A big tourist-lodge operator recently shared a list of questions he is most commonly asked by tourists about the country. One of them was an inquiry into why there are so many people standing or sitting idle by the roadside. I have an answer to this, I think. It is because standing or sitting by the roadside is just an African thing. People love to be in community most of the time. I see it in the early morning when men gather at trading centres to drink tea and eat chapati and sumbusas from the woman who passes by the same place at the same time daily with a bucket and a packet of thin see through kaveera. I see it in the camaraderie at wedding launches and every and any cause for a celebration. Also, everyday, is market day. Someone is always selling something to eat and the street or roadside is the perfect place to find customers.

I began my 31st year with sleep-laden eyes, many kilogrammes less in weight, [the same old] abstract thoughts of running away and equipped with a new breast gadget to extract a milk supply that had already started to dwindle within four months. I went to the only place I could think of, a spa. I had been taking care of a new born and a three and a half year old, with no hands or voice besides mine for hours and sometimes, it seems, days at a time. I needed someone to take care of me.

When I finally sat down, my ears were sharply attuned to the sound of flowing bubbling water in the small fountain nearby. I was a fugitive. Nobody was going to hand me a crying child, nobody was coming to ask mummy-mummy-mummy for anything. I was just any other human being on the outside. On the inside, I was the woman who had burst out of a hospital door, 4cm dilated with contractions, with my suitcase, ready to fight, for the first time in a long time, for who I know myself to truly be. I had been a victim once, at the first hospital, after the first birth. I was not ready to be one again. I hoped the nurse would try and push me around this time, call a security guard to come hold me down.

I spent most of that night awake, watching a woman and motherhood talk show after washing my hair with the full wrath of beautiful smelling golden-orange coloured sodium sulphate in singular use bottles. I had been meaning to wash it a month or so before, but time had been a luxury too great to afford. So I looked up at the ceiling, wondered if baby would manage to sleep, if someone had found the duvet I had left on top of the car. Two hours beyond the time I had planned on leaving, I had run out of the house hurriedly without looking back, just in case my main support system at the time, suddenly had something more urgent to do- something about turbines, discussions and meeting bosses and friends. A few kilometres away, I turned back. Stealthily running back inside the gate, I threw the duvet which I had in the moment decided to pick up, on top of the car. I contemplated taking it to the door and quickly changed my mind. It was hanging in one direction so I straightened it, took a glimpse at the balcony, looking for a sign of upheaval, then, willing myself to walk away, I walked back outside unnoticed and drove away.

…

Church street, Pretoria, is silent, lined by trees and the sidewalk is paved by white sand and stones. I could walk for three minutes or more and not see anybody. Any scampering in the trees meant that I was about to be robbed on knife or gun point. Every now and then, a car with loud shouts of menacing white superiority occasionally grazed the road at super speed.

There are no people selling Kabalagala or boiled maize on the streets or the roadside. The roadside is for hobos and other unemployed people with cardboard boxes asking for any kind of job. Nobody sells pineapples or mangoes from a wheelbarrow. Nobody talks to you. You seem to disappear unseen in the dry windless air, the scalding sweat-lessness in the summer, which is when I usually walked, from my residence to the only African salon that side of town.

…

I slowly lunge backwards onto my pillow and stare at the ceiling behind the mosquito net. I think about the child I once was. The child who was terrified of the dark, who could not sleep alone in a bed by myself. That was even long before the soundless footsteps in the dark, the door I thought I had shut swinging eerily from side to side, long before it became a part of my subconscious; the memory of me following them with a faint smile and humour, thinking it was one of the children, a funny story I would tell later, only to come face to face with the black night, opened up by the empty space where the back door should have stood closed.

There is a smell about new beginnings in new places that is etched in every memory of that place. Our first apartment was like that. It was solely ours, new and novel. It was home, because it was ours and it was ours even though, I spent most of our time there, a lone soul staring through the glass balcony doors where most of the sunlight came through, centering the rustic wooden table in the kitchen where two more beings would eventually sit. They were the same glass doors through which they would enter, those who work while others sleep and sleep while others work. A small cough here and there, breathless, there was something in the air. One child was in his room, door closed but not locked, the child who had wailed all day, red faced, was in the room opposite ours, door wide open so that we could hear him when he awoke. The television was, large and black and still, the laptop lay shut on top of the armrest, the tea in the cup left half drunk in the cup, next to the phone next to the book I was attempting to read. They left empty spaces and a souvenir of cement-grey fingerprints and an array of knives on the chair where we had once sat and talked and smiled and laughed. … My four year old recently told me that he was afraid of the dark. Attempting to logicize his fears, I promptly asked him what he feared about the dark, and he said, “The dark”.

I wake up most days feeling tired. I don’t know if it is because of the red light of the night lamp next to me. Sometimes I wake up just in time for the lingering presence of hands upon my neck to disappear. Sleep paralysis it is called. The power has been off every few days. Just like many things here at home, you must know somebody or be a somebody before someone performs a job that they are paid monthly to provide. Most times, you must be a someone from the same tribal grouping, otherwise you are too proud and need humbling. You are to consider yourself lucky if you receive anything on time or up to a standard of any level.

*

I lay still and wait for sleep to whisk me away. Sometimes I turn to the side and glare at the residential unit of the big commercial complex they built next to us. Sometimes I see the glow of the TV. Most times I just stare at the still indoor plant in the glass windowed corridor. The glass is a light reflecting glass so I can only see through it with the light of the moon. My ears lay at the foot of my babies’ beds and I whisper constant incoherent prayers hoping God is close enough to hear me. Many times I have turned to the emptiness expecting lifelessness and loneliness to consume me, and I have instead found power, love and sound mind.

© Karungi

Pickled an avocado by mistake, and true to form, in an hour, it looked like it had aged at least 20 years

God, my source.