Free Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa Page B

behind it. All the banana plantain, all the lean meat, all the cow’s entrails and all the beer was there, with the least apology of digestion. The latrines and their environs were major disaster areas. Serenity had never seen such quantities of shit in his entire life. The trails of yellowish-green diarrhea were even more unsettling. If a herd of hippos weren’t to blame for this prodigal spread of dung, then there must have been something terribly wrong with the banana beer the crowd had consumed. He remembered that, as was usual on such occasions, various people had donated drinks without anyone putting them on alist. What would a list of donors have helped anyway, he thought, and shrugged uneasily.
    To clear away all the garbage, all the grass huts, all the muck, would claim a few days, but there was no shortage of volunteers. Luckily, no one complained about the beer or the food, and no deaths had been reported in the course of the week. So it hadn’t been a plot after all! So nobody had put bits of hyena’s liver in the drinks or in the food! What a relief!
    In a social hierarchy where the husband’s family ranked above the wife’s, any woman hoping to do things her own way had to seize the initiative from day one of her honeymoon and send clear messages to her spouse’s relatives, and that was exactly what Padlock did with her glum expression and her taciturn attitude. Serenity’s relatives soon found themselves marooned in a steadily contracting sitting room with a noncommunicative bride in front of them and a heavy, oppressive silence. A few wished Nakibuka were the bride, because she was cheerful, talkative and had a very sweet smile. They soon learned not to call when Serenity was out, which was often, because he had many things to deal with apart from resuming his classroom duties.
    Serenity’s sisters, Tiida and Nakatu, both marriage veterans and very knowledgeable in these matters, quickly realized that their brother had married a woman to keep them out of his house. Like many other relatives, they left for home as soon as the mountains of shit and the pools of vomit had been cleared, the borrowed chairs and benches returned and the booth dismantled. Tiida summed up her feelings: “She is some woman indeed. Another unclimbable Mpande Hill.”
    “I told you,” Nakatu replied. Both further agreed that the mountains of shit and lakes of vomit were indicators of fecundity. They knew that this was a woman to outbreed all. Not that they were in direct competition with their younger brother, but it was still a sign of power to bring many children to your father’s house when there was a wedding, a funeral or a clan meeting. Tiida had stopped breeding: the doctor, with his sensitive stomach and nose, could not bear the sight of nappies or the noise of children after a long day at the hospital. He had wanted only two children. Tiida had given him four, after a lot of pleading for the extra two. Nakatu had two children, twins, and it was feared that the pair had damaged something inside her to the effectthat, despite many well-timed efforts, she had not conceived in the last eight years. It was she, with her unfulfilled desires, who was not too pleased with the bride’s putative fecundity. This was before she met Hajj Ali and his miracle-working semen. Nakatu did not like the bride very much, and in a way was pleased that she had turned out to be such a grouch; she would not need much reason to avoid her.
    Padlock, for one, did not miss the company of her sisters-in-law much. Of the two she liked Tiida a little bit more. Tiida impressed her as a doer, someone trying to better herself all the time. The sad thing was that she was going in the wrong direction. The unforgivable affliction of pride and vanity she exhibited made Padlock pity her. A woman who bathed four times a day, fussed over just about everything and boasted about her flush toilet, her marble bathroom and her husband’s big post was sick,