Ber Anena
The driver looked at Gimara, looked at me, and said he would not carry a dead body in his bus. My mouth was usually quick to shoot such a man with evil words, but I needed the idiot’s help.
He had watched us walk through the gates of Namayiba Bus Park, our arms locked like a parent walking their child down the aisle. But that was no wedding march. The doctor had said my grandson was an impossible case, and I needed to take him home.
“Driver, please, the bus is the only transport we can afford. Help us.”
He had a dirty smile on his face when he called my grandson a dead body. After hearing me plead, that smile got wider. He stroked the beards that stretched to his chest like agaba tree creepers.
“Where is he going?”
“Gulu,” Gimara answered, his first word since morning. I could tell that he had been saving energy for that moment with the driver. He wanted the man to believe that he was strong enough for the five-hour journey.
My hope was too stubborn for me to consider that my grandson could die on the journey. His illness was more than enough burden for us to carry but death would be a costly addition. Despite his sick head, Gimara must have remembered how complicated transporting a body can be. The ritual involved using a young virgin hen to fan tires of the vehicle carrying the deceased. If that ceremony was not done, the restless soul of the dead would jam the car. The driver was not going to mention this fear to me, but I knew. I could hear gospel music playing on the bus but I knew that even a vehicle taking a body for a funeral service in the church went through that ritual.
I was praying so hard for a miracle. But what if the devil won and Gimara lost the fight during the journey? Would the vehicle grind to a stop? I had not experienced something like that in my seventy years on earth. Would the driver demand that I pay the millions of shillings drivers charge for carrying dead bodies?
I looked at the driver with pleading eyes, but his stupid smile was gone. Instead, he started chewing something loudly, his lips and face twisting like he was trying not to fart.
“This young man is obviously very sick. He will not manage the long bus ride. Get a special hire,” he said.
The way he said get a special hire was as if he was paying for it.
“Where is the money, my son?”
The hospital had slapped us with a bill of twenty million. If Gimara’s boss had not helped collect money from his business colleagues, we would still be drying ourselves on the hospital veranda, security guards watching over our every movement like hawks.
“That is not a question for me, Mama.”
The driver was young enough to be my son, but he was treating me like my brain was filled with nothing but porridge. I was itching to smack his face so that he could see reason, but I couldn’t. It was his bus, and my bones were too tired for jail on account of assault.
Some passengers stuck their heads out of the bus windows, listening and watching. “Driver, have mercy on the old woman,” a woman in the back window shouted. That alerted other passengers to get up from their seats. They crowded the front of the bus and looked out through the windshield that had white bird poop and dead insects stuck to the glass.
“The bus is already full, what are we waiting for?” someone shouted.
“Take us home!”
“We have waited for hours for this thing to start moving.”
“You don’t know these money-minded bus people,” another said. “They will pile us on top of each other until the bus croaks like a frog.”
The bus roared with laughter.
“There are three seats in the back. Let them in and we go,” the woman by the back window said. I blessed her heart.
It was true that buses that traveled from Kampala to upcountry towns usually took hours to get full, especially if it was not a weekend or public holiday. They didn’t leave until every seat was occupied. I was lucky we had arrived when the bus was about to leave, but with the driver behaving like a king, I didn’t know what to do.
My arms were tired from holding Gimara up. The muscular men who loaded passengers’ luggage in the bus trunk were standing with their chests out, staring like Gimara had leprosy. I helped Gimara onto the dusty floor, knelt and looked up at the driver without a word. The tears that started rolling from my eyes were for the humiliation I was facing in a cruel city that had welcomed my healthy child and returned him broken. I had already said everything I could to the driver. If I opened my mouth, it would be to curse him and every single one in his lineage. He gave me the kind of look that said he wished I could disappear.
“Take him up.” He ordered the busboys.
“As soon as he dies—pap like this—I will throw you off the bus.” He shouted this for everyone on the bus to hear.
