could look at it and say, “Now see: I have ten loves in total. Let me
save three for my country and give all the rest to my neighbours.”It
must have been the way that Father Ignatius filled his mug –until the
tea ran over the clay rim and down the stool leg and soaked into his
canvas shoe –that got me thinking about my own father. One moment
I was listening to tales of Acholi valour, and the next, I was stringing
together images of my father, making his limbs move and his lips
spew words, so that in the end, he was a marionette and my memories
of him were only scenes in a theatrical display. Even as I showed
Father Ignatius to his chambers, cleared the table, put the chairs back
inside, took my purse, and dragged myself to Odeon to get a matatu to
Uthiru, I thought about the millet-coloured freckle in my father’s eye,
and the fifty cent coins he always forgot in his coat pockets, and the
way each Saturday morning men knocked on our front door and said
things like, “Johnson, you have to come now; the water pipe has burst
and we are filling our glasses with shit,” and, “Johnson, there is no
time to put on clothes even; just come the way you are. The maid
gave birth in the night and flushed the baby down the toilet.”Every
day after work, I bought an ear of street-roasted maize and chewed it
one kernel at a time, and when I reached the house, I wiggled out of
the muslin dress and wore dungarees and drank a cup of masala chai.
Then I carried my father’s toolbox to the bathroom. I chiselled out old
broken tiles from the wall, and they fell onto my boots, and the dust
rose from them and exploded in the flaring tongues of fire lapping
through chinks in the stained glass.This time, as I did all those things,
I thought of the day I sat at my father’s feet and he scooped a handful
of groundnuts and rubbed them between his palms, chewed them, and
then fed the mush to me. I was of a curious age then; old enough to
chew with my own teeth, yet young enough to desire that hot,
masticated love, love that did not need to be doctrinated or measured
in cough syrup caps. The Thursday Father Ignatius came from
Kitgum, I spent the entire night on my stomach on the sitting room
floor, drawing my father. In my mind I could see his face, see the
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Le portrait magazine