caused a rupture in her relationship with her father.
Matthew Charles Wangahu 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.
Kaniuru 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 Kaniuru 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 Kaniuru 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-gahu’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 Wangahu