In a few minutes, we were on the way to Gulu, Gimara seated with his head on my lap and passengers stretching their necks whenever the bus hit a pothole, to see if he had dropped dead.
If someone told me a month earlier that I would be holding the beaten body of the only son of my only daughter on my lap, I would have called them a witch and you wouldn’t blame me.
Gimara had passed his secondary school exams very well, but not enough for the government to pay for his university. As many of his peers moved forward with their education, Gimara stayed home. Luckily, he was not one of the idle and unruly kind of teenagers who gave their parents high blood pressure. He had all sorts of useful ideas.
“Let’s start selling bricks, Mama,” he said, the first week after finishing his exams. “I’ll make them of course. Do you see all the buildings coming up? They need bricks.”
I didn’t want Gimara to start engaging in hard physical labor so young. Besides, bricklaying was not a one-man job. We would need to hire people to fetch water, dig and mix the soil, and stack the bricks when it came time to bake them. We didn’t have the money. I said no but Gimara was ready with another idea.
“Let’s buy a goat, Mama. If it multiplied, we’ll earn some real money.” I liked this idea. I wasn’t sure if I did because my husband, Akena, used to rear animals too or because I had seen how goat and cattle owners made money, especially on holidays. Since Gimara learned of his Baba’s love for animals, he yearned to do the same. Besides, animals seemed to love him back. The stray village dogs followed him around, the cats rubbed their tails on his legs, and the few times he took our neighbor’s goats to pasture, the animals didn’t resist being tethered.
I pulled out the money I had saved from the previous year’s millet harvest and bought a young female goat, but I knew it would be a while before we would start earning from it. Knowing Gimara, he would want to do something on the side besides taking the goat to graze in the morning and bringing it home at sunset. When he brought up the idea of moving to the city, I was not surprised.
Once in Kampala, Gimara planned to work for a year or two, and pay himself through Makerere University until he became a doctor. The boy wanted to honor his mother who died giving birth to him. I remember doctors at the hospital told me my daughter was complaining too much for no reason. The midwife even said labor was supposed to be painful.
But a woman knows her body better than anyone and my Adunu knew something was wrong. They didn’t listen. As if that was not enough, Gimara’s father stood over the child and blamed him for killing his wife.
“I will not be part of the bad luck this child carries.” He stomped out of the house and disappeared, before the soil settled on the grave of his wife. I held Gimara, the beautiful son of my beautiful daughter, and swore to raise him into a man better than his father. I had done a good job so far. I heaped blessings on his head as Gimara boarded Gateway Bus for that 300km journey to Kampala, a city rumored to have a better chance of making money.
Luck was on his side when he arrived in Kampala. A boy he went to Gulu Primary School with opened the door to his single room in Kamwokya for my son. He introduced Gimara to his boss in Kikubo Market and together, they started selling second-hand clothes for a salary that got him food and rent and a shirt on his back.
A year later, Gimara was going with his boss to China to buy bales of cloth which they sold to retailers from all over the country. He even changed his mind about going to school. He said doctors were always in the news protesting poor pay. He told me about the many people who went to university but were stuck at home with nothing to do. Some roamed the streets wearing nice suits but robbed people for a living. Gimara thought if he worked hard and started his own business, he would afford the best hospitals in the world and give us a better life.
In Gulu, my face had started shining because Gimara sent me money every month and I fed well with it. When his boss raised his salary after the first year, Gimara called me, his words falling over each other like they did when he was excited.
“I’m going to buy you a phone, Mama. Your very first phone!”
“Gimaraaa! That shiny thing will kill my old eyes for nothing.” My words didn’t spoil Gimara’s excitement.
“You don’t have to borrow Obol’s phone every time I want to talk to you.”
“Obol is not complaining, is he? And what is the use of a neighbor if not to help each other once in a while?”
“One day I may be in big trouble and Obol may not be home.”
“Problems are expensive for people like us, Gimara, don’t even joke about it.”
