Matthew Charles Wangahü wanted his daughter to marry into a wealthy family so that wealth would produce more wealth, power, and social standing. Before the accident, she had seen this as natural and inevitable. But now Nyawlra wanted to marry somebody with whom she could build a new tomorrow. At college, she met a young man of her new dreams of self-reliance.
Kaniürü was an artist very much involved in his art. Even if he was indifferent to student politics, he did not seem to mind her involvement. He was not one of those who forbid their girlfriends or wives to get involved in public issues or those who believed that politics and civic matters were a man’s domain. What convinced her that she had found her life’s mate was that Kaniürü did not come from a wealthy family. He told her that he was an orphan; his parents had died when he was a child, and he was brought up by a grandmother who died when he was at college. She felt for him and fell in love with her image of a self-made man.
What Grace Nyawlra did not know was that Kaniürü did not share her notion of a pure and blissful union. When his eyes rested on her, they saw beyond her looks to the even more alluring looks of Wan-gahü’s wealth and property. Through Nyawlra, he would rise from the depths of poverty and misery to the heaven of leisure and well-being. He kept on dreaming and looking forward to the day when he and Nyawlra would walk down the aisle; Nyawlra in white satin and he dressed to kill in a dark suit with a boutonniere. There would be ten bridesmaids and ten best men, a huge wedding ceremony with a hundred Mercedes-Benzes, bumper to bumper, shuttling dignitaries to the reception. Holding hands, he and Nyawlra would be the center of everybody’s attention, gladly having to endure speech after speech from all those dignitaries, this endless prelude to that moment when he and Nyawlra would slice through a ten-layer wedding cake. Whenever Nyawlra saw the glint in his eyes, she assumed it reflected the light of desire and love, and she felt humbled by the intensity of his devotion. Nyawlra’s dreams were for a simple wedding ceremony, not a display of affluence. She wanted a celebration of life, not a performance of its denial.
As for Wangahü, her father, he would have been surprised to know how close his own vision was to Kaniürü’s. But Wangahü s contempt for anybody who had not made it was so deep that even this shared vision would have struck him as presumptuousness of the poor. The thought that his own daughter would marry a man who did not even have a family was too painful to contemplate. What kind of a man is an artist? To Wangahü, drawing pictures was the work of cripples, children, and feeble women or men afraid to use their muscles; he would never see his own blood connected to such misery.
So Nyawlra and Kaniürü put wedding rings on each other’s fingers without the blessings of a grateful father, and not before a multitude but at the district commissioner’s, their witnesses being a man and a woman whom they had met only a few minutes before the civil ceremony. The split between father and daughter was now complete. Wangahü kept on insisting, She has disrobed me in public, why? She has left me naked before my entire church community, why? She has turned me into a laughing stock, why? Why elope with a man so poor that he does not even have a family? How will he support her, by hawking wood carvings of giraffes and rhinos to tourists?
The estrangement between father and daughter caused tension between the newlyweds. Kaniürü felt that the lifeline that was supposed to pull him out of his sea of troubles had been severed and Nyawlra was now the only person who had the power and the means to put things to right. No sooner had the two returned from their honeymoon than Kaniürü started urging Nyawlra to fall on her knees and beg her father’s forgiveness. Nyawlra, for her part, needed to break with her past; she yearned to make it on their own and earn respect through hard work, the simple dignity of their home, and a happy family life. Every day the newlyweds clashed. Kaniürü continued nagging her, even after he got a job at the Ruler’s Polytechnic at Eldares. He would often accuse her of ruining their lives by refusing to reconcile with her father, until one day Nyawlra exploded: Was it me you wanted to marry, or my father’s money r
In the heat of the moment they rushed to the district commissioner’s and filed for divorce, parting company in less than a year of failed married bliss.
Nyawlra now found herself on a new road to freedom. Kaniürü felt he had lost his way to riches and never tired of trying to win her back.
Nyawlra started laughing as she recounted his pathetic attempts to Kamltl.
By now the two beggars were at table, enjoying a meal of ugali and collard greens Nyawlra had quickly prepared in the kitchen. Kamrö was inwardly grateful. He could not remember the last time he had eaten good home cooking, and it was with tremendous self-restraint that he did not gulp it all down.
The little house comprised a bedroom with a guitar hanging prominently on the wall, a sitting room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a toilet and shower. The beggars had already washed themselves and changed, Kamltl into his job-seeking shirt and trousers and Nyawlra into a simple homely dress.
“And what does Kaniürü do now?” he asked her.
“I believe he is still a teacher at the Ruler’s Polytechnic. But you won’t believe this. I hear he recently became a member of the Ruler’s glorious youthwing that the Ruler talked about in his famous television address to the nation, following the incident of the snakes at the park, in an effort to attract the youth away from the propaganda of the Movement for the Voice of the People.”
“A new Aburlria, indeed,” Kamltl commented. “Even a college teacher a youthwinger!”
