Najja

There’s a knock on the door. Neighbors often run to Najja for meds when their children fall sick in the middle of the night which is why they refer to her as Musawo. Perhaps it’s because they don’t queue up, at her inconvenience, whenever they go to hospital. Najja Loreyn works at Kyabinge Health Center IV. ‘Mbu Musawo the line… nti ate Musawo nalwaaziza.. . nywo nywo nywo…and they think everyone who works in a hospital can manage any condition,’ Najja always complains as soon as they’re out of sight. Certainly, this is another one of such whacks. It bears similar urgency.

“But I am tired, can’t they see?” 

She rolls to the other side of the bed. Ah, it’s Belinda. The thought comes with relief. Belinda is four years old. When it is time to play, she rounds the vicinity while collecting her colleagues. 

‘Togenda wa Mushawo? Jjangu.’ – Aren’t you going to Musawo’s? 

The neighborhood, amused by her childish accent always asks, ‘What’s at Mushawo’s place!’ 

Belinda responds, jumping feverishly, ‘Mushawo mukwano gwaffe.’ 

Once she has succeeded, Belinda leads the children to Musawo’s house. Najja never complains; she enjoys their company, save for one thing. 

“But these children can never play quietly,” she grumbles. The words are slurred. She stretches out her figure before snoring noisily. They bang again. And again! Oh, no! It’s not Belinda. This can’t be. Najja’s body quakes at her insight. Cold fear seizes her. They are now banging rigorously. The entire house is shaking, with particles flying off the walls. Her heart switches to pounding. Her breathing starts to sprint. Just then she hears something. It’s the door. The doorframe dislodges from the adjacent walls. Najja tightly closes her eyes and holds her breath as she anticipates the door’s fall and awaits her fate. This is everyone’s fate, Najja helplessly concedes, they only wait turns. Her time has finally come. The door falls. The blare from the thud is immense. Startled, Najja breaks into a squeal that yanks her straight out of sleep. She sits up in bed, panting and moist from perspiration. She grabs at her chest while she huffs. 

“It was a dream Najja,” she tries reassuring herself, “Just a dream.” 

She curses the insecurity in the district. It haunts them throughout the day, carries on through the nights, and now has crept into her dreams! She mumbles while lying back in bed, pulling the beddings along to cover her head. Not like she plans to go back to sleep. In Bukomansimbi, people no longer intentionally go to sleep. It just ‘steals’ them, as they often say. The machete-wielding goons have a modus operandi of attacking in the night. They break into people’s houses, slaughter them with machetes like they are cattle in an abattoir, and then march off with any valuable that they can lift. Not even alarms can stop them. It is even worse if it rains. There haven’t been any attacks recorded during the day so far, which is why the residents mostly sleep during the day and stay awake at night. Unfortunately, because of her work schedule, Najja cannot afford to sleep during the day. She continues to doze during her night watch. 

While lying back in bed, Najja gets a strange feeling, like there is someone in the house. But she tries not to think about it. The struggle to suppress the thought, its possibility, and the fear that it brought is almost physical. The effort wrings sweat out of her. The sheets under her feel damp. Just then, she hears scraping under the bed. She is quick to resolve that it is a rat; it is safer than a break-in. However, the latter dominates her mind. How can someone have possibly entered? She is certain she double-checked the locks before going to bed. So she insists that she is just scared.  Najja has recently become infatuated with locking her house. She double checks her house-locks in a manner more of an obsession than necessity. She does so before moving in or out of the house or going to sleep or even if she doesn’t remember the time she last checked them! But majority of the times, Najja just finds herself toying with the latch. Unbolting and relocking. Unbolting and relocking. She is afraid she might actually end up in a mental facility someday because of these assailants. They have been terrorizing the district with machetes for close to two months. Some families have even fled their homes. Others occupy them during the day and vacate as nightfall approaches. 

