8

At Brilliant Girls High School, Nyawlra went through a period when she really struggled with her names. There was a time when she called herself Engenethi Nyawlra Charles Matthew Mügwanja Wangahü, often writing it as E.N.C.M.M. Wangahü. She was not very keen on Engenethi and became Grace Mügwanja. Grace Mügwanja stuck, mostly in the village community, and she held on to it for a while. Her father liked Grace more than Engenethi, and Roithi, her mother, liked Engenethi more than Grace, and both hated Mügwanja with equal intensity, and so to her parents she would always be either Engenethi or Grace. She herself continued struggling with these markers of identity, and after going to college she eventually settled for Nyawlra wa Wangahü, though there were some who could not bring themselves to call her anything but Grace Mügwanja.

For his part, her father liked initialing his two African names, Mügwanja and Wangahü, to form Matthew M. W. Charles, and sometimes, leaving them out altogether, he was Matthew Charles or simply Mr. Charles. He was angry with those who called him Carüthi, the African-language version of Charles, even if prefixed with a title. He would not of course have raised any objections if they had called him Sir Charles, but in their ignorance the village folk insisted on calling him Bwana Carüthi.

Wangahü’s wealth came from timber, coffee, and tea. He had three children, two boys and the girl Nyawlra. The boys did not do particularly well in Aburlrian schools, and Wangahü sent them off to America, where they enrolled in colleges to study accounting and computer science, or so they claimed. They wandered from college to college without graduating, but every year Wangahü sent them money for tuition and room and board. Although as a parent he was concerned about their lack of progress, as a man of means he had something that would boost his already considerable standing among his peers: to pay full tuition and room and board for two in America was no easy task, and he was showing that he was indeed a man of some financial clout. He did not send Nyawlra to America, for he did not want his daughter to marry white, though he had no such reservations for the boys. Even so, he wanted her to have a lifestyle commensurate with his class. The rich bought their sons and daughters cars jokingly referred to as toys, Japanese in contrast to all German makes, which were of course for grown men and women. Nyawlra’s was a brand-new Toyota Corolla, and early on she bought into the lifestyle. Parties, keeping up with the latest fashion, speeding on the highways, these were the chief joys of her life, and she had not stopped to look under the surface of things. In those days, the likes of Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka and Luminous Karamu-Mbu-ya-Itulka were often in the news, being denounced by the Ruler for preaching revolution. She hated the very mention of these rebels: Why were they so critical of the government? And why were they in exile?

Then there was this accident. She was driving on a highway, fascinated with speed, pushing her car to its limit when it skidded and crashed on the roadside. Though she suffered minor injuries, she knew that she had narrowly escaped. What surprised her then and later when she recalled her near fatality was the number of cars that simply passed her by; no one had stopped to see if anyone was hurt or needed help. The people who hurried to her rescue were the barefooted, mostly. One unloaded his donkey cart to rush her to the nearest medical center many miles away, the donkey announcing their arrival at the emergency room by braying loudly and shitting.

During the period of recovery she learned how to play guitar. At first it was hard pressing the strings and putting the chords together, but when she started strumming and producing music, it was strangely soothing. The music contributed to her healing. It was then that she started thinking seriously about her life. If she had died, what would she have left behind as her legacy to the living? There had to be more to life than fast cars, parties, and beauty parlors. She was in her first year at Eldares University, and from then on she started taking an interest in social issues. She became active in theater and student politics and acquainted herself with the activities in exile of Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka and Luminous Karamu-Mbu-ya-Itulka, who inspired her teenage imagination. She also loved the stage, and nothing made her happier than playing this or that tragic or comic role, eliciting tears or laughter from an audience. She was a brilliant actress. She could change herself into any character, sometimes so realistically that even those who thought they knew her well because of seeing her on the platforms in many student political events were often unable to say whether it was really Nyawlra on the stage. As for history, it excited her curiosity the way a crime scene focuses a detective. History, particularly African history, was the scene of many crimes with many conflicting witnesses. Historians were detectives of time, and she loved the challenge of putting the different pieces of the puzzle together to make out the hidden shapes of things past. So, the pursuit of beau monde had given way to a search for a model society. This change in how she looked at the world is what caused a rupture in her relationship with her father.

Matthew Charles Wangahü wanted his daughter to marry into a wealthy family so that wealth would produce more wealth, power, and social standing. Before the accident, she had seen this as natural and inevitable. But now Nyawlra wanted to marry somebody with whom she could build a new tomorrow. At college, she met a young man of her new dreams of self-reliance.

Kaniürü was an artist very much involved in his art. Even if he was indifferent to student politics, he did not seem to mind her involvement. He was not one of those who forbid their girlfriends or wives to get involved in public issues or those who believed that politics and civic matters were a man’s domain. What convinced her that she had found her life’s mate was that Kaniürü did not come from a wealthy family. He told her that he was an orphan; his parents had died when he was a child, and he was brought up by a grandmother who died when he was at college. She felt for him and fell in love with her image of a self-made man.

