THE LUWERU TRIANGLE BOB EJIKE

THE LUWERU TRIANGLE

BOB EJIKE

We had been together for a week, one whole week of true love, the ideal kind that parents did not fear. That type with a clear understanding of margins and limits, where the boundary was silently drawn and the rules clearly stipulated. You simply could not get beyond that point. At first it was hard to maintain the borderline, but as the days turned into nights and my manhood hardened and recoiled helplessly with Jessica maintaining her hard line posture, I slowly became acquainted with the fact that it was best to quit attempting to cross the borderline and started getting used to the physical deprivation that would become the pattern of our relationship for the next two years.

The Supergal contest eventually terminated at the sprawling Arirang Korean Restaurant in Kololo, with a dazzling performance from General himself. The old soldier was stunningly youthful and energetic, sending the spectators wild and screaming for more. The contest followed duly and the winners were selected by a panel of seasoned musicians. The third runner-up took some presents that included a guitar, the second bagged a trip to South Africa, and the winner, the youngest, prettiest, wildest and noisiest  contestant, took a new model Volvo car which her older brother would smash beyond repair the very next week.

As we poured out of the hall after the show, Kasha, the quiet contestant who had caught my fancy during their rehearsals, was outside, leaning on the wall, crying as if it was the end of the world. She had crashed on the fourth position which carried no price at all, not least because of her singing ability but more on account of her poor sense of fashion. She had alienated the judges by appearing in the outfit of a Norwegian farm girl while singing a forceful African song. If she had dressed in an African traditional garment she would have taken the trip to Johannesburg or at least gotten something for her one month’s toil.  The way she was weeping suggested that she had not expected the verdict of the judges. She must have underestimated her concurrence in her ardent hope to take home the flashy Volvo. I calmed her gently and promised to give her backups and chorus jobs from my studio. I put her in my car and drove her to her father’s house. I was soon to make true on my promise.

The way Ugandan concert promoters invited an artiste whose contacts they did not have, to perform in a concert, was by adding the artiste’s name and photograph to their concert poster, including the performer’s video clips in the TV promotional video and putting the musician’s song in the radio jingle, and the song selection of the mobile vans that drove around the town blaring music, with deejays calling out the names of the artistes on the bill. That way artistes lived with alertness and were always vigilant on the roads and attentive to radio and television, constantly watching street manifestos to see if their names appeared on them. I took Kasha as my background singer on all the shows I was invited to perform in, I mean those I agreed to do, and she started making a living from them and my studio backups. But I had a gut instinct that she was not contented, for she wanted to be a big star.

The next month I travelled with General through the amazingly genteel countryside to the source of the River Nile in Jinja, to shoot his music video. I had to switch off my phone because Jenny, a friend of Antonio’s girlfriend, whom he had introduced to me at our last outing together, was now ‘on my case’ as they say in Ugandan street parlance, to refer to being emotionally stalked by someone, and she was not giving me breathing space, and Janet and Leila were also phoning intermittently, even Barbie, the comely faced, tall, slender, younger sister of my secretary, Belinda, who had presented herself at the studios as a budding musician, was also calling me and trying to entice me into an amorous affair, and it would have been unmannerly  to receive such calls before one of the  highest officials of my host country, even if I was irreverently dismissive to the callers.

I spent the rest of my time editing the video.  Immediately I finished the job it was launched on the state television. It was received with mixed feelings. While majority of the people felt that the officer should stick to soldiering, administration and lawmaking, others welcomed the break from official routine and enjoyed the music for its merits.

While General’s artistry gradually dissipated within the nation, I commenced recording my own album with Zindi, a famous local star and member of a popular all-girl vocal band. Antonio had picked her older sister from their disgusting habitation in the muddled profusion of raffia sheds, mud huts, indescribable bamboo constructs, unpainted cottages and other wretched affairs built from cement and muck in the dreadfully pauperized, dusty, guttered and labyrinthine ghetto of Kibuli, off Ggaba Road by the loud Kabalagala T-junction. Antonio had fallen brainlessly in love with her, taken her away from her tattered penury, constructed a large house for her on Kibuli Road at great cost and built in two businesses for her, a dressmaking industry equipped with various sophisticated machines and a big well-stocked video and music shop. Afterwards she carted her family out of the ghetto and resettled them in her new building where they started helping her in running the two outfits she had acquired. Thereafter she somehow convinced Antonio to go and build another house for her mother in their northeastern hometown of Mbale, close to the Kenyan border, and Antonio’s unbridled generosity journeyed over there. He strenuously put up the house for her mother. When he finished building the house and the girl’s mother moved in and took possession of it and he started facing the inevitable financial meltdown that resulted from building two houses and opening two businesses for a mistress without any returns to oneself, if one was not a millionaire, his girlfriend promptly abandoned him, keeping the properties and investments he had made to herself and accusing him of philandering with her friends and being an unrepentant womanizer.  Evidently Antonio was not an angel, but she had waited for him to finish expending his scarce resources on her before conveniently noticing his flaws which had always been there, and when she resumed dating it was with an affluent European.

