Rain!

I have been many people in the rain in Kampala.

Rain! And I’m one of them again.

I have been the office worker, trapped in my office in the evening shower, reluctant to return home.

Grateful to use this evening rain as an excuse. Down the street from my office in Uganda House, I can hear the furious honking of taxis and private cars slowing down into the snarl of traffic. I won’t have to be a part of that for many more hours.

I won’t yet have to squint through the pelting rain to determine if the taxi I’m about to dash for is the kind that leaks and will stain my shirt once I’m trapped in its steamy bad breath hell with 16 other people.

No, still in my office, waiting out the rain, I won’t have to constantly rub my brow trying to see better as I jump out of the taxi, trying to avoid stepping right into a paddle of water. Or worse, sewage from a leaking pipe.

I won’t have to be a part of any of that yet, in my office in Uganda House, waiting for the rain to cease, this evening. The rain, my good friend, my protector.

In this office, in the evening, after dark, when I should be working, becoming myself again, for a few hours. The screen of my computer is the only light in this darkness. Company accounts — Microsoft Excel spreadsheets — my wandering mind.

My real life covering for in the muffling headphones I have on. I know no one will walk in after an hour of rain and I can let the tears flow. Nothing on this computer is me but this music and a folder of photos tucked away in discontinued accounts on an external hard disk I retrieve from the back of my bottom left drawer when I’m sure I’m going to be alone in this office.

When it’s raining, on Sunday afternoons, or Saturday football match days, I can scroll and stroll, fortify my heart with this squat bottle of brandy the tea-boy brings me once a week, private arrangement. All the things that I have left behind in this folder and that music. I will be making my weary salutes, like a child hoping the rain will go on all night, but it never does. But while it is on, I sit here, on evenings on like this, and remember.

Time to remember

She will call the office soon enough, my wife, and ask if she should send the driver for me. It will not matter that I will say no, I will take the taxi home. She will send him anyway. But he will take his time, driving the longest route from our home in Buziga to come to my office on Kampala Road, giving me time.

Time to be away from them all for a little longer. Time to remember. Through that wailing music, my heart crouches, my finger poised over the mouse, warning me I should not open this folder again. I know what happens when I do.

I should have deleted these photos. I should never have kept them. The cord of my headphones can let me get up from my seat and walk to the window from where I can see Café Javas and Café Pap in Cargen House.

On rainy Kampala evenings like this, they are full of caffeine-seekers, pizza addicts, or those who simply do not want to be seen anywhere else but here. Jabbering. I can almost hear them. But I can never be a part of them again with my wife and four children and two years to go before I will have to contest for a parliamentary seat. 

I wonder how many of them know these are the best years of their lives. Probably not many. I did not know. They will never again love as frenziedly as they do now.

They will never have friendships truer than the ones they have now. They will never again believe like they do now. I wonder how many of them right now in Café Pap, in Javas, are with their “Rita” like I used to be. I wonder if they know it.

She loved the rain like I do. All I have to do is think and I’m back where I used to be. I remember everything.

Like how we used to sit in the night in her mother’s restaurant shack, waiting for the rain to stop, in Kikoni, along the road to Bwaise and Kalerwe. She would be rinsing and drying the cutlery and I would be resting before I would have to be on my way to Kalerwe where I lived at the time.

I had left home and did not want anything to do with my parents and was trying to earn an independent living away from family money. She was her mother’s right hand in the tucked away mabati restaurant Makerere University students ate, called kikumi kikumi.

You could say ours was the love story of the basket-weaver and the cook. That’s what my father called me, a basket-weaver. Though I made more than baskets, trying to get my crafts business started.

She would sit in the doorway of their shack, washing and tossing the water out into a shallow drain that ran along their shack. I would be seated in the dark, my shoes off and feet sockless so that my sore feet could stretch out.

Her mother gone after eight pm, back home which was a few hundred metres away through the twisting slum shacks to make sure Rita’s brother who was in primary six and should be back from school had his supper.

Saving on electricity, there would be no light on inside the shack so that whenever she turned to look at me from the door when she was talking, I would see her face in the gray night light of the rain.

She was my lifeline when nothing seemed to be working out. I was in my last month at the horrid one-roomed house I was living in when Rita first paid me any attention. Thinking how I had made a mess of my life at what was supposed to be the beginning of it.

Wondering how I was going to swallow my pride and return to my family, contrite and pleading. No one was buying my crafts and I could no longer afford the taxi from Kalerwe to the centre of Kampala and sometimes to Nakawa, so I was walking. Everyday I had to choose between either eating lunch or supper because I could not afford both. I don’t know why she looked at me at that time.

I was ashamed of the one room I lived in until she came over and liked it, “You are a man. You have your own house.”

I had begun to doubt the soundness of my business plans until pillow-talking, she told me, “I wish I could think like you.” The rattle of rain on aluminium rooftops will always remind me of Rita. I in her mother’s shack on those nights, Sunday afternoons in my one room in Kalerwe, a Nakivuubo stadium music concert we went to mark the beginning of the New Year, the cups of ginger spiced tea she used to make for me.

It has been 12 years since Rita. I have paid back in every way I know for the loss I caused them. But it seems I will never pay back enough to forgive myself.

The mother and son run the biggest supermarket in Wandegeya now. I know the people to call so that Rita’s brother does not have to pay too many bribes for his goods coming in from Dubai.

I pass by the supermarket at least once a week. When I’m alone, I shop there. But Rita never saw all of this. Dead 12 years now.

So here I stand. Not wanting to go home yet. Remembering everything. On a rainy Kampala evening turning into night. In my office on Uganda House. Looking out into the street. So this is who I have been in the rain. But I have also been other people in the rain. During these night Kampala.

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