They were silent for a while.
“And how did you end up in the streets, begging?” Kamltl asked, wondering whether she shared his desperation. Or did the divorce from Kaniürü and the separation from her father have anything to do with it? “I would never have imagined meeting a university woman begging in the streets!”
“Weren’t you just talking about a new Aburlria? If fifty-year-old university professors are becoming the Ruler’s youthwingers, why can’t university graduates become beggars?”
“I didn’t mean university graduates in general, but women graduates. Like you, for instance.”
“Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?” Nyawlra asked rather sharply. “Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood} Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions’? Mariam Ba of Senegal, So Long a Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.”
“I am not much of a reader of fiction,” Kamltl said. “Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.”
“Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?” Nyawlra pressed. “Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things’? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines’? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!”
“I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,” Kamltl said, trying to redeem himself. “Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …”
“I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,” Nyawlra said. “The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?”
“To be very frank,” Kamltl said, trying to steer the talk away from the subject of women writers, “the books that most fascinate me are those about Egypt and Ethiopia, the entire area of the Nile, the Red Sea, and the coastline. I have a theory that the coastline of the Indian Ocean was once a cultural highway with constant migrations and exchange. There are hardly any women who write about that. I will start reading books by women writers. Perhaps you can recommend som
e. But you did not answer my question. What were you doing in beggars’ clothes at the Ruler’s Square?”
“What about you?” Nyawlra asked. “What were you doing there?”
Before Kamltl could answer, she was laughing again, as if a new thought had seized her.
“What is it?” Kamltl asked. Was her laughter at the expense of his ignorance about women writers?
“It occurred to me as you were talking about Egypt and Ethiopia … how did you become so knowledgeable about witchcraft and magic potions?” she managed to say in between bouts of laughter.
At the mention of his foray into magic, and remembering the look on the police officer’s face, Kamltl, too, broke into hysterics.
9
“When we were children we used to play witchcraft. We would stick a wooden spike through a bundle of leaves, a dead frog or lizard, and one or two Sodom apples and then plant the spike in a path. From a safe distance we kept an eye on it, and what excited us most was to see adults, grown men and women, avoiding any contact with the bundle. Some would even take a step or two back, then give it a wide berth. Nobody dared touch it; there were times when the bundle remained in place, Lord knows, for days.
“Just outside the village was a big orchard of plums, pears, mangoes, oranges, tangerines, and lemons, and whenever we passed anywhere near this garden of Eden, the landowner would set his dogs on us children so that we would not steal his fruit. Some of the children did actually find a way of climbing over the fence; they would come back with their pockets bulging with fruit. Still, we did not like his chasing us with dogs on a public path, and we hated even more that he took us all to be thieves deserving of punishment whether we had stolen anything or not. One day we decided to test our witch power on our tormenter. We prepared the magic bundle in the same way but made it more potent. To the dead frogs and Sodom apples and leaves we added dead chameleons and planted the wood spike in a corner of the orchard where passersby could see it.
“Well, it did work, a bit too well for our comfort. The farmer was so terrified that he hired the services of a witch doctor to undo the power of the evil no doubt planted in his land by envious rivals. His countermeasure did not help, for people were now afraid of getting caught between two contending magics. Word spread so that wholesale buyers and retailers from other areas refused to touch the man’s fruit.
“He was saved from ruin by an Indian buyer who said that African magic was no match for Indian magic and bought the fruits at the price of damaged goods. He claimed that he was going to spend more money getting the fruits cleansed with potent potions imported directly from India.
“At first we the magic workers were happy about our success and thought that we were cleverer than the adults and all the professional witch doctors because we had fooled them all. But, thinking that our parents, who also hated the landlord, would be happy, we let them in on our triumphs. The thrashing we got removed all thoughts of our ever dabbling in witchcraft again, until tonight.”
“Why did they beat you, for indulging in witchcraft or for using it to ruin the landlord?”
“Probably both; how dare children do that to an adult and a neighbor at that, but I think more for playing at witchcraft. Who knows? Even innocent deeds by babes might excite dangerous spirits from the netherworld to come and haunt the living. Whatever the case, we should have known that our parents were unlikely to say to us, Thank you for your ambition to become witch doctors.”
“But thank you for your magic tonight. It saved us,” Nyawlra said. “Now tell me this,” she added in a slightly more serious vein. “When did you join the band of beggars? I had not seen you in the group before.”
Kamltl gobbled another mouthful of ugali.
“Where shall I begin?” he asked as a means of clearing the way for his story. “I come from KTambugi. My parents were not rich, so paying for my schooling was a burden. They had to sell off their chickens, goats, and eventually their land, thus leaving us with nothing for a rainy day. When I finished college, I thought my time had come to show my gratitude. Aburlria thought otherwise. I have been a pest to my friends—this one for a place to spend the night, another for something to put in my belly. Borrowing here and there for bus fare.”