Zindi’s musical triumph was the final product of Antonio’s boundless bounteousness. She had risen miraculously from being merely a minuscule aspect of her penury-stricken ghetto to regional superstardom after Antonio’s money had been splashed on her family. So when Antonio, who had remained curiously friendly with her family in spite of the obvious rip off, asked her to do a Collabo with me, to my engender the acceptance of my music by the vaster East African market, Zindi understandably obliged, as long as I paid her lavishly and upfront for every song she would record with me. 

My communication with Jessica at this time was at fever pitch because I had bought her an inexpensive mobile phone which she had smuggled into her dormitory and was using surreptitiously.  We really did not have much to talk about besides assuring each other about our feelings and repeating our vows of chastity to each other. Occasionally she gossiping about her associates Jodie, Pal and Whitney, while I related my eventful showbiz travails.

 I remember the look Jessica gave me that day that I came into the little hotel room that we inhabited for a week and presented the little cellular phone and the question she asked me, ‘For love or jealousy?’

I grinned at her quick wit and admitted with honesty, ‘both.’

‘You can’t bear the idea of me befriending another man casually even for the purpose of being able to call you from his phone,’ she teased.

‘Casually is usually temporary,’ I muttered.  I had imagined her sneaking out of her dormitory at midnight in her transparent nightgown to tiptoe into the lone school doctor’s studio, and it made me wonder what levels of compromise she was compelled to permit for him to acquiesce and give her illegal access on his phone to call me as frequently as she did. Did she just exchange a few jokes with him or caress his chest trickily and put her soft round ever-increasing bottom on his laps and pretend not to notice as he ran his hand up her backside for the favor? All so that she could hear my voice for a few minutes? Those situations, though just imagined, ignited a dormant but potent jealousy within me, uncurling its ugly, spiteful, monstrous head. I had to behead it by purchasing a phone for her and encouraging her to break the school rules boldly.

We had been together for a week, one whole week of true love, the ideal kind that parents did not fear. That type with a clear understanding of margins and limits, where the boundary was silently drawn and the rules clearly stipulated. You simply could not get beyond that point. At first it was hard to maintain the borderline, but as the days turned into nights and my manhood hardened and recoiled helplessly with Jessica maintaining her hard line posture, I slowly became acquainted with the fact that it was best to quit attempting to cross the borderline and started getting used to the physical deprivation that would become the pattern of our relationship for the next two years. Surprisingly, I grew to accept it, because the moment carnal intimacy is ruled out, the concept of it exits from the mind and other interests immediately inhabit the head. So we played games like gleeful infants and narrated endless stories. When my simple stories finished, I recounted others about my past relationships. This sort of narration lighted the fires her jealousy in no little way and made her wrathful and loud. Nonetheless, we always went to bed happy, she lying naked and pliant on my unclothed body, me respecting the set boundary, despite my unending hunger for her, all through the night. From then on her physical profile was stored away in my brain and the desire for it hunted me down every day like a predator beast.

One week later, Jessica departed to her school with fat shopping bags and pockets busting with my cash and I returned to my studio work. One day, a month after Jessica’s visit, I was in the studio recording with Zindi. My phone started ringing sporadically. I had switched it off because it was sounding so frequently and distracting me from my work, if it wasn’t Kasha wishing to introduce me to her half-sister, it was Gina, a shapely artiste that we recorded earlier in the month, wanting me to come and meet her cousin that had been dying to see me ever since she saw my video on television, or Ruby, a dark, slim, athletic, fashion student whom I had met at one of my club shows, needing me to accompany her to a fashion fair, or Marion, a Makerere student from Mbale, whom I couldn’t remember where I had met and least of all how she had got my phone number, calling to invite me to her hostel in Wandegeya, with a promise of giving me everything a man could get from a woman. But I had had to call my housekeeper, Margaret, to tell her not to bother cooking as I was not coming home for lunch, and I had forgotten to switch off the phone. When it yelled again I felt like clicking it off but instead answered on instinct.Jessica’s baby voice twitted on the line. ‘Honey, are you okay? Tomorrow is Saturday, our visitation day and I want you to come and see me.’

