Arrivals

"Madam, is it you who brought the dead body? You need to go to the cargo terminal." Yeah, that would be me, Mr Airport Man. I am also the person who wants to spit in your face for calling her a dead body but, I'll just follow you into the bowels of this airport. My, doesn't everything in this little airport look as old as I remember it! Sure, there is a thin smear of oily paint over the aged walls, but that is like Shanti body jelly over my grandmother's wrinkled elbows. Hardly, the image of new. 

When Lindsey first joined me in Cairo, we were not what you would call lesbians. Sure,  our significant others had always been sort of third wheels and our friendship had always been the main union in both of our lives. But back then, we hadn't committed the requisite sins to earn us the label. Had we known we would tumble into said sin, maybe I wouldn't have moved to Cairo, in the first place. Cape Town perhaps, as we eventually did. Anyhow, I can't tell you about it all now for here comes Joshua. 

Flanked by three men I can only describe as, Goliath, Badang and their pet gorilla, he cuts the figure of your regular African warlord. Nanti, it is war awaiting us, outside this airport today. He called it "The Fight Against the Primitives," in our WhatsApp chat. The Primitives. I wish I could come up with a name for our side of the battle. "A little woman, her mid-sized brother and their three mercenaries," seems far less inspired.

The Primitives are Lindsey's relatives. From the long distance calls we have had over the last two weeks, I gather they include: an uncle (both of her parents are deceased), an area council member (no blood relation but a relative by geographical proximity and political investment, I suppose) and three other men whose relationships to her are so sketchy, I didn't store the information. They want her body. They want it buried at the ancestral grave site. Initially, I wanted that too, which is why I got in touch with them, but one of them let it known they'll have a mob in place to keep me away from the burial. So, it is war now.  By virtue of the authority entrusted to me by myself, as spouse of the deceased, I am burying this woman in my home country, on a piece of land I can reasonably expect to be buried on myself. Look, Lindsey is dead. What else I am going to do with my life except enter bull fights? This is going to happen or I will die attempting it.

"Go stand with them. Tell them we are waiting for the funeral car to arrive. Angela and I are leaving with the body now. When we reach Kitooro, I'll call Isa to come around with your escape car. Drive to Kyazanga. Make sure the grave diggers are done by evening. Burial is tomorrow. We'll bring the body," Joshua, whispers to our mercenaries. Apparently, Badang is also known as Isa. Goliath and the Gorilla walk away from us, back towards the arrivals area, that lovely piece of real estate where normal people who aren't carrying dead bodies are received. So as not to watch Isa wheel my love, now laid naked in an ice cold metal box, away, I turn to Joshua. "I thought you called it the Fight Against the Primitives. You got my hopes high. Sneaking away isn't exactly a fight." He, seems to appreciate my feeble attempt at humour.  "Hun, we are The Enlightened. We aren't going to fight them with sticks. That's their thing. We are fight them with brains," he says, touching his head with a bit of dramatic effect at the end. "The Enlightened, huh? You've got all this down to a play script. Is this why you are doing it? The drama of it?" Joshua, a real life playwright momentarily searches my face. Maybe she looking to establish how seriously I mean my question. Perhaps he's checking to see how much more humour I can take. My face however, set itself into an expressionless mask the day Lindsey died. He finds no help there. I guess he decides to play it safe, "big sis, I wanted to see you again and if this is the way I get to, so be it." 

Isa and his Badang muscles have smoothly slotted Lindsey under the seats of the passenger service Toyota. Following Joshua's cue, I take up a four seater row to myself. Joshua hands me a newspaper and following his cue again, I lie down, holding the paper above my face, pretending to read. The driver, a diminutive man, possibly middle aged or maybe just a man who has lived the hard life long enough, coughs the engine alive and  we head out of the airport compound.

