The Famished Road (49 page)

DAD BOUGHT THEM drinks. Mum served them food. They all talked in subdued tones as if in the presence of a corpse. It was from them that I learnt of some of the things that had been happening during the time that I had been away.

There had been a break in the rainy season. Houses had been flooded and whole families had been forced to move. Streets had become streams. Improvised graveyards had become so waterlogged that coffins had been seen floating past houses, or beached in front of the abodes of certain minor politicians. Electric cables had been brought down by the force of wind and rain and, some people added, by the forces against progress. Fishes had been found in wells. A snake had slid into a house and killed a woman. People said the snake had been sent by an enemy. I heard stories of politicians, who were members of secret societies, who tried to hold back the rain because of the grand rally which they had to keep postponing. I heard that Madame Koto had joined them. I also heard that one day she had slipped on the muddy ground, had taken a nasty fall, and had to be rushed to a powerful herbalist. That was how the talk went, from the most ordinary events to the most singular, from the man who had raved under a tremendous downpour, swearing that he saw red eagles with flowers in their mouths, to the woman who was said to have given birth to a bigwhite egg.

They spoke of strange things and omens, of the blind old man who had woken up one night screaming that a giant lizard was pursuing him and that it had smashed his accordion. They spoke of omens in the movements of giant constellations. A star had fallen into the Atlantic. Another star had burst into being over our area. Birds of gold had been seen at night. Sweet songs had been heard by women in the dark, songs wandering down the empty street. People dreamed of statues that walked, bringing gifts to the area; they dreamed of birds and butterflies, of hybrid animals, of antelopes with jewelled necklaces, of beggars who were princesses, of a rain of gold dust, of the land suffocating with plenitude while the majority starved, of a cornucopia two decades long with darkness to follow, of miracles on hungry roads, of the wise man who would emerge from nowhere to rule and transform the future agonies of the land.

They even talked of widespread rumours, confirmed on two continents, about one of our most important politicians who had been sighted on the moon. Listening to them instilled in me an absolute awe of the world. I was lightning-struck by life. When they left, my brain fairly combusted with the realities they had conjured in low voices. A brilliant aura linked Mum and Dad that night. They glowed with an almost spectral radiance. I felt exhausted and restless. I wanted to see the world again. Mum sang.

Dad said:

‘Birth brings glory.’

I slept on the bed that night. Mum and Dad slept on the mat. Later I heard them moving and whispering, moving and shaking the floor, as if they were in a hurry to fill the world with glories.

BECAME STRONGER. I ventured out into the street. It dawned on me that I had been granted a greater freedom, so long as I stayed alive. When I went out to play it seemed that something had altered the world. Bushes and strange plants had grown wild everywhere. The rain had beaten holes in the ground. Streets were unpassable for mud. Trees had fallen across paths and roads. Electric cables dangled in the air. I tried to wander—my feet had begun to itch—but water blocked off my attempts. The rain too had made the world smaller. In the forest the ground was thick with mud and yellow leaves and sacrificial offerings. I wandered about in the devastation of our area. It wasn’t much fun. The rain had completely joined whole streets to the marshland. All the streets in our area were once part of a river. As always, the river god was claiming back his terrain.

And so with nowhere to go I was forced to be content with the distractions our street offered. As I had to avoid two places along our street I found them both quite magnetic. I climbed a tree, sat on a branch like an awkward bird, and watched both houses. Children were playing outside the blind old man’s bungalow. He was not around. His chair was on the verandah, soaked with rain. His window had been broken and the room seemed empty. Madame Koto’s bar was different. The barfront was covered in water and weeds. Planks on stones led to the bar. Her signboard was askew. The curtain strips had thinned and I could just about see in. Electric cables had been connected to her roof from a pole on the street. She was the only one who had this privilege. A few cars arrived at the barfront and blasted their horns. A great number of women came out of the bar, chattering and laughing. Dancing to strains of music, they filed across the planks. Madame Koto, her stomach bigger than ever, her right foot bandaged, came out and waved to them. The cars drove the women away.

Madame Koto paused at the door, and surveyed the world. Her white beads sat proudly round her neck. Soon her eyes fixed in my direction. She stared at me for a long time. Then, to my amazement, she started coming towards me. I tried to get down from the tree, but the branch caught the back of my shorts. I resigned myself to what she would do. Rolling the fat of her body with each measured step, avoiding the treacherous puddles and mudholes without seeming to do so, she strode up to me. She was massive. The sheer weight of wrappers gave her a queer grandeur. There was an impressive new exhaustion on her face. She stood beneath the tree, fixing me with a stare, and said:

‘Azaro, what are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you think you are a bird?’

‘No.’

‘Why were you staring at me just now?’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Come down!’

‘No.’

She glared at me. Then, suddenly, she said:

‘What were you doing in my dreams?’

‘Nothing.’

She made an attempt to catch hold of my feet, but I withdrew them. She jumped, landed badly, hurt her foot, and gave up trying to get me to come down. She said:

‘If I catch you in my dreams again I will eat you up.’

Then she hobbled back to her bar. When she had disappeared behind the curtain str4s her women came out and stared at me and made abusive signs. When they got bored with watchingme I got down from the tree and went home.

Dad had returned early from work. He was bare-chested and sweating. He had attached a bag full of rags to the wall and was punching it. He looked at me, sweat pouring down his face, and said:

‘My son, your father is practising.’

‘For what?’

‘To be world champion.’

He went on hitting the bundle, making the walls tremble, each punch vibrating the foundations of the house, grunts escaping from his mouth. He went on punching the bundle till a neighbour banged on the door.

‘What are you trying to do, eh?’ he shouted. ‘You want to break down the wall?

Go and join the army instead of disturbing people!’

