My roommate doesn’t sound too good. At all. And now I am wondering if I am safe. But then again, lately any slight cough, any hidden sneeze at the bus stop or at the store will cause all hackles to rise.
In this age of Covid, we have all learnt not to cough, or sneeze or clear our throat in public. It is a dangerous thing; like screaming”gun” in a movie theater. The results are the same; there’s going to be a stampede and you’re going to be left on the ground, a stain.
The sounds coming out of the throat of my roommate are not entirely new. I nursed somebody with Covid only five months ago. He says he’s okay and after asking him for the forth time this weekend, I resolved not to ask again.
But I don’t want to even think of the possibility.
See, he traveled out of the country recently and he’s been back about two weeks. But we all know that airports are the devil’s playground these days. If you are traveling for more than 12 hours one way, that’s a lot of Covid you’re going through.
In America, politics trumps common sense, so the people who should know better, the doctors and the technocrats at the Centers for Disease Control, have given in and said people don’t have to wear masks on planes or on any other kind of public transportation. So now, when we would be getting out of the nightmare, seems we’re going to go right back in.
If my roommate actually caught Covid, the implications are just bad. It would mean I’d have to self isolate. I’d probably get less pay, mortgage be damned, and my department at work, already strained to the limits because of people who’ve called in sick, would probably have to shut down as the bosses investigate to see if anyone caught Covid.
To God, I hope what I am hearing is just a sore throat. I am going to work with that assumption. Because the alternative is just unthinkable.
The Bazaar across from the apartments is all quiet now. Pix: steven tendo
In the middle of the night, when you’re sleepless in Sunnyvale, CA, it is safe to walk out of the apartment and take a stroll. I know, I know, was bummed out like that when this was first suggested to me. But I tried it last night and I can report, it was actually pleasant.
Maybe there’s a method to this madness. I mean who’d have thunk this is possible in today’s America, right?
Sunnyvale’s place in Silicone Valley is probably why walking out in the middle of the night without even locking your door behind you is something people here will suggest to you, without their tongues in their cheeks. This is not a drill.
One side Sunnyvale, the other side Santa Clara: Pix: steven tendo
I was bored. I had YouTubed all the Ugandan music one could consume in one day. Watched all the movies I hadn’t already watched on Tubi and even tried to get a few CEUs, what with re-certification coming up very fast.
So I asked myself what else I could do. After I realized my surfing was taking me dangerously to the edge, when I started watching Rodney Carrington stage shows and even started laughing at those crass jokes, it was time to move.
It was a cool night. Not really breezy, but cool it was.
And there were a bunch of other lonelies out there with me. People who couldn’t sleep, I supposed. But it was probably just tens of South Asians here to build computer programs for you to use in all the robots that are coming your way through Amazon or Google.
Sunnyvale is like Little Bangalore. It was my roommate, the guy from who I am renting space as I go about completing my travel contract, who first told me about the cool beautiful nights when it is best to take a stroll. He would know, he’s from the Old Country.
Everywhere I go around here, I hear the same language spoken. This is probably why it is so safe here; all these nerds have better things to think about than doing you harm.
I took the block one way, the other way and never ran into anyone that I would have considered dangerous.
I love this place. Pity I cannot stay. Because, Sunnyvale, you’re pretty, but too expensive.
Recently one of those, a blue-blood born in Africa, ironically, Elon Musk, has been making moves to acquire Twitter. Looking in from the outside, meaning from Africa, one can’t help pulling tufts of hair out of their scalps. Are these guys too bored they will do anything that comes into their minds?
Someone said half jokingly, that Musk should just come and buy Uganda. I mean our country definitely needs a new manager, because we have failed to manage it on our own.
I always go back to the pensioners. I have failed to find any justification for making septuagenarians trek from upcountry to Kampala every month for their retirement pay only to be told to “come back next month because a glitch occurred and there’s not enough money this time.”