Gimara had moved away from the hand-to-mouth life, but I didn’t want him to get too excited. He had started saving money to buy land, cows, and more goats, which was what he needed to focus on. He was working hard to move away from Kamwokya and its many criminals to a place with a wall fence and a security guard. And then he would buy a car—the first car in our small family, and Gimara would not have to play with death riding Kampala’s crazy boda bodas.
But while Gimara was busy running away from life’s problems, prob- lems were running after him. That Monday evening after work, Gimara walked the ten or so minutes from his workplace to the Centenary Bank ATM in downtown Kampala. It was the end of the month and the banks had two categories of people. There were those who got a salary and went to withdraw it for various purposes. Then there were thieves who lingered around the bank, waiting to pounce on those who left the ATM with fat pockets.
As Gimara walked out of the ATM, he remembered a man in green running into him. They each said sorry and carried on. He went to the nearby electronics arcade and bought the phone he had promised me. He walked to the New Taxi Park and boarded the vehicle heading to Kamwokya. As he took a back seat in the fourteen-seater, a man in green arrived and entered the same taxi. Was he the same guy from the bank? Gimara didn’t think much of it after that initial question. He was tired and his mind was home.
Gimara alighted at the Kamwokya taxi stop and started walking the remaining distance. The narrow, dimly-lit path was deserted at the time but voices came from the buildings nearby. Not long after, Gimara sensed that someone was coming behind him. He turned and looked, and it was the man in green. His heart started beating fast. He knew that was not a mere coincidence anymore. He stopped under an electric pole with bright light and looked at the man in green, hoping he would just walk past him. The man started whistling and swinging a backpack as though aware of the fear building inside Gimara. He walked faster now like he was heading somewhere far. He even strode a few steps past Gimara before he pulled a fist-sized stone from the bag and aimed it at Gimara’s head. My grandson said he dodged it, but the man was quicker. He kicked Gimara in the ankle and he fell, hitting his head against the electric pole. As Gimara struggled to get to his feet, the criminal landed a hard blow on the back of his head.
“Why didn’t you scream, Gimara, why?”
“Everything happened so fast, Mama.”
Gimara played dead so that the man wouldn’t hit his head again. He went straight for the small bag with a new phone, which meant he had watched Gimara as he bought it. He turned Gimara’s pockets inside out and took the three hundred thousand shillings—money that was meant for his rent, some for me, and some for his monthly upkeep.
The man in green ran away, leaving Gimara groaning on the bushy path. A good Samaritan found him, asked for a contact and he mumbled Obol’s phone number before his body started shaking and shaking and that was the last thing he recalled of that night.
As the bus approached Migeera, the trading center where vehicles usually stopped for passengers to buy roadside cassava, maize, gonja, and water, that same shaking started. Gimara trembled so hard like Satan had broken into his body. The woman sitting in the same row with us joined me in holding Gimara down, but our seats still shook, alerting passengers behind us and those across the aisle.
When it stopped, Gimara pressed his head on my lap, breathing quick and hard like he had been running up a hill. The man across the aisle was staring with eyes and mouth wide. He was the first to get up when the bus pulled into the fuel station at Migeera. I prayed he was not running to make a report to the driver. I prayed he was just pressed and wanted to be the first to reach the public toilets.
I could not go out even if I wanted to but when our neighbor offered to hold Gimara so that I could stretch my old legs, I thanked her. Outside, I saw the man with wide eyes whispering to the driver. I cleared my throat and made sure the driver saw me and knew that the boy he had declared dead was still alive on the bus.
I turned and hurried to the toilets. We only had ten minutes. My body had tuned itself to keep my bladder calm until we got to Gulu, but when the chance to pee presented itself, it demanded to be emptied. I prayed that Gimara was fine. That his bladder was empty since he refused to drink or eat anything that morning. If he peed on himself in that bus, or worse, that miserable driver would throw us out.