The rumblings carry on, with sounds of something bigger than a rat, maybe a cat. Najja’s heart is racing with every thought in her mind. The sweat continues to drain from every pore on her body. It probably drains into her bowels too, because currently, her bladder is almost full. The urge isn’t as strong yet. Otherwise she will have to ease herself in a Nomi pail which she keeps under the bed. She wonders what time it is. Her body aches from lying on one side. But she can’t turn, lest the bed screeches and alerts whoever is in the room that she is not only in but actually awake. Her heart thuds at the thought. Let them take whatever they want as long as they leave me untouched, she bargains. There hasn’t been a single attack that did not leave casualties. Not touch her! She manages a smile at her naivety. Under the bed, the rumblings go on intermittently, but now she is convinced it is her paranoid mind. The nightmare just aggravated her fear of the night. Then, the Muezzin announces the hour of Fajr prayer – the Islamic dawn prayers. It is after 5am, Najja registers. It won’t be long before she’s safe. She hadn’t heard the rasping long enough, that she had slipped back into sleep by the time the Muezzin called. Najja marvels at her ability to tell time without a clock, but rather by the brightness of the sun, its position above the head, and the position of the shadows. She starts counting off her fingers: at midday the sun is…, she pauses to remember, and she dozes off again.

When she wakes up, the bright sun rays have flooded the room which means she is quite as safe as she is late for work. Najja jumps out of bed, throwing the beddings to one side as if she has just seen a reptile under them. She doesn’t remember when she slept off. How is she going to make it to work? Given the brightness in the room, Najja knows it is after eight. She is as good as dead. She drops back in bed like a deflated balloon.  At just about the same time, someone makes an alarm from outside. Najja looks through the window but it is too bright for her eyes to see. Then, other voices join in almost immediately. Now, they are screaming. 

‘Ulululuu… Musawo… Musawo Najja…. enyumbayo… Ulululuu ab’ebijambiya batulumbye!’ 

Najja can’t make much sense out of whatever they are trying to say but she knows well she is in danger. She grabs a kanga off a nail in the wall and fastens it around herself above the breasts to cover her night garment, then rushes out of the house locking the door behind her. 

The neighbors are flocking the rear of her house. The crowd grows. 

The villagers, men and women, are armored with tools. Some have knives, some pangas, others axes and others hoes. They were going to the fields when they heard the alarm. For some, the gardening was called to a halt: they approach with soiled feet. Najja gapes at her back wall: it looks like a cloth bitten by a rat. She cups her cheeks in her palms. Then she folds one hand at the chest and supports her chin with the other. Then, she whistles. A man standing at her side, stunned by the harmony of her whistle, steals a very quick glance at her that Najja doesn’t even notice. She instead moves closer and stares into the hole in the wall. It is about one foot from the ground and joined with the room from underneath her bed. A moist rag lies on the ground. The wall finishing has been scraped off carefully – moistened and scraped downwards. The red-brown bricks carefully disengaged from their concrete, have been placed on either side of the hole. They are six of them, to be exact. Najja pictures herself being passed through the space, for she knows she could fit. The thought sends a bout of chills down her spine. 

A party of men forms an incomplete circle around the hole in the wall. Apparently, they are examining the scene. A bigger group, away from the hole, has the woman who made the first alarm. She is recapping her experience tirelessly as people arrive as if she has been contracted. 

“I had come to harvest some maize. And then I saw something I couldn’t understand on the wall. But it looked suspicious…I said eh…then I slowly moved closer…wo…wo…wo,” she covers her mouth with her right hand, then she claps thrice before she continues, ‘On a hole I set my eyes. A hole on the house…!’ The woman is recounting with enthusiasm at the top of her voice, probably because she saw the hole or the thug first. She has firsthand information. But, the crowd too listens to her in anticipation. In addition, she is Namukisa. 

‘I made an alarm…Ulululu…, I called Musawo, and at that exact minute a man ran through my maize to the other side,’ she indicates with a finger, ‘and he disappeared into the maize while...’  

The crowd, as if nudged, probably by the ‘disappearing’ part, goes wild. Everyone just bursts out whining as loud as they can. It is the kind of noise in a market on an open market day. They pace back and forth, up and down. 

‘That murderer…’ a voice pierces through the tumult, biting on ‘murderer’, and then another, ‘We shall get him, his days are numbered.’ 

The fury, like breath in morning air, is steaming from the mob. The long awaited tormentor has just slipped through their hands! It is despicable. A small boy of about seven is landing punches with his tiny fists in the air. Apparently, he is warming up. 

