...Bina told me these things because she was there. When, Pa’s former workmate, called Matata, found them sleeping under a fuel tanker by the roadside, he came out, looked keenly at Ma the way witchdoctors about to go in a trance do. He peered and began to shed tears.

He picked Ma and urged Bina to his battered land rover, all the while tearing like a silly school boy who had been caught copying in the examination room.

He told Ma stories of Pa’s family by that Alur woman and how they had fled to Pader, how the people with black shades at night and flowery shirts had taken Pa away. Ma just smiled.

She did not know what he was talking about. Bina knew then that she was losing Ma, these Alur family stories and flowery shirt business seemed very grim by a child’s thinking, but there was Ma, smiling blankly gladly trying to pinch away the old leather from her car seat.

Matata took them to Jinja in his home of two wives where each of them with their line of tots eyed them suspiciously, the way a mother views her son’s new girlfriend from a different tribe; a disaster waiting to happen.

One day, while Bina was playing dulu on the street with Matata’s school for toddlers, a woman saw her and started shrieking and yelling in her direction.

"Bina, Bina, am your auntie, Bina, come, your mother has almost died of grief.” This is how Bina was found again.

This is how she learnt to forget about her brother, stopped brooding about Zikusooka. She learnt to peel potatoes and make groundnut paste so that whenever she visited Ma in Jinja, she made some for Ma.

In Iganga it was not as quite a neighbourhood, not with all the goats and the cows and the chicken roaming on the roads together with the bicycles, and cars and motorcycles.

Those small trips to Jinja for Bina were like the holidays. They met and talked and once in a while Ma mentioned the madness that people said had made her walk all over looking for her disappeared father.

They talked about those days in the wilderness when they slept on shop verandas and in goat sheds like happy animals of God.

She talked about the thing growing inside her, which was me, to her and wondered if Bina was going to be there with her to play with the child when it began to learn to play.

She did not hold in high esteem Matata’s tots, not with all the shitting all over the place, the practicing of father and mother in their sleeping quarters.

Those children were being brought up like savages and you don’t want your child to be growing up in that company even if you had spent your last few months roaming in the bushes, your head gone haywire with a child from nowhere.
Bina and Ma were like sister and sister, age mates who had been separated before birth.

They shared their madness and longed for the together moments of sheer silence sometimes near that lake spot where they had met, the queer pair, lounging on the lake shores, collecting shells, for me, while I was yet to come.

The mothers of the tots began not to like the concern Matata was giving to his dead friend’s mad wife and her crazy child friend.

It was too much to take care of a pregnant wife of a man who just disappeared.

You could end up with a lot of pregnant women expecting children, whose fathers were faceless, women whose husbands may have been tossed into the Nile, they bodies hitting the water after the boulders that their waists were fastened to.

The mothers were worried that this bastard child was to become a sort of prize in the house, now that all the tots were stubborn and more than half a dozen siblings to be mischievous with.

They could imagine, an only child with a father who did not father him.

The mothers started laying down schemes to send her away. They claimed that she whipped the tots without any reason, chanted in the wee hours of the night like an enchanted woman and blamed it the madness coming back. Petitions were constantly reaching Matata through every possible channel.

The tots were tutored to plead with their father to send away the mad woman from their home.

The rumor mills went into over drive about the strange woman that was living amongst them.

They made it look like in times when people were disappearing everyday; they did not want a person appearing suddenly from nowhere.

Matata was a real polygamous man.

He did not listen to his wives often because as he had been advised by his father, women often break homes. He made sure the message sunk into his sons as well.

Your mothers, they are not your clan mates, they are just like visitors in this home.

In those few times when he sat with his make tots, trying to make them to make him a proud father, away from the shitting all over the place, the sex-practicing everyday, he tried to tell them away from his mothers who he treated like converted enemies.

The women knew how to win the allegiance of the male tots back.

The steamed sweet potatoes and a second offering of the ground nut paste during the evening meal was enough, especially when the dishes had been wiped clean of the first offering, the eyes stuck onto the mothers to show the enthusiasm over more sauce on the melamine dishes.

The pushing and pulling over the strange mad woman, continued for a while but Matata effused to budge.

A friend is a friend, dead or alive, he lectured into the wandering deficient brains of his tots. One morning, Ma started to yell and the mothers knew that she was going to stay longer than they had anticipated.

They collected their best body wrappings quickly and organized the only pick up in the village to ferry her to hospital.

Where she had been known for her good manners, in spite of her supposed madness, Ma wailed; kicked, abused, thrust her arms everywhere.

The hurled the metallic beds around the hospital and made it impossible for any other patient to be housed in her vicinity. The people believed that she was truly mad and would have urged Matata to take her to another clinic, if he had not been around.

The same evening Bina had arrived and was the only person who seemed to have a calming effect on the ailing woman, with her pre-teenage years but for only a while.

The bed hurling business was back, although Bina says it was not long before I came out, a few minutes before a headless object. Everyone including the mothers forgave Ma, for her Madness when they heard the news.

They said my dead sibling was the devil behind the madness and in an unusual change of tact, changed into loving aunties, falling over themselves to rock me to sleep.

So this is how, the famous rotting torso came up again, through my birth. There I was, the future break-dance king, kicking and punching the air, squealing, and the screeching announcement, the message that I have arrived.

She thought I had brought the torso matter to a close. The memories of the eastern trek flooded her, dulling the pain. No it was not some form of madness, she told Bina.

It was the disappearing of someone you are used to looking at their naked feminine feet under the towel in the morning, when he bent over to brush, humming along to Tabuley.

This is where the sadness stops. I came with the good omen. Matata got a promotion from manual labourer to factory supervisor at the Chilington Hoe factory.

It meant that bread and sugar stopped being a rare commodity, like they had been after the Indians ran away. He could make sure a few loaves were smuggled from Kenya for him every few weeks.

He even got dropped home in the factory’s ageing Leyland truck causing a scene in the neighbourhood. He managed to buy himself one of the relic Indian buildings in town that had been stripped of all the windows and doors, and even the paint. He turned it into a bachelor pad, banning the wives from occupying the different rooms with large street shop doors.

To the chagrin of the mothers, he donated one room to Ma, but since they wanted to remain in her good books they did not show any contempt of his decision.

Instead, she let them sneak into the town to visit her while he was away which was enough for them. Bina came to stay with us, me being the toast of the new neighbourhood, with my squeals and screeches.

I did not know all of this of course. They told me these things.

END

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