“And Bahati? You told me you lived in Bahati!” she asked.
“I am sorry—I lied, or rather I misled you. I was playing with the word’s dual meaning, suggesting a place to you, which it is. But it was really that I live wherever luck and chance guide me. Then one day I told myself, I must no longer burden my friends. I will follow in the footsteps of John the Baptist and make my bed in the wilderness. And like the homeless I would seek my sustenance in the garbage dump. At first it felt good that I no longer humiliated myself before my friends; but still, even my self-debasement was hard on the soul. If you lose self-esteem, what are you left with?
“The question nagged me, and then one day I decided that my life must take another direction, a different direction, the way of a Buddhist monk. So it was that I decided on two uniforms: that of the job seeker by day and that of the beggar by night. Tonight was my first night as a beggar, and see where it got me …”
Kamltl stopped abruptly. He felt that Nyawlra was not really listening to him, and he was right. He looked at her and her eyes said it all, even as she voiced her disbelief.
“You mean you were there to beg for real?” she asked.
“Why weren’t you?” Kamltl responded, puzzled.
“You mean … you are not … not one of us?”
“How do you mean, one of you? What were you doing outside Paradise in the rags of a beggar?”
“Nothing. Nothing, really. We oppose the Buler’s birthday cake and the Global Bank mission of putting us in a permanent debt trap. We must all oppose this business of Marching to Heaven.”
“By pretending to be poor and beggars?” Kamltl asked, a tinge of bitterness in his voice. “What is the connection between doing politics and donning rags? Do you think that begging is theater?”
“A theater of politics,” she shot back. “The water I drink, the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the bed I sleep on, are all determined by politics, good or bad. Politics is about power and how it is used. Politics involves choosing sides in the struggle for power. So on which side are you?”
“Must one always be on this or that side? I believe in humanity, divine, indivisible. We all need to look deeply in our hearts and the humanity in us will be revealed in all its glory. Then greed and the drive to humiliate others will come to a halt.”
“And this glorious humanity you wax so poetic about, what turns it against itself? Original sin?”
“Listen. I am not a priest. I am not a politician. The tribulations of this world are too much for me and my will.”
“So why did you choose to stand outside the gates of Paradise when there were so many other seven-star hotels around?”
He did not respond immediately. Images of what had happened all day flashed across his mind. Tell it all to her, a stranger? No, not everything.
“I did not choose to be there,” he now told her. “I just found myself there. I was blinded with anger and hunger. I went where they led me. What happens in life is fate. Fate falls like rain from Heaven above, and like rain it does not fall on all equally. Fortune, good and bad, comes from God.”
Nyawlra interrupted him with a hymn:
In the Christian Heaven we shall meet
We shall meet in the Christian Heaven
She laughed a little. Kamltl looked at her: this woman was chameleonlike. One moment she was a faithful secretary, then a player in the politics of poverty, and even a singing religious fanatic.
“Are you religious?” she asked him.
“Why?”
“Because you said that the good and the bad come to us ready-made from Heaven above. Did you, when in India, convert to some religion that believes that the poor and the wealthy are born so? That their fate is predetermined? Then what would be the point of one
looking into one’s heart for humanity revealed in all its glory? What if what one sees is tainted? What if the taint is fated?”
“I don’t know,” Kamltl said vaguely.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Nyawlra pressed him. “How can you be religious and not know, or not know what religion you subscribe to?”
“Because … because … I don’t know. Sometimes I feel overcome by unanswerable questions. Who created the universe? The lives in the bodies that die—where do they go? Or is life an illusion? Maya, as the Indian Shankara would teach. Sometimes at night, alone in the wilderness, lying on my back, looking at the stars and the vast universe, I feel lifted out … I mean, I hear voices telling me, Kamrö, why do you burden yourself with so much worry? See how big the universe is? What are you in the face of its immensity and eternity? No, I would not say that I am religious, but I believe in something greater than us. And you?”
“Have you ever heard of the Animal of the Earth?” Nyawlra asked him suddenly. “Surely you’ve heard the rumor that the Ruler of Aburlria is a Devil worshipper and that he does so in the name of the Animal of the Earth?”
Kamltl sensed rather than knew clearly what she was talking about, but it was enough to raise in him new suspicions. Could this woman be a member of the dreaded Ruler’s M5? And would that not explain why she had impersonated a beggar? Was he the victim of a new plot? Had she been trying to compromise him? If so, she was good at it. Her talk and kindness had already softened him. For although they did not see eye to eye on all the issues, their disagreements had so far not degenerated into anger or hatred. They talked as if they had grown up together, knowing each other in times of sorrow and happiness. Kamrö was so at ease in her presence that he felt as if he could reveal his innermost thoughts and experiences. But weren’t the agents of the State renowned for seducing their victims into lowering their guards, and then pouncing on them? Kamrö became wary of Nyawlra and withdrew into himself.