Dad stopped punching the bundle and began shadow-boxing. Each especially solid punch at the air was accompanied by the names of real or imagined enemies and a string of abuses. He jumped about, ducked, jabbed, threw upper cuts, feinted, and bobbed. Foam appeared on the sweat of his chest. He grew tired. He went and had a bath. When he came back I began to serve his food. He stopped me. He served the food himself. We ate together.

When we finished I went off to wash the plates. Dad sat in his chair, smoking. He was restless when I returned. I watched him silently. He looked at me every so often and smiled. Not long afterwards the landlord turned up. He didn’t knock. He pushed his way in, left the door wide open, and addressed his complaints to the whole compound.

‘They tell me you have been breaking down the walls! If you damage anything in my house thunder will destroy you. And you better start getting ready to move away.I am tired of your trouble!’

He stormed away. Dad carried on smoking. He hadn’t moved. When the landlord left Dad got up, shut the door, and went back to his chair. We didn’t say anything till Mum returned.

WE HAD NO idea how serious Dad was with his boxing. He began to train dementedly. Sometimes he would wake up at night and bob and counter-punch, hit and jab, swing punches and lash out at imaginary adversaries. In the mornings, before he chewed on his chewing stick, before he ate, he would work out all around the room. He would wake me up with his footwork and laboured breathing. I would look up from the mat and see his giant feet jumping around my head, his elbows protecting his face. He punched at the clothes-line, till the line snapped. He punched at flies and jabbed at mosquitoes. He specialised in fighting his own shadow as if it were his most hated antagonist. He would get me to stand on the bed and hold a folded towel for him. He would punch it from all angles. His movements became crab-like, and he developed the oddest upper cuts. The more he became involved in boxing, the more he ate. His appetite got so large that Mum pleaded with him to stop. We couldn’t afford the money, she said. Dad ignored her. We cut down on what we ate so he could build his body. He didn’t know that we did.

It got worse. Dad took to sparringwith the air on his way to work. On his way back he did the same thing, shuffling, performing fancy footwork, executing kink jabs, throwing combinations. We began to think something terrible was happening to him.

‘Poverty is driving him mad,’ Mum said.

People began to look at us as if we were freaks. The room became too small for Dad to practise in. He had by then punched practically everything in sight. He had made my mat threadbare by standing it against the wall and thumping it. He had punched holes in the mattress. He burst the bottom of one of Mum’s basins. He stopped listening to anything anyone said. He became so engrossed in his obsession. We couldn’t understand it. But it was when he took to boxing on the verandah that we abandoned all attempts to comprehend what had seized hold of his brain. Something had changed in him. His eyes became cool, serene, fierce, and narrowed, all at once.

He seemed to look at people as if they were transparent, insubstantial. His knuckles became big and raw from bashing the backyard walls. One day I stumbled on him in the backyard. He had a cloth round his fists and he was hitting the wall with all his strength. He went on hitting till the white cloth was covered with his blood. Then he stopped.

‘To be a man is not a small thing,’ he would say to me.

His shadow-boxing, however, began to attract attention. When he punched walls in the backyard the women would appear round the well, on the slightest pretext.

Fetchingwater without using it suddenly became fashionable with the married and unmarried women. He didn’t mind performing to the crowd of women and children.

But he got dissatisfied with the backyard because the water spilt on the floor made it difficult to do his footwork. One day he slipped and fell. The women laughed. The next evening he shadow-boxed down the passage. And that night, when he thought the world was asleep, he resumed training in the compound-front.

On those nights Dad had the best sparring partners. He fought the wind, the midges, and the mosquitoes that rose from their millions of larvae all over the swamp of the road. I would wake at night and be aware immediately that he wasn’t in the room. It was the absence of his restless energy. I would rise, tiptoe out of the room, and go to the housefront. Like a hero of the night, alone, invincible, and always battling, Dad boxed all over the grounds. He always fought several imaginary foes, as if the whole world were against him. He fought these foes unceasingly and he always knocked them out. When they had hit the floor he would throw up his arms triumphantly. For me, then, he was the king of the ghetto nights. I would watch him for a long time. The night became safer for me. And while he trained I would wander our road. When he was around the night turned everything familiar into another country, another world.

What a new place the night made the ghetto! The houses were still. There were no lights anywhere. The forest was a mass of darkness, a deep blue darkness, deeper than the surrounding night. The houses, the trees, the bushes, made of our road a curious mountain range. The houses were humped like sleepingmonsters in the dark. Isolated trees were a cluster of giants with wild hair, sleeping on their feet. And the road was no longer a road but the original river. Majestically it unfolded itself in the darkness, one step at a time. It was when I wandered the road at night that I first became aware that sometimes I disappeared.

At first it frightened me. I would be walking along, never able to see far, and then I would pass into the darkness. I would begin to look for myself. I became a dark ghost.

The wind passed through me. But when I kicked a stone, or tripped, or when a light shone on me, I would become miraculously reconstituted. I would hurry back to our housefront, where Dad was still training, unaware of my presence.

He seemed so solid on those nights. The darkness became his cloak and friend. His eyes burned bright. He talked to the wind and his voice was powerful; it had weight, it was the voice of a new man. When he had finished his training he would skip and shuffle about in fascinating footworks, calling himself Black Tyger. The name began to fit. I never saw him so radiant and so strong as when he practised at night. And it was through his night training that his name began to spread. When he shadow-boxed he began to attract strange kinds of attention. I was watching him one night, with mosquitoes swarming all over me, when I saw a single light come down the road and stop not far from him. The light was by itself. It was smaller than a matchlight, but it stayed there and watched Dad box with the darkness. As time passed the number of lights that watched him increased. One day I counted three of them.

‘Dad, there are three lights watching you,’ I said.

‘What?’

He was startled to hear my voice. I guess it was the first time he realised that I was there.