How much does Uganda pay in pensions every month? That’s a good question. One that needs to be crowdsourced. Or just GTS.
The World Bank says Uganda’s pension bill is Shs250B every year. How much is that in American money? Worldwide, the bill is $56.6T.
But all we need it’s a measly Shs250B to let Jajjas stay home and stop the monthly sojourn to the city on fruitless pursuits. This is a tiny drop in Elon’s vat of cash. He’d not even realize it’s been deducted from his account.
Musk has so much money, he’s decided to buy the global marketplace of ideas. I don’t pretend to know why otherwise I’d be a billionaire flexing my muscles and showing up everybody on how much farther I can piss.
That can never sink in. While Ugandans are struggling to make Shs100,000, there’s a guy who’s got more money in his piggy bank than their country. Our economy is $36.5B and that’s probably an over count.
So, do we want Elon Musk to buy Uganda, since he’s showing a strange new penchant for buying toys he’s never really going play with? Heck yeah.
I’ve had big frights in life before. Like the time my daughter went missing at one of those Christmas parties that were held in Kololo with thousands of children and parents flooding the independence Grounds. One moment she was there with me, the next moment i turned around and she was gone.
Another time, during a family outing at Freedom City in Najjanankumbi, I turned around to see my other daughter all of four years old, climbing on the sides of the bouncy castle. It was one of those huge ones that hold hundreds of jumping children at the same time. Little genius was not content with just jumping with everyone else, she had to do it different.
So there I was, with my heart in my mouth, waiting for her to fall and at the same time screaming for her to get back inside the castle to safety. Of course my voice was drowned out by a million screaming children.
Freedom City, where I learned not to trust a little four-year-old with climbing duties. Photo: worldtravelserver.com
The greatest fear I’ve ever experienced in my life in the USA was when I was stopped by a cop on my way to work. Even writing about it has been strangely hard, yet it happened quite a while back.
It is one thing to watch the dumpster fire that is America’s epidemic of police-on-Black-people violence that plays on a loop on the news, but quite another to be the one wondering, as the lady cop strides slowly toward your car, if this is the last time you’ll be alive.
Mind, this wasn’t even the first time I’d been stopped by a cop. It wasn’t even in any of the more “intolerant” states. It was in deep blue California, where all the liberals say you should run to if you want to live.
I had no clue. I didn’t really have any business knowing. So my ignorance was now putting me in the most precarious situation I’d ever been in.
Now, more than two years later, I still shudder remembering how hard my heart jumped in my chest, beating a loud and irritating tune, a dirge maybe.
In my head, one word kept on ringing: “Why?” I couldn’t think what I had done wrong. I was not speeding as that section of the road did not allow speeding with being narrow and carrying somewhat heavy traffic.
Was it a case of mistaken identity; had the cop been siting idly, chomping on a doughnut and then gotten a call from dispatch to look out for an African-American in a black Jetta?
Split seconds. Hundreds of thoughts running through my head in split seconds, I sat with that sinking feeling as I saw the cop approach when she finally decided to leave her high vehicle. I guess she was running searches on her computer to make sure nobody was looking for a car exactly like the one I was driving.
What made it even more sinister was the way she moved her hand, almost in slow motion, almost absent-mindedly, to her side piece on her hip. She kept walking as she checked out the back of the car through her dark glasses.
Once at the passenger side, she was stern with her questions about why I was striving without tags. At some point she realized what had happened. New car, temporary tags taped on the inside of the windscreen and a quick check of her car computer after looking at my ID hadn’t raised any red flags.
“Is this the first time you’re being stopped?”
“Yes. And I am obviously rattled,” I said. I don’t know where I got the courage to be a wise ass. But I looked down at my hands and I could swear I saw a slight tremor. I quickly grabbed the wheel to hide my fear. But she’d already seen through it.
