Enulé was a downright scoundrel.

Even though he was now a grown up, he still lived at home and ate the meat his father bought at the market and the food his old mother laboured to cook in her smoky kitchen. He refused to build his own hut and he slept in his parents’ house. He would wake up when the sun was already high in the sky.

Enulé loved girls and they loved him back. What they saw in him, none of the elders could understand. But Enulé had a possession that was coveted by the maidens and it made them fight one another over it; a beast of a possession that hurt them badly each time they encountered it.

But they would not let up and they tittered excitedly when he walked into their compounds, on one pretext or other, recalling their experience.

Enulé owned a motorcycle. A foul, smoke-belching, bedlam-invoking, noisy machine with a capacity for high speed. How he came by it was a mystery. Some said he once worked for an old white Catholic Father who gave it to him when he went back to his country.

It was one of those old models with huge exhaust pipes, a wide saddle and an even wider tank.

Enulé got the girls because of the motorcycle. Oh, how they swooned after him! To them, he was a man worthy of admiration. They made up fantastic tales of him and his motorcycle, had dreams about him, and when he was around, you could not get them to concentrate on anything.

But Enulé was the bane of most men in the village. Parents would try to smoke him out when he came courting one of their daughters, but he eluded them each time. He would ride off with one girl or other, spend the entire day with her, only returning her late in the night after the older people had gone to bed.

The girl would be discovered the next morning moving sheepishly about, feigning illness. The only evidence that she had been on a date with Enulé would be the burn on her left leg.

They always came back with their left leg burnt because they did not know how to dismount the bike carefully, but no matter how much they suffered, they could not keep away from that rascal or his motorcycle.

There was a young girl called Agnes who lived with my grandparents. Her mother was my father’s sister and even though I had never met my aunt, I inherited her name. She was called Nabirye, which translated as mother of twins.
My aunt never bore twins, but it was hoped by the family that when the time came that I would.

Aunt Nabirye died when Agnes was very little. As a child I was curious about Agnes and why my aunt died and left her. I wondered why she had delayed her death until Agnes was grown up. I once asked my father once if would also die and leave us alone but he assured me he wouldn’t.

One day, at the funeral of a much older uncle, my aunts gathered and began to talk about how many of their siblings had died. They talked about Agnes’s mother.

I was sitting at the feet of one of my favourite aunts, playing with a banana fibre doll, when I heard them say that Aunt Nabirye had dated the notorious Enulé! They said she was one of his favourite girls because he kept coming back for her again and again to take her for rides on his motorcycle.

“Remember when she tried to hide the burn on her left leg?” one of the sister’s said, and they had a good laugh about it.

Enulé had come to my grandfather’s home to pick up Aunt Nabirye. She begged two of her sisters to cover for her as she would be away the whole day. They agreed without knowing where she was going, until she came back with the proverbial burnt left calf.

For days she suffered quietly with the wound, applying poultice after poultice and generally making it worse, until someone suggested she visit the medicine woman. And so, while her family was busy in the farm harvesting maize, she sneaked off to go see the medicine woman.

The medicine woman immediately treated the wound but the woman went and told Agnes’s father that she had been to see her.

Aunt Nabirye was summoned by grandfather and questioned about what had caused her burn. She insisted that she had been burnt by the cooking stones and stuck to her story until grandfather left her alone.

Though grandmother inspected her wound, it was hard to tell what had caused the burn because it lacked the cylindrical shape of the burns that other girls who had ridden on Enulé’s motorcycle had contracted.

“I don’t want any of my daughters consorting with the likes of Enulé, or any boy for that matter. If I find out one of you has been running around with that dog, I shall banish you from my home. He is a worthless no-good idler who has no job and no prospects,” grandfather had warned them. He was a renowned disciplinarian.

My grandparents kept an eye on Nabirye for a couple of weeks after that. When her wound healed, Enulé took her on another ride along the tarmac road. He was intrigued with her and often took her for longer rides even as far as the trading centre in the neighbouring village, where he would treat her to cold drinks and cakes.

Poor Nabirye fell headlong in love with him and soon became pregnant with his child. When she told him the news, he disappeared from the village.

She was devastated. When her sisters found out, they castigated her for her stubbornness, but also sympathised with her. They all waited anxiously for the day when their father would find out.

For several months, Nabirye would wake up early to avoid her parents seeing her having morning sickness. If she craved any strange thing, she would sneak away to eat it in the garden behind their house.

She began to wear her skirts over her dresses, pinning them under her arms so they would swirl all around her and disguise her protruding belly.

Then one day they were visited by a nosy distant relative who immediately on seeing Nabirye suspected that she was pregnant.

“That girl is pregnant,” she told grandmother.

Grandmother called out to her and studied her carefully before asking her if she was pregnant. Nabirye tried to deny but it she had been “busted.”

Grandfather was too enraged to face Enulé’s parents so he sent his sons and an older brother to talk to them.

Enulé’s parents did not know where he was but they agreed to look after Nabirye and pay the stipulated fine.

Sadly, Aunt Nabirye died from malaria soon after giving birth to Agnes, who at 11 years old is yet to meet her father Enulé.

He is a downright rascal, Enulé.