a warm welcome; child and husband in tow. The evening had been like any other, with hard liquor, soft liquor, food and uncommon sounds of her father laughing. Meanwhile, the HS seethed and puffed and heaved until she almost reached smoking point. Finally, because she thought no one had noticed her, she threatened them with the one thing she still had control over, losing control. She grabbed a bottle, tilted it violently at a 90 degree angle and swerved to the kitchen with her glass.

After the trio had left, life resumed as normal, a handful of scrutiny and a fresh carpet of anger and resentment restored, the air was once again heavy with that annoying uncertainty when nothing is right and nothing is wrong.

Unknown to the gang, Naaka was not as stupid and childish as she presented herself. On that night, Naaka had told their secrets to the woman’s maid- the woman who was never supposed to be. Prior to this, the woman, known as Pine, had only seen with her heart what the atmosphere could not say with words. As the gang had sat in her judgement night after night, Naaka lay around playing the literal village fool.

It all began around the time, children begin to reveal who they are going to be. Most adults, well versed in the ways of the world, begin to align themselves with the most brilliant, most social, most beautiful – most likely to be successful child. They map out their life for them; what they will become, where they will work, where they will live, who they will marry and what glory that will bring to the parent plant.

Pine was not that child. It had been years since the conversations that predicted her downfall commenced; her pitied choices, her low standards and the life of sorrow destined for her. But life, as it sometimes does, had tricked them and things had not quite gone as planned. So, a comrade volunteered herself. She would be the friend, possibly the confidant, report back on all matters sad and poor. This she did with the dexterity of an office messenger. She laughed, she visited, she planned, she helped. But, even the best laid lies leave a trail.

The trail began the day, the one who was to be, It-boy arrived. It-boy arrived on one of those hot sunny days which turn into a dark cloudy rainy day when the day turns grey before dusk . On the day, there was a two hour jam from town to the outskirts which Pine insisted that her and Pau disregard in order to meet and greet him. This only confirmed to It-boy just how beneath him they both really were.

Unfortunately for Comrade, he was a much less seasoned, tactless soldier whose actions conveyed exactly what he had been told in secret. He would never have lasted a day as a double agent.

After all, he had started by distancing himself as openly as a child whose father tells her to avoid her cousins during Christmas holidays does. He purposely aligned himself with only those he assumed were the highest in hierarchy- obedient as told. To his dismay and to Comrade’s utter shock, the Chief Source of Power glared past him like a man determined.

In HS’s opinion, research, skills and experience, there was always a hierarchy among siblings. In her clan, there was always the well off one- the one who gave to the poor ones, there was always the one who wanted to be like the wealthy one- the wannabe, there was the one who was unemployed, there was the drunk and there was the one who remained in the village to take care of the house and beat his wife.

HS had trained Comrade very well but Comrade, in one of her weak moments had recited one of their impoverished but treasured beliefs, a scarcity memento; No one can wish better for you than what they have for themselves. Stephanie R Covey had called it a Win Lose attitude.

As Pine’s path became a little less pre-determined, at the dinner when it became clearer that there was one, who though unworthy, never left Pine’s side. I am her best friend, Comrade had laughed. Short and sweet, except that it clarified at least one thing that was true- she expected that she was Pine’s best friend but Comrade had never regarded Pine as her own friend.

It showed. It showed. While Comrade had planned Pine’s wedding, she had kept everything including her wedding venue from Pine. Pine would be an invited guest, an outsider, a witness to her happiness. As she changed her mind over whether Pine would sing or not sing and as Pine debated over what song the bridal party would enter to, the It-boy, a worldwide emblem of all confused-confusers, a psychologist’s tool for explanation as to why brokenness attaches to brokenness- fakeness to fakeness- asked out loud, who Pine was supposed to be anyway. She was supposed to be the matron- maid of honour- that was what Comrade had said to her. It-boy had once again exposed the charade.

The night that Naaka spilled their secret was the second last night she held that job. A potential victim of head-smashing, she went down like Tounde in Houseboy. She had heard what she was not supposed to hear and her presence now remained like a glowing red thumb which had just been shut between a door and its frame. She was like the all knowing eye that sat with them at the table and followed them as they had their conversations.

They created trumped up charges against her. Because she was a twin, they said, she was a ghost, an evil spirit. She had confessed to practicing witchcraft, they said. For this, she was sentenced to freedom; freedom from the peace-thirsty beat down and the suffocating land of head-smashers and double agents.