She let me go. I guess I should have been more polite. She tried to make light of it. Probably to get me at ease. But I did not feel okay for a very long time after that. Two years on, I do not feel okay. I still remember her: red hair, slightly freckled and a bit thick in the sides.
I do not know her name. I did not ask. I did not have the presence of mind to do that. As I drove away, I kept thinking, this could have been my last day alive. Over a misunderstanding at a traffic stop. I would have been turned into a headline, a meme, a hashtag.
If she’d been stressed about something, or mistaken me for some other random black person, she’d easily have pulled that gun and shot. Unfortunately, it is still easy for law enforcement officers to end another person’s life in stupid circumstances like this.
There’s also the time I was driving to Mbarara with my family when by some freak accident, I found myself in auto-pilot fighting to steady the car that was, of its own volition, careening towards a bunch of tourists who were scampering for dear life. I’d driven on a wet road the whole way from Entebbe but now in Masaka, suddenly the road is too slippery?
Total Nyendo, Masaka where the car came to a final stop after fishtailing in the middle of the Kampala-Mbarara Highway. Photo credit: Tee on Foursquare
By far though, on that afternoon in California, after the cop eventually let me go, I knew deep down that this was different. I had finally been exposed to what I had chosen when I chose to leave everything behind and start from scratch in the USA.
Nicodemus is not a slave. He doesn’t have to put up with the b.s anymore. He smiles a lot more, has good digestion and overall, has a great life.
But Nicodemus wasn’t always a Freeman. Nicodemus was a slave.
He is long past the days of tribulation; when even he despised himself for the fool he was making of himself. Because the whole world around him did too. In spades.
On any given Tuesday, Nicodemus would park his tiny Vitz on the crowded thoroughfare right by Nicodemus Pork joint in Nakulabye, just as the 9pm BCom External class should have been breaking.
The pork place wasn’t his; he just liked to pretend it was. Plus it was a running joke a million years ago between his friends when he was also a student at the nearby Makerere University.
Somewhere between his loud protestations and swallowing the delicious fire-roasted pork usually bought by his well-meaning chums, the place had grown on him.
Nicodemus was looking at his black Samsung phone, lying on the old table discolored by time. For as long as he could remember, university students had come down from on high in their ivory tower to partake of the wonders of Nicodemus’ pork.
In a few minutes, if everything went according to plan, he would not be able to handle his phone, even with its protective case.
His hands would probably be greasy from the finger-licking good pork, straight out of the kalaayi or the fire. Also, he would have by his side the only person he would have wanted to text anyway.
Any given Tuesday. Or Wednesday or Thursday.
Nabatanzi did not show up. She was okay exchanging messages online and pledging to live for him alone. But when it came down to the real question of commitment, Nabatanzi proved herself a witch.
It had slowly begun downing on Nicodemus that this…thing that he had going with the tall fair 22-year-old medical student…this…he didn’t even know what it was anymore. It was well below where he would have wanted it to be.
Online she was great. Laughed at his jokes even. But who was to say when she said,” LOL, she was really having a belly laugh?
Today is another day. There were other days of confusion and despair. But all that is past. He has learned his lessons well.
Physics makes us go back to end of the line. It is the leveler no one jokes with. When the laws of nature decide the time has come for something, nature gets its way.
You can run, but there’s nowhere to hide. The hundreds of words he has poured into your ear the last four months have burnt a hole in your soul. You cannot unhear them, or lighten their weight and you can’t ignore what those early morning conversations had come to mean to you.
Every morning, like clockwork, you dropped on the love seat and called. Maybe sometimes he called. And you talked. What under the sun did you not talk about!
There was a time when it was him calling all the time. But with time, it was you. In the morning, when you had the house to yourself and the food was on the sigiri rumbling, you stuck your white earbuds in your ears and dialed his number.
Even before his voice came down from more than 5000 miles away, clear as a bell, something was rising in your chest. Not that he said ground-shaking things or sang like a lark, it just felt…right.