We still had two hours left to arrive in Gulu. I got back on the bus and started praying again in the language of my mother. Maybe the gods would get us home and also heal my son—something doctors from that rich people’s hospital had failed to do.
For two weeks, the doctors had rolled Gimara into one machine after another, trying to figure out how many parts of his head needed to be sewn back together. They pricked his arms with needles, looking for veins that kept appearing and disappearing. When they found it, they pumped him with drugs and liters of water.
Wires and tubes hung from his chest and mouth and nose and head like octopus arms. A machine that sat on the wall above his bed kept going beep beep beep. One time, the machine went beeeeeeeeeeeep like an endless ambulance and Gimara started shaking in that small hospital bed, his energy threatening to split the bed in the middle.
I looked at my grandson wide-mouthed but couldn’t call for help. It was as if my saliva had become glue, marrying my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Caretakers of the nine other patients in the Injury Ward got up, moving close to see what was happening. One of them shouted, Doctor! Someone is dying. I wondered for a minute why the woman was inviting death upon Gimara but decided to focus on the help she had called for.
A nurse ran into the room and stuck a needle in Gimara’s arm. Whatever was rocking his body jumped out with one big shake that pushed Gimara to the edge of the bed, his head dangling. My bad knees grew softer at that moment. Thankfully the nurse caught him. If he had hit his head on that cold cement floor, I would have just packed for home without waiting for anyone to tell me my child was dead.
Gimara started breathing properly again. His chest rose and fell with ease. Two days later, some of the wires and tubes were even removed from his body. Gimara started eating soft food—pounded potatoes and soup and leafy vegetables—unlike the thing they had been feeding him through a tube. He was talking a bit louder, not the whispering which made me put my ears near his mouth to understand what he was saying.
During the doctor’s ward rounds, the nurse started smiling a certain smile that made me believe Gimara was going to be okay. But the machine went beeeeeeeeeeeep again not long after. This time, I was the one that shouted, Doctor, my child needs you! A nurse ran into the ward, followed by the giant doctor. My heart started falling.
The doctor stood by the bed, reading the many papers in Gimara’s file like he was not the one who had been writing them. He held the latest picture of Gimara’s head against the window light and looked long and closely. He took his glasses off and put them back on like he didn’t trust his bare eyes or the glasses. The skin of his forehead kept stretching and folding.
The man didn’t say a word to me, not that I would’ve understood anything anyway. These doctors talked like they were raised in the Queen of England’s compound. Even for a simple condition, they preferred their big English.
Luckily, Gimara’s body stopped shaking following the injection the nurse gave him. When he pulled himself into a sitting position, he no longer cried my head my head my head. But he didn’t get better than that, and neither did he get worse. He was just there like a river that never flowed, never dried up, never burst its banks.
The next time the giant doctor came back, he handed me a new scan of Gimara’s head. He pointed to different sections and explained things that went over my head like a foreign language. All I saw was the whiteness of bones and dark spots. He said there was blood in a sensitive part of Gimara’s brain following the attack.
“Why don’t you cut his head open and clean out the blood?” I asked.
The doctor looked at me as though I was mad. He stroked his head like he had the most brilliant mind known to man.
“Mama, if we open his brain, he may die.”
“And if you don’t open it, he will still die.”
“Mama, do you pray? You should do that now.”
“What do you think I have been doing all this time?”
“All I’m saying is that there’s nothing more we can do.”
“You young people of today talk to us anyhow because you read books. Why have your books failed to heal my son?”
“We tried our best, Mama.”
“The only one who deserves to call me Mama is that poor boy you have failed to save.”
“The nurse will tell you everything else you need to know.” The doctor stepped quickly away from me as if he could feel I was itching to throw myself at him. There had been stories of caretakers and even patients who beat doctors out of frustration. Maybe if I had the energy of youth, I would do that but all I had were words that didn’t seem to be helping.