 ‘I am in the middle of a recording project baby’ I protested politely.

‘Don’t tell me you won’t come for my visitation, honey. What is it? Am I no longer important to you? You don’t love me anymore? You found someone prettier? Have you started doing those loose Kampala harlots that pretend to be singers and dancers?’ She taunted me.

‘I am not doing anybody honey. You know I love you baby, but I’ve got a living to make and a company to run……..’ I tried to explain with as cheerfully as I could, wondering what had brought about our sudden role reversal.

‘Honey, please don’t fail to come to my visitation tomorrow or I will never forgive you.’ She both pleaded and threatened and the line went dead.

Zindi threw herself seductively at me, her hand caressing my crotch. My producer, Shades, pretended not to notice, feigning extraordinary concentration on the recording consul. Zindi was dark, with a bony sensuality. She was naturally trendy and possessed childlike eyes and manners reminiscent of excessively playful cartoon characters, which made her manner and actions seem unreal. She had captured the nation’s imagination when her nude pictures appeared in the centre spread of the Red Pepper, and thereafter became an instant success. But then famous women were like billboards in the street of this inscrutable life, mounted for public consumption, to be admired and enjoyed briefly and forgotten once passed, in the interest of peace and tranquility in a man’s life.

I pulled away from Zindi, thinking of Antonio whose shrewdness in business was incontestable, wondering what inexorable potent forces had been used on him to daze him into building two big houses for Zindi’s mother and older sister and filling one with commercial CDs and sewing machines without bothering to put them in his name, only to be later abandoned like an irreparable broken down machine. What combustible romantic words, what musicality of voice, what enticing promises, what inflammable kisses, what morbid caresses, what corporal turns and tosses, what rapid changes of intimate positions, did Zindi’s sister give him to rent his pocket and thoroughly dispossess him of his means? What irresistible portions of her feminine anatomy did she use to eradicate his brain completely from his body and turn him into an unthinking vegetal imbecile? I was certain that Zindi possessed the same maddening charm or knew how to go about acquiring it, and I had no intention of handing over my studios to her and going to build another house for her mother in their village! So I gave her reasonable space and we got on with the singing.

The next day Jessica ’s calls to ensure that I came for her Visiting Day interrupted my recording a number of times. I had to turn off the phone to continue work but afterwards I could not sleep at night. The thought of disappointing Jessica brought me unprecedented insomnia. I stayed up thinking what a terribly selfish guy I was, how I gave consideration only to my art, how nothing else meant much to me, how she must have suffered, felt embarrassed by my absence, how she must have been laughed at by her friends and acquaintances, since she must have boasted excitedly that her boyfriend was coming. Eventually I dozed off from fatigue, but I jumped up in the middle of the night following a loud thud on the roof, accompanied by a horrifying, shrieking resonance. With a dreadful sense of trepidation I woke up, utterly awestruck. Initially I suspected a burglary but soon dismissed it as remote because of my overzealous, well-armed askaris, who were roaming the compound, then I thought of an earthquake. I had witnessed two minor earthquakes here that shook the roof and windows of the house, vibrating tables, chairs and cutlery. But when I listened harder and heard the dabbing footsteps on the roof, I realized that it was a lonely monkey that sometimes paid me unscheduled nocturnal visits. I had gotten used to leaving bananas for it on one of the avocado trees in the garden. Sometimes it ate the bananas, other times they just rotted away.  I closed my eyes and snoozed off.

The next morning I roused to the passionate cry of the muezzin, calling the Muslim faithful to prayers, pigeons calling and crows and cuckoos cooing. I quickly got myself ready, stepped out, into my car and drove out into the uneven dirt road that led to Kisugu Road. By the junction, beside the road, lay a full-bodied woman in death or a drunken stupor. It was a familiar sight so I just drove past. A few people were already on the road, especially armed uniformed guards strolling home from night duty. I went shopping for food at Quality Hill, where an old Belgian had buried decades of his life building a formidable grocery for expatriates.  A seventy-year old, former German ambassador, who had bluntly refused to leave Kampala after his retirement, was breakfasting with his fifth Ugandan teenage, live-in concubine. Other mostly old, white, sex tourists with their very young Ugandan mistresses sat down to prohibitively costly breakfast. I greeted the former Excellency, for I had known him from high profile parties, where I performed, and we chatted briefly about nothing in particular and exchanged a few jokes. He still retained his boyish smile in spite of his advanced age. The girl was so dark I could swear that she would disappear once darkness came.