I hate ‘small talk’. I hate leaving things hanging. I hate being misunderstood. I am the person who might answer honestly to a How are you. This is why I hate sitting at my work lunch table. It would take me 80% of my energy a day every day, remembering that I was on the inside but not really an insider; like, if a workmate was unveiling his new house, and the boss was not invited, I would not be invited either and because my answer to Why are you eating dry food? [ a typical Ugandan question] is not silly or funny but a full disclosure of my digestive-acne symbiosis and my inability to eat most of what I like, which might end up in a detailed breakdown of my dairy intolerance. So, instead of tripping on my words, my tongue tied, but hanging inside my mouth, it remains.

I was part of a group all through primary school except my one year as the new girl in a school where, for the first time, where you lived and how your parents earned a living mattered. At breaktime, conversations like, “My dad is your dad’s boss” happened. The teachers tried to maul us, differentiate us, establish an intellectual- social hierarchy. They distinctly told me and a few others who happened to be in the wrong ‘stream’ that we were stupid because we kept our hair and that certainly we would never make it in life, the Rector said. We were 12.

I made it into a group again in Secondary school, and our congregation began mainly because we had a similar background in primary school education. We had gone to the prestigious schools in Kampala unlike most of our classmates who had been in boarding schools since nursery school and for whom being whipped was a casual event in daily life. One of my teachers constantly derided me for having come from an ‘Academy’ while the rest had come from actual ‘Schools’. I’m not sure what he understood by the word Academy but dictionaries were a prized possession those days. We regularly borrowed The Collins English Dictionary from each other to find out meanings and confirm spellings. Spelling too, has gone out of style.

I eventually made groups of loose ‘friendships’ – the higher class roommates and the fellowship girls. However, my first and main group was with a group of three girls within which was the only friendship I had ever intentionally pursued, my closest friend without whom a Sharia Law inspired cane whipping four years would never have been remotely bearable. She was, in my opinion, the most beautiful girl. She had [permanent] duck lips, falling egg eyes and a somewhat wounded back story. We were both short but she was more delicate and small, and as I evened out horizontally, she navigated the higher atmospheric pressures about 4 inches above my head by the time we were 15. She eventually found other ‘high’ rollers, with a less grim stance on the world, and I, dissolved somewhere in the masses, praying and fasting fervently, but as protective and [distantly] immersed as if it were one of those the barbed-wire-fenced friendships you find in girls’ only schools.

Shortly before University, I met a group of girls who became my roommates in the last two years of High school and 10 years later, our friendship can be described in what is known today as a ‘situationship’. We talked, laughed, shrieked in our hostel room like we had just glanced upon The Beetles and abused boys together [one of whom I got married to]. As soon as we stepped out of the gate, it was as if it had all never happened.

Two years out of University, after having become accustomed to treading alone for four years on Dutch influenced county [whose precise orderliness is now fading], struggling to find a place in what I had once viewed, like many other school returnees, as a repugnant potholed boda-boda street-vendor filled grotesque mess, I was added to another group. It was no longer a Do you want to sit with us anymore group. You could simply be added, on WhatsApp. Four years away had distorted a lot of common history we could have shared, there were no recent memories. We did have one thing in common. We had dated boys who shared the same crowd and we all seemed to be at crossroads in our relationships. Some of the girls had been replaced, some of the girls were still not official and others jut did not know where it was that it was all going. [At the time, all our leaves were shedding and we all seemed to be hanging onto either stagnant, dead or changing relationships.] Then, I got engaged, and somehow in the middle of the dust cloud that wedding preparation is, I could see clearly, where the cracks were, and in some places, the utter nothingness.

The best bragging rights go to girls who can post a woman every Woman Crush Wednesday and tag them in Winning or Queening or Killing it or them. It is like a social media album. This is me, this is my friend, this is all of us, and we are all happy at her birthday brunch at this expensive restaurant. Not having a girl squad to go on trips with feels like what it meant to sit alone at home time while waiting for your parent to pick you up- you would have to go sit with the teachers. [Trying to sit with the Indian girls would only more plainly reveal how much more alone you were.]

And then, some days, you realise that you might be that favour friend, the one that is kept, just in case. Some days you realise that you just might be another tick on the checklist for the friend’s wife and sometimes, you wonder why, just like everyone else, you can’t just laugh with careless abandon as you say a lot about nothing in particular. You wonder why it is, that from the moment you meet someone, it is always forever or nothing.

Author: A. M. K

Housegirl

Is this how it ends?