The doctor marched out of the ward like he was being pursued by wasps. The other patients and their attendants had looked and listened. While I had enjoyed eavesdropping on chitchats and what the doctors and nurses said in the ward, I now hated that everyone had heard what my poor grandson’s fate was.
Like he did the first time his father walked out on him twenty years ago, Gimara held my hand, snuggling close like he knew he was dying, just like he seemed to have known at a day old that his mother was gone for good.
Sitting with Gimara’s head on my lap, sixty-three bus passengers fearing for the worst from my grandson, felt like being trapped in a mobile jail heading to hell. Time was moving slowly and Gimara was becoming heavier. I didn’t know if I was just getting tired. The midday sun was boiling the bus. The heat on tired bodies, followed by the smell of different foods that people carried into the bus from Migeera, and silent farts from dozing passengers, made it unbearable. Unluckily for us, the window by our row was too rusty to slide open. Some passengers seated by the working windows refused to open them, claiming the wind was a bigger inconvenience than the heat within.
Sweat dripped from Gimara’s head. His mouth was open like his nose alone couldn’t take in enough air. I felt his pulse and it was barely there. The woman in our row, seeing our growing discomfort, got up to join the passenger that had two young boys in the seat behind us.
She took one of the boys’ seats and carried him on her lap. I stretched Gimara’s legs on the created space.
Gimara opened his eyes and tried to turn his face upward. He gritted his teeth in pain. “Lie still, my son,” I whispered.
“Mama,” he said. I propped his head such that I could look into his twinkling eyes.
“I have heard you, Gimara. How do you feel?”
“Good.”
“We thank the gods. Lie still. You don’t want to hurt your head more.”
The bus approached Karuma. That was the place Gimara used to dream about the most when he was young. He had heard about the baboons that lived by the Karuma Falls Bridge, waiting for bananas or maize that passengers tossed to them through the windows. In primary five, he studied about the River Nile, the fact that its source was in Jinja, and that it flowed northwards from Uganda to Sudan and Egypt.
And when he left for Kampala, Gimara got a window seat on the Gateway Bus so that he would see the baboons and the Nile water and the soldiers who kept watch over the bridge, arresting and confiscating any phones or cameras used to take photos of the area. That day, when Gimara had called Obol’s phone to tell me he had arrived in Kampala, the first thing he talked about was the wonder of Karuma Falls.
“Mama, the baboons and monkeys are big and bossy and just beautiful. Beautiful.”
“Aha. And the River Nile?”
“Ho! The water looks just like milk boiling.”
And now, I was on a bus with my only grandchild whose head was too useless for him to enjoy Karuma and its beautiful, bossy baboons.
If his grandfather was still here and if Gimara was healthy, I would be watching the love of animals of two men. Who didn’t know how much Akena loved his animals? Immediately after Adunu’s marriage ceremony, he started rearing the cattle we received as dowry and those we already had. Two years later, the animals had multiplied from one to two kraals. Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and rabbits ran around the home, filling it with sounds and dung.
As Adunu and her husband worked on getting their first child, Akena chose the healthiest-looking animal and tattooed Gimara’s name on its side.
Then, suddenly, Kony started a war against Museveni’s government, promising to save our people from isolation and mistreatment. He said he would bring back the cattle Museveni’s boys raided when they were shooting their way to power. It all sounded very good to the ears. Akena woke up one day and joined Kony in the bush.
But how would a woman without a husband or sons protect and keep two kraals of animals? Even before the fighters came to help themselves to our animals, some neighbors who silently eyed our wealth had already started stealing them as soon as they heard my husband was gone.
Gimara was born ten years after his grandfather went to join Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. I don’t know if the news reached him that his grandson had finally come into the world and that his only daughter was no more. If he did, maybe he would have returned home to help me shoulder the burden of grief and raise his grandson.
“What was Baba like?” Gimara often asked.
“Is it true Gimara the cow responded to Baba when he called its name?”
“How did you and Baba meet?”