I stopped reading Uganda news about this time last year, when that anti homosexuality bill was annulled by the constitutional court. I like happy endings. I haven't wanted to sour it with knowledge of any new developments. Before the annulment, Lindsey and I had literally lived on the Ugandan interwebs. You would think people like us already knew how Ugandans feel about our sexuality but my skin still crawls when I remember the crass, dehumanising tornado of Facebook and website comments we lived through in those two years. Look, we thought we knew how much our people hated queer folk. Lindsey absolutely insisted on abandoning our children, to spare them shamed association with our sexuality. The morning after that night, long ago in Cairo when I crept into bed with her and she let me, she woke up with a plan so detailed, I was staggered. 

"I cannot do this to my children. I cannot set them up for a lifetime of shame." 

"Lindsey, they won't know. It was once." 

"Was it?" she shot me the death stare. 

"It wasn't," I repented. "But still, you are panicking too early. Nobody has to know." 

That death stare again. 

"Lindsey," I begged. "This has nothing to do with the children." 

"Angela, you need to shut up," she seemed suddenly weak. "I have been in love with you since I first saw you. I didn't always know what it was, but it was what it was. What it is. Nobody has to know? I know. You know. And yes, it has a lot to do with the children. I am all about my children. My children and you. Now I have to choose. I choose you. You must choose too." 

Now, if you have read those blogs about the retarded dwanzie, so scared of commitment that they chill every emotionally substantial situation by rebooting it to casual, I am that person. I used to be that person anyway. I actually wanted to strike a careless pose and say, "woman, I had sex with you once and now I must choose between you and my offspring?" But that death stare of hers. Plus, I knew it for what it was. I had flown her to Cairo. I had prepared the two bedrooms in my apartment such that the children would sleep in one, and we would share the other. Sure, that's also what you do when your best friend is visiting but I had crept into her bed and, well, the rest of that night is yours to imagine. I still set slightly messed up remembering it. Morbid.  I’m reminiscing about sinning all over my death wife who is lying naked in a cold metal box beneath the seats of the car I'm riding in.

Do you know what I did when I was asked to choose? I made pancakes. I make a mean pancake breakfast, by the way. Okay, right. I am changing the subject now as I did then. Just as well. Joshua is freaking out on the phone. 

"What do you mean they are chasing you? Now? I thought you escaped in the same car you took them to the airport in?"

"What do you mean police pickup? You are telling me they went to the police, reported a case, got a deployment attached to them, while you were still in chasing distance? Are you riding on a turtle?" 

"Did they see the car we are in? Good. Good." 

"But of course, Uganda Police got right on this one. A homosexual is stealing a dead body. National crisis. Sempa, don't drive towards Kyazanga. Take Mubende road. Lose them. Lose them or you are on your own, Sempa. Bwebabakwaata, nze siyina kyembamanyiiko!" 

The Miserable Past

“I am just tired of the pain Lindsey and I no longer think that the only way out is through it. The way out is away. Like Kate, I’m going to divorce my family. Quietly, amicably, without undue drama. I’m just going to leave and never return to this country.”

Lindsey sat down and quietly cried with me. We had been here countless times before. I knew, some part of her believed that this was another of those countless time. We would sit and cry. She would be genuinely sad that another year had rolled down and I still hadn’t found the one thing I most insisted on wanting — my mother’s love. But she must have thought that I would go over the bump once again and continue pursuing it. I knew different. I knew that this time I had arrived at sad acceptance. That is why I hadn’t come to her before buying the air ticket. Not before securing a job in a country five nations north of my homeland. It is why I wasn’t telling her any of these details either. My mother may never have come to love me in 32 years of having me but Lindsey had loved me within months of meeting me. She would fight me if she knew how seriously I meant my threat of flight. That’s the last thing I wanted. A fight with my best friend as the last memory of home. 