You had moved past the obstacles in your way to him and you’d decided that the present arrangement was ideal. He’s a million miles away and nothing will happen unless that ground can be swallowed up somehow.
You’d gotten to that spot where you overcame your shyness and even video-called. Just so you could see him for real. And you cannot deny it, you liked what you saw.
Being apart was giving you the chance to observe the real him. Without the distraction of presence, you were learning things about him, but more importantly, about yourself.
But there was always the unspoken line between you. The whole edifice rested on your word. He laid his cards on the table and told you what he was after ultimately and it was up to you to follow through or to just tell him this was not going to work.
So you broke and ran. You thought he was going to be that guy…the one who stalks you and crashes into your DMs and reminds you of all the things he’s done for you. Admit, you kind of wanted him to be that kind of guy so you’d have a concrete excuse to tell the world when they eventually start asking why you dropped him.
He did not. Your phone got stolen; that’s the story you fed him through a mutual friend. He read it as it was supposed to be read. You wanted space. Because in Uganda, it doesn’t matter if a girl has never had a job, they always have a smart phone. It doesn’t take a week before she’d replaced it if it is stolen.
The message was clear.
Now you’re missing those early morning two-hour chats. The evening winding conversations when it is morning where he is. But he’s an obstinate idiot who won’t join Snapchat, Twitter or Instagram. That way it would have been easy to lurk in the crowd and watch him without him knowing.
I started drinking to fuel my next post. Friday night and I have time on my hands. Not working tomorrow and I am on my own in Sunnyvale, CA.
So I decided I need to face my writers’ block head on.
I’d always despised people who drink to write. Seriously. Like why would you have to drink to get the words flowing if you are a real writer.
So for years, I never touched alcohol. I never wanted to be associated with alcohol. Like Chinua Achebe’s Unoka, father of Okonkwo (damn. I can’t believe I remember my 1997 Literature class), I believed my father had drunk all there was to drink. So like Okonkwo, I told myself I would not be ruled by the bottle. I would find my way without any additives.
Sikes. The joke’s on me now. I just realized the buzz is to die for. I think if Achebe had written Okonkwo as a guy who later in life took up drinking as a strategy, he wouldn’t have had to do the things he did. Because this feeling just makes everything level.
Irie.
He wouldn’t have had to be that intense. Okonkwo’s problem was probably that he never drank. Maybe Ikemefuna would have survived in the end. But then there wouldn’t have been the conflict that the world has pored over for decades. Things Fall Apart wouldn’t be a thing.
I am writing now, flowing because there’s alcohol in my veins. Right now, I can do anything. I can fly. Nothing feels like this.
At all.
I’ve pined for the time I wrote from the gut. There was a time when writing was easy for me. I’d just sit at a computer and bang out a piece. My first real editor, Tony Owana, once told me, after reading another one of my blockbuster pieces for The Sunrise weekly newspaper back home in Uganda, that I should consider writing a book.
I told him, with all the spunk of a cock-sure idiot, that that “was a tall order.” I think that was one of the phrases I’d just added to my vocabulary. It sounded smart. And so I used it.
But now, I am 44 years old and right in the middle of a midlife crisis and I know Tony Owana was telling it as he saw it. I dallied. I wasted years away from writing. I have to admit I was scared.
Now I know a way around it. Or so I thought. I have discovered there’s a way to write again. It might be construed as weakness by another young writer, to have to imbibe before I write, but that’s okay.I know one thing. I’ve never felt the words flow the way they’re flowing right now.
I think I just might have found my way back.7-Eleven continues to make a killing because there are people who realize, at the end of the day that they need a little bit of Dutch Courage. They are perceptive enough to know there’s a market out there made up of people who make up their minds at the last minute. People who know the need to pour out a little liquor.
The ADT guy came in today to fix our security system. Ten minutes into our conversation, and he did that American thing I’ve still not gotten used to: asked where I am from.