What Grace Nyawlra did not know was that Kaniürü did not share her notion of a pure and blissful union. When his eyes rested on her, they saw beyond her looks to the even more alluring looks of Wan-gahü’s wealth and property. Through Nyawlra, he would rise from the depths of poverty and misery to the heaven of leisure and well-being. He kept on dreaming and looking forward to the day when he and Nyawlra would walk down the aisle; Nyawlra in white satin and he dressed to kill in a dark suit with a boutonniere. There would be ten bridesmaids and ten best men, a huge wedding ceremony with a hundred Mercedes-Benzes, bumper to bumper, shuttling dignitaries to the reception. Holding hands, he and Nyawlra would be the center of everybody’s attention, gladly having to endure speech after speech from all those dignitaries, this endless prelude to that moment when he and Nyawlra would slice through a ten-layer wedding cake. Whenever Nyawlra saw the glint in his eyes, she assumed it reflected the light of desire and love, and she felt humbled by the intensity of his devotion. Nyawlra’s dreams were for a simple wedding ceremony, not a display of affluence. She wanted a celebration of life, not a performance of its denial.

As for Wangahü, her father, he would have been surprised to know how close his own vision was to Kaniürü’s. But Wangahü s contempt for anybody who had not made it was so deep that even this shared vision would have struck him as presumptuousness of the poor. The thought that his own daughter would marry a man who did not even have a family was too painful to contemplate. What kind of a man is an artist? To Wangahü, drawing pictures was the work of cripples, children, and feeble women or men afraid to use their muscles; he would never see his own blood connected to such misery.

So Nyawlra and Kaniürü put wedding rings on each other’s fingers without the blessings of a grateful father, and not before a multitude but at the district commissioner’s, their witnesses being a man and a woman whom they had met only a few minutes before the civil ceremony. The split between father and daughter was now complete. Wangahü kept on insisting, She has disrobed me in public, why? She has left me naked before my entire church community, why? She has turned me into a laughing stock, why? Why elope with a man so poor that he does not even have a family? How will he support her, by hawking wood carvings of giraffes and rhinos to tourists?

The estrangement between father and daughter caused tension between the newlyweds. Kaniürü felt that the lifeline that was supposed to pull him out of his sea of troubles had been severed and Nyawlra was now the only person who had the power and the means to put things to right. No sooner had the two returned from their honeymoon than Kaniürü started urging Nyawlra to fall on her knees and beg her father’s forgiveness. Nyawlra, for her part, needed to break with her past; she yearned to make it on their own and earn respect through hard work, the simple dignity of their home, and a happy family life. Every day the newlyweds clashed. Kaniürü continued nagging her, even after he got a job at the Ruler’s Polytechnic at Eldares. He would often accuse her of ruining their lives by refusing to reconcile with her father, until one day Nyawlra exploded: Was it me you wanted to marry, or my father’s money r

In the heat of the moment they rushed to the district commissioner’s and filed for divorce, parting company in less than a year of failed married bliss.

Nyawlra now found herself on a new road to freedom. Kaniürü felt he had lost his way to riches and never tired of trying to win her back.

Nyawlra started laughing as she recounted his pathetic attempts to Kamltl.

By now the two beggars were at table, enjoying a meal of ugali and collard greens Nyawlra had quickly prepared in the kitchen. Kamrö was inwardly grateful. He could not remember the last time he had eaten good home cooking, and it was with tremendous self-restraint that he did not gulp it all down.

The little house comprised a bedroom with a guitar hanging prominently on the wall, a sitting room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a toilet and shower. The beggars had already washed themselves and changed, Kamltl into his job-seeking shirt and trousers and Nyawlra into a simple homely dress.

“And what does Kaniürü do now?” he asked her.

“I believe he is still a teacher at the Ruler’s Polytechnic. But you won’t believe this. I hear he recently became a member of the Ruler’s glorious youthwing that the Ruler talked about in his famous television address to the nation, following the incident of the snakes at the park, in an effort to attract the youth away from the propaganda of the Movement for the Voice of the People.”

“A new Aburlria, indeed,” Kamltl commented. “Even a college teacher a youthwinger!”

They were silent for a while.

“And how did you end up in the streets, begging?” Kamltl asked, wondering whether she shared his desperation. Or did the divorce from Kaniürü and the separation from her father have anything to do with it? “I would never have imagined meeting a university woman begging in the streets!”

“Weren’t you just talking about a new Aburlria? If fifty-year-old university professors are becoming the Ruler’s youthwingers, why can’t university graduates become beggars?”

“I didn’t mean university graduates in general, but women graduates. Like you, for instance.”

“Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?” Nyawlra asked rather sharply. “Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood} Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions’? Mariam Ba of Senegal, So Long a Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.”

“I am not much of a reader of fiction,” Kamltl said. “Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.”

“Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?” Nyawlra pressed. “Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things’? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines’? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!”

“I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,” Kamltl said, trying to redeem himself. “Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …”

“I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,” Nyawlra said. “The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?”

“To be very frank,” Kamltl said, trying to steer the talk away from the subject of women writers, “the books that most fascinate me are those about Egypt and Ethiopia, the entire area of the Nile, the Red Sea, and the coastline. I have a theory that the coastline of the Indian Ocean was once a cultural highway with constant migrations and exchange. There are hardly any women who write about that. I will start reading books by women writers. Perhaps you can recommend some. But you did not answer my question. What were you doing in beggars’ clothes at the Ruler’s Square?”

“What about you?” Nyawlra asked. “What were you doing there?”

Before Kamltl could answer, she was laughing again, as if a new thought had seized her.

“What is it?” Kamltl asked. Was her laughter at the expense of his ignorance about women writers?

“It occurred to me as you were talking about Egypt and Ethiopia … how did you become so knowledgeable about witchcraft and magic potions?” she managed to say in between bouts of laughter.

At the mention of his foray into magic, and remembering the look on the police officer’s face, Kamltl, too, broke into hysterics.