Several hours later, we were back to gossiping about the men in our lives. Hers, the artistic kind was apparently now searching for himself in new found habits: chain smoking and groping waitresses. He was always a piece of work, that vain man! No amount of failure had dissuaded him of the notion that the world must revolve around his sorry little ass. For the umpteenth time I wondered out loud, why Lindsey put up with him. But I knew why. She held many beliefs that I didn’t share — like the idea that once a man sired your children, you owed him accommodation for all things short of beating you. Her own answer though was, “and who are you to pass judgement, my dear?” And indeed who was I? My man and I were in our seventh year of him being married to somebody who cared slightly more about his shit than I did. We had been lovers before he met her but he had always been loud about his perception that I would never make the kind of wife he was raised to expect. You know, the one that accommodates all of you once you sire her kids? When she first came along, I thought he was only using her as a bargaining chirp. Why else would he have left her love notes lying around for me to read? Bad grammar and a lot of talk about brooding! He was trying to show me that he would leave if I didn’t start leaning towards commitment and family. Not that we weren’t family. We already had an accidental one. Well, it is a long story but he married her and I guess, I just could not be bothered to find a new sexual mate so we kept going after the initial drama regarding his marriage. I wondered quietly, if I would miss him when I disappeared into the world. Probably a little. Most definitely not enough. We went on and on, expressing the same dissatisfactions with our lives that we had never had enough incentive to leave behind. For a while, it felt like I had gone over the bump. Like life would be boring normal again the next day. So much that I started to wonder if I had been melodramatic in the first place. You tell me. Was I being melodramatic? Here’s the story: 

It was a Saturday afternoon. As I sat in my childhood bedroom, a relative of my stepfather came visiting. One of the important ones — a leader in the clan, in some capacity. At family gatherings, people literally line up to introduce their children to him. I only knew him from having distantly observed him at those family gatherings. I had never quite been introduced. In fact, I had never joined the line of family members being introduced. I suspected I wasn’t allowed to. That Saturday, he must have come unannounced. I’m pretty sure my mother would not have invited me over that same afternoon, had the visit been planned. This will all become clear in a second. 

When I heard the hullabaloo of welcoming a guest, I got out of the bedroom to join in. Soon enough, we were taking turns greeting him, with my mother providing introductory context. “That is Nick, your eldest son in this compound. Joshua, he follows Andy whose graduation you came to last year.” Then, “that is Angela. Angela Nambi. She works at Bank of Uganda.” Yes, my mother introduced me as they do when I sit on panels at workshops.

You want to know what that meant? Well, I can explain; I have decades of experience in the nuances of being a bastard child. It meant that in that context, as in the majority of contexts in my mother’s good wife life, I could not be owned up to. I was the illegitimate child, born of sin and shame. Certainly not the child one claims out loud with the same mouth that sings hymns on Sunday. Definitely, not one you own up to before your most respected in-law.

Now you think I am being melodramatic but maybe you should have been there when, at 11, I was asked to stay away from two family wedding receptions for the same reasons. Look here; when I was 12, I sang a solo at the national schools’  festival and caught the eye of a newspaper reporter. As he led me away, Maama stopped us, took me aside and instructed, “if they ask for the names of your parents, don’t answer. The people of Papa’s side will read it and know.” What will they know? That the mysterious child who lives at his house is actually his wife’s child not an orphan benefitting from her charity, as they surely must have assumed. I didn’t give the interview. I was crying too hard to speak. 

Well, maybe you are right. I am as melodramatic as an artist is wont to be. After all, at the time I was introduced as Angela Nambi who works for Bank of Uganda, it was in fact a thing. My country had just come out of a civil war. Nearly everybody was unemployed and I was a woman with a job. A job at Bank of Uganda. But then again, in the very next breath, she introduced Tom as, “our youngest.”  

Still, I was 32 and trotting towards more success than had been seen by any of my family members (legitimate and illegitimate) in generations. I was a professional woman in an economy so crippled it didn’t even produce soap. Perhaps, not belonging with a family should not have been enough to drive me to north Africa. It turned out, Lindsey certainly thought so. In the months after I left the country, she wrote me a five-page letter detailing all the ways in which I was “narcissistic and emotionally retarded.”

Oh well, think whatever you might of me. I barely wrote to my mother in the years after I left but when she was gravely ill three years ago, Joshua and I started talking again. We've became very closer since. It is profound that he had seen things as I had all those years. He understood my staying away. But now, Lindsey lies in a coffin at the cargo end of this airport. I dragged her away from here when she started talking to me again. But I had to bring her back home. Joshua said I could but it is really, really complicated. I’ll tell you more but first, let me go fetch my love who is cargo now.