‘This man is going to come back,’ another of the same size but taller assures him. One woman sucks her teeth long and hard just before a man hits his axe down with all his might as if he intends to split the earth. Silence immediately ensues. Namukisa who is restless from the unending utterances seizes the moment. She carries on apologetically, ‘I tried following him, but the maize plantation is too thick as you can see. I couldn’t see through it.’ 

She demonstrates at every chance. ‘I think he had been hiding in the maize. When I made an alarm, he knew his time was up; he decided to run. I wish I had seen him. Or gotten my hands on him like this.’ 

She is now clenching her fists so hard that they are shaking. The people repeatedly interrupt her with their submissions and questions as she goes on to explain.   

Najja’s house, a sizable single room, is third in a row of five. The rentals are on the outskirts of Kyabinge trading center, just a few meters from the road. But following the rainy season, people had tilted their fields. Hence, Najja’s closest hind neighbor is a thick garden of maize – almost the height of the walls – which, to the pleasure of the thugs provides a shield from by-passers. Not to mention the darkness it creates at night. 

The news has fallen on the right one, as they say. Namukisa is known village over for carrying around gossip. Just rumors! Now, these are facts with a head and feet – with visible evidence! Her lips were literally on fire.  Some woman whispers to a neighbor; ‘Era ono ow’olugambo y’eyalabye! Leero luno. Ekyaalo kifudde.’ Namukisa suits the old adage: she doesn’t talk and they talk.

Scattered in sets of twos and more, people go on to recount the incident while telling stories of similar incidents. And they all keep indicating with fingers or their mouth in the direction of the hole and sucking their teeth or clapping hands at each mention.  Talks about the incident carry on and on among the crowd. So much is the reiteration that with time, the story in some factions is that the man had spent the night in the house with Musawo and that he had been seen moving out. Some say they saw him coming out of the hole.  Others say he was found peeping into Musawo’s house. That he had a machete and all sorts of things. A woman in a gomesi tells her clique, ‘You should have seen him. From the way he looked, he’s the one with a machete.’ Then she claps her hands. 

But the fact remains – there is a hole in Musawo’s wall. Every story that fits into that is as good as true. 

Najja goes on to tell her clique about her dream and her night, and they sympathize with her. Nothing had looked suspicious in her room but it doesn’t matter.  She is glad enough that she emerged out of it all alive. It has never been heard of, at least not in the Bukomansimbi attacks. They didn’t use a machete on her! 

The semi-circle of men at the hole led by the Local Council chairman then have a ‘legal exchange’ and agree to notify the police about the incident in as much as ‘there is no solid case where there is no culprit,’ in their opinion. Upon hearing this, the crowd starts to scatter and to diminish. With time they all went back to attend to their day’s chores. It is coming to midday. Najja too has to report to work however late she is. She ponders about her work. Najja wakes up early every morning just to go to see to it that the hospital cleaners clean their allocated areas diligently. She wonders why an adult can’t be responsible enough to do what they are paid to do without being monitored. “And they clean while watching for me as if they clean Najja,” She murmurs. “But as SC, Supervisor Cleaners, my work depends on the likes of them. The positions of supervisors would probably not even exist if employees weren’t anticipated to be that naughty.” Najja reconsiders with pride. 

 Reminiscing on the hell of nights she has had since the first machete attack in the district, Najja paces back to her hollow house. She is joined by her next door neighbor. They walk up to Najja’s doorstep.  

‘I’ll pester the builder so that he fixes the wall before the sun sets,’ the neighbor says. 

‘Yeah... Otherwise they will be passing air in a basket when they return to finish me off. You know, when it’s wet.’ 

They giggle.  

Najja reaches for the door bolt as they continue to joke about the situation. She unfastens the bolt. Right then, a man fleeing from the house as if it is on fire, runs her over. Or rather, it is like a contest of who goes in or out first that he has won. Najja stumbles off to the ground, trembling, and the neighbor follows suit. The women silently watch as the man flees with Najja’s wooden piggy bank in one hand and a rusty machete in the other. After a few breath taking seconds of recovering to the reality of what just happened, Najja alarms in involuntary jerks, ‘Ululululu…Ululululu…’ as she runs in his direction. The neighbor follows.