If Akena was here, maybe I wouldn’t need to be a father to Gimara too, teaching him about the dangers of making a girl pregnant before they were ready, the importance of hygiene, how to shave his beard, how to make a living without becoming a slave to money. I didn’t mind giving him advice and showing him the way, but from Gimara’s endless questions, I knew he yearned for a father figure.
Even when the war ended, and many fighters came back home, my Akena was not among them. Like the many families with missing children, wives, and husbands, I didn’t know if Akena was alive or dead. Many times, people who escaped from rebel captivity said, Oh! Akena is a commander. But other times someone else said, Oh! Mzee Akena was killed during a fight with government soldiers.
My eyes stayed on the road, waiting for the day he would walk into our home, his long frame filling the doorway, his thick hair thicker, and his loud laughter echoing at the discovery that the grandson he named before he was even conceived, loved animals as much as he did.
The bus slow-paced through the many road humps at Karuma Falls Bridge until we got to Corner Kamdini. As it stopped for people to buy fresh fruits from the Lango region, I felt Gimara stir. Then his body started shaking again.
I was grateful for the temporary commotion—sellers holding up baskets of oranges, mangoes, sour sop, and lemon to passengers, and passengers haggling for lower prices through the window. But soon, the bus was in motion, and attention shifted to me and my grandson. The man with wide eyes widened them further as soon as he saw Gimara trembling. Passengers in the back seat stuck their heads between the seats to have a good look.
The bus picked up speed. We were about forty minutes away from home. I wondered if anyone was thinking of the same proverb I dreaded. Agulu pii too I dogola. The water pot breaks at the door. I had carried the fragile, precious pot of water that was my grandson all the way from Kampala. There was no way he was going to break; to die as he got home.
I needed him to get home alive so that I could try and keep him alive. I would look for the herbs my mother and her mother showed me. I would burn the fresh leaves and make Gimara inhale the healing smoke to melt that blood gathered in a corner of his brain. The same herb smoke that cleared nostrils blocked by flu. The same herbs that cured headaches that threatened to split heads into two and made eyesight blurry. I would make him an herbal bath and give him a drink of bitter roots that healed our people of many diseases.
I was going to try because Gimara was my only family. He was a child and for us, parents didn’t bury their children. It was the worst of the worst tragedy. If Gimara died, who would bury me? Who would tend to the home that carried our name?
Gimara’s trembling was getting worse. I pressed him harder onto my tired, numb lap. I hoped that the bus conductor who was seated at the front next to the driver was too engrossed. The Gods Must be Crazy was playing on the screen at the front, and passengers were busy watching and talking in between. Children were giggling. But around me, it was silence.
When Gimara suddenly stopped shaking, I leaned back and breathed in. His weight sank harder on my lap and his arms and legs fell, limp. He was looking at me but not really looking at me. I had seen death many times and that was it, in my own arms. I pressed my hands over Gimara’s face to close the eyes that had become whiter and wider as though he was trying to see something really important.
I lifted his dangling hand and felt his wrist for a pulse. Nothing.
Around me, whispers passed from one seat to the next until everyone was quiet, except the three or so children still giggling at The Gods Must Be Crazy.
The bus just kept going and I wondered if the passengers had kept the news from the driver and his conductor. As we approached Gulu, the woman who was seated with us earlier, helped me call Obol on the phone. At Layibi, she helped me tell the conductor that we were getting off at the trading center.
The bus rode to a stop next to Layibi Market. Obol was there, with a group of men standing by a pickup truck. He came up onto the bus, white sheet in hand, and placed it over Gimara before carrying him down to a waiting pick-up truck. As the bus pulled away, I looked at the faces hanging out of the window. I saw someone wipe their eyes, but my own stayed dry. My chest didn’t heave like it did when my eyes were about to get misty. My knees didn’t buckle under the weight of grief. Perhaps my body knew something.
I slipped my hand under the white sheet and held Gimara’s hand. As I watched the bus disappear in the distance, Gimara’s fingers twitched.