Normally, I give a wise-ass answer like, “oh, I came from California only four months ago,” or if I am particularly passed off, “I came from Kansas.” Delivery is always deadpan, like I am totally clueless about what they mean.
This dude was different; I picked up on the African accent the moment he walked in the door. So I was stuck…a bit.
My go-to response, usually so sweet for me, wasn’t going to cut it. He’s been here since 2006 or so, and he was just being an American. But he’s still from the Old Country.
“I am…not from here,” I said, a little grumpy. There was no joy in owning him, yet he was using triggering language.
Eventually I told him where I came from. He said he caught an accent in my speech and he wondered. Then he said: “I am from Liberia myself,” after which he told me a mini life story about himself.
Moral of the story: sometimes the world is not out to get me.
Slowly, as the years rolled on since that unforgettable evening in 2005 in Kololo, I have become enured to the whole thing. Or I should be by now anyway.
But when somebody dies, especially somebody you did life with; a friend or a member of your family, it hurts like you’ve never hurt like this before.
Like the recent death of Harriet. My Harriet.
Harriet Nabudere was a smart girl. She was so smart, she couldn’t even connect with her family. Because, forget being a Gungas girl and all, she was just different.
Handled like a princess by her parents, maybe because they knew what she was destined for, she just couldn’t shake off the perception of snottiness. When the big family gatherings happened on Muteesa Road in Ntinda, and the loud uncles and giggling cousins were too rambunctious to stay indoors on cool Ugandan weekend nights, Harriet was in the living room watching a movie or reading (James Hardley Chase, Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins…)
She was the weird one.
But that’s precisely what attracted me to her and her to me. Because we were misfits both. I was the only child of two elderly peasants, who tried to move heaven and earth to give me what I wanted. I was a lonely child who found solace in books for their ability to transport me to other worlds.
She was the smart love child of a politician and a socialite who turned into a banker. We both had something to prove to the world.
Harriet was my cousin, six years older and the most considerate person I knew.
She went on to become a high-flying public health doctor. At some point while working long hours for Ian Clarke, she told me she was going to train in public health and change the world.
Her dream to impact Uganda started even before she went to medical school. Maybe that explained why she was still focused even through the grueling years of internship at Mulago Teaching Hospital.
Even as her course mates crushed and burned, retook courses and all round became embittered with the thankless work they were doing, she always told me, even if I didn’t fully understand, that being a mere doctor wasn’t good enough if all you did was be reactive. She wanted to be able to intercept infections even before they arose in the population.
So she worked like crazy. And she got the honors. And she became a director in public health.
I was proud of Harriet like that.
Then life happened. We grew apart. She started a family and I also started one. We couldn’t go to the movies at Cineplex Cinema like we used to or just sit at Mama Mia on Speke Road and talk. We ‘grew up.’
Years later, in the heat of the 2016 election in Uganda, I saw her posts that seemed to support a candidate other than one I would have wanted to lead Uganda. I felt betrayed. But I also realized how far apart we had grown.
Then this year, we reconnected. It wasn’t the same, but it gave me great happiness. It was still at the stage of rediscovering what we had each been up to.
Two months after we had made new contact, I got a text message. Harriet had passed. She had suffered from Covid earlier, but she had beaten it off. In hindsight it appears, not quite.
I will miss my Harriet sorely. The one who believed me and fought for me when I was wrongly accused. The one who went against her mother to leave me to house-sit as she went to Dhaka in Bangladesh to learn about public health.
Harriet came to visit when my mom was on her death bed and she must have seen what was coming, doctor that she was, because she was uncharacteristically chatty, as though she was trying to prepare me for what was just a few hours away.
I cry for Harriet because of the friendship that we lost, that will never come back.
After being constantly busy in this new profession of mine, for close to four years, this strange new thing where there are blocks of time during which the activity one would most probably observe being done by everyone is twiddling of thumbs, is just disconcerting.
Even Steven 