I left Quality Hill and drove to John Rich Supermarket in Kabalagala, one of the very few decent African-owned supermarkets in Uganda, and lavishly bought school provisions. When I strolled out, I observed a billboard at the junction imploring us to GET OFF THE SEXUAL NETWORK AND LIVE A HEALTHY LIFE, and as I commenced the drive to Wobulenze where Jessica ’s school was located, my vehicle FM continued with the same message of earthly salvation through abstinence, an announcement that had been rendered popular by the Ugandan first lady, also a respectable Member of Parliament, whose enlightenment campaign for the prevention of HIV infection had won her worldwide accolades. It was now sounding like a stale communication as nobody seemed to be listening to it anymore, with majority of the youth proclaiming that they did not wish to live like perpetually turtles, but preferred to live fast, die young and have a nice little coffin. 

It was a long, winding and lonely road, sandwiched by rainforests on both sides. I drove past open farmlands, marshes, Matoke, tea and coffee plantations and green bushes where cattle grazed. Occasionally I came face to face with big trucks and heavy-laden goods lorries and every now and then they swung dangerously into my side of the road making me swing energetically off their deadly path. Frequently little village settlements of tiny raffia-roofed  mud huts sprouted up, and less frequently, towns, which were actually small clusters of about two dozen miniature cottages of a peculiarly square architecture, sprung up by the roadsides and quickly disappeared.

I had time to think about Jessica and my association with her which was becoming committal and therefore serious. I had boundless admiration for her as a person but I was not crazy about her. My career was far too important for me to accommodate the kind of responsibility she was craftily placing on my laps. The entertainment fiefdom I had imported was tottering before my eyes and I knew that it would require all my combative energy, money and intelligence to stop it from total collapse. A serious love affair that would mortgage my time, money and emotions was a luxury I could ill afford at this time, yet I could not get myself to back out from what was beginning to look like a burden without recompense. Generally Jessica was not that demanding, but I did not lose sight of the fact that her unscheduled visit and request for my presence on her visitation day was tantamount to indirect monetary demands, since no proud man would receive his girlfriend from school or visit her in her college without expressing some level of generosity. There was no way I could send her back to school empty-handed nor could I go to visit her without a reasonable amount of money and provision. I could not pretend that the fact that she was not giving in to me while getting my cash bountifully never bothered me. It did, and I sometimes felt foolish and used, but I lacked the courage to confront the issue, also because I was happy with her being part of my reality, an extension that made my lonely life seem normal. At this level we were really just good friends, but if my sentiments for her amounted to just a feeling of formal cordiality, why hadn’t I slept well last night? I asked myself. Why was I risking my life on this highway that led to Gulu and Sudan, running to her pleasure, doing her bidding, if I was not in love with her? I gave myself no answer but instead called her on the cell phone. ‘Darling, I am on my way to your school’ I announced when she answered.

‘Today isn’t visitation. Yesterday was. The security men won’t let you in.’ She informed me in a sulky voice.

‘You want to bet?’ I challenged teasingly and added.  ‘Be near the gate darling.’

It was to my relief that I reached the town which was well-peopled, and pulled off the road, and direction from a young man guided me through a straight line, at which point my phone belched out music and I answered it. It was Keddy, a girl of about Jessica’s age, the latest ‘on my case.’ I cut the line without a word. She called back and I cut it again.  I drove on until I saw the signboard of Katikamu Seventh Day Adventist College. I turned off the highway into a smaller road and then following the arrow of a signpost, curved into a brown track that led to the gate of the big, highly ordered, mission school. The guard came to inform me that I would not be allowed in since it was not Visiting Day. I passed a generous amount of shillings into his hand which he quickly pocketed and opened the gate, explaining to his colleague that I had come to visit one of the teachers. I drove through the entrance into the road between the well-cultivated lawns before the structured blue and white school bungalows and cottages where smartly uniformed boys and girls loitered.

Jessica was waiting a safe distance from the gate. She looked taller, emaciated and more mature, but with a strained face marked by lingering preoccupation and unprecedented bouts of insomnia. She climbed into the auto and gave a labored smile. I grinned. ‘How is school?’

‘Fine. You can’t linger honey, just ten minutes.’ She whispered regretfully.

‘Okay.’ I pulled the bag of provisions from the backseat and some cash from my pocket and handed them to her. She was silent, her face dull.

‘Jessica, what’s wrong, books?’ I inquired with a perturbed voice.

‘No darling, I have serious problems’ she said in a soft agonized voice, silent speculation crowding her eyes.

‘Tell me about it’ I insisted with stirring curiosity.

‘They are personal problems’ she mumbled with a flustered look in an emotion-strangled voice, ‘I don’t want to bother you with them.’

I felt deeply hurt by her words. ‘Jessica, I believed that you were my girl. That we have something serious going on and we belong to each other, which is why I am waiting for you for years’

‘Yes, I am your woman and you are my man and we have a future together. We shall someday surely be married, become husband and wife, a wonderful happy couple and have beautiful children, if you want. Nevertheless these are my problems, not yours.’ She sounded impervious, but I did not miss the import of her words. I had sometimes projected my future with her and visualized her occupying a temporal place as my lover, but I had never really pictured her as my wife and I had never imagined living with her and having children with her. But because it came from her, I found the idea very interesting, for I was certain that our children would be beautiful and intelligent and that with her sheltered upbringing and elitist education Jessica would bring peace and tranquility to my life.

‘How can I marry you and have children with you when you keep secrets from me?’ I found myself asking.

She reflected on my words for a brief while that seemed long because of our circumstance, then she muttered, ‘Honey, I will have to quit school.’

The shock of her words blasted through my brain, shaking my body slightly. ‘Why?’ I quested incredulously.

‘Because my parents are no longer able to afford my fees, you see, my parents are pensioners and the pension is very small. My mother has a one-bedroom house on rent and that’s what she uses to maintain me in school, but her tenants are presently having problem paying the rent, so sometimes she is unable to pay my school fees, and both my mother and my father have high blood pressure. Their condition is worsening because of their worry about my fees, and I don’t want to lose both of them altogether, so I have decided to leave school by the end of this term and maybe I will find a job to assist them.’

‘What about your brothers and sisters who are working?’ I inquired.

‘They have their own problems in their homes, their own children to maintain, and don’t give much thought to me. You see I really don’t have anybody in this world except you.’

I ruminated quickly on her situation within the split seconds that were available and heard myself saying like in a trance. ‘Jessica, I love you. I am in love with you, do you understand?’

‘Yes, honey, I love you too and want to spend the rest of my life with you and make you very, very happy and give you many lovely children’ she assured me staunchly.

‘You will stay in school. Send the bills to me. I put down my wallet for your future.’ I declared with authoritative flourish.

She shouted in wild delight, her voice rolling in blissful waves as she made to hug me, but the eyes of the guards that her exhilaration had attracted reminded her of where she was, and she took her shopping, said ‘goodbye’ to me and stepped out of the vehicle. I soaked up the sight of her until she entered the dormitory. I started the engine of my car and drove out of the school gate with the corrupt gateman waving cheerily at me.

As I drove back to Kampala, recollections of Jessica assailed the confines of my mind. Her circumstance, her smugness that made her hide her difficult condition from me, her single-handed determination to survive and her unusual sense of sacrifice towards her parents further endeared her to me.  But despite my empathy for her circumstance, my mind was telling me that my hasty decision to come to her aid without any collateral was irrational. I had not even ascertained the cost of her school fees and maintenance before committing myself, so I was completely oblivious of what I was getting into. Yet I felt happy to get into it. It gave me a certain messianic sense to be able assist this virtuous, beautiful, intelligent and hardworking young woman, who was unilaterally proposing marriage to me in the distant future in return for sponsoring the remnants of her learning. I figured that her needs were upright and she was not one of those loose, greedy girls that would roll in bed with a stranger for loose cash, good food, fancy dresses and jewelry. She was after all a reserved virgin, a charmingly honest young woman who had kept her own in an increasingly   depraved environment, which was why she needed assistance in the first place. Most girls who possessed her kind of beauty would hit the street and solve the problem with their bodies. But, at least in my view, Jessica was not compromised. She was only needy and it was no fault of her own and she had not allowed her needs to hinder her principle, not even in my regard, even though she knew that I had the means to get her out of the mess. I respected her and my esteem for her concretized my decision to lend her a hand in her search for self actualization.  I realized that we had made an unspoken covenant, but did not apprehend the fact that I had been roped into the recurrent expenditure of exorbitant school fees and the repetitive ritual of continually plying that dangerous road to Wobulenze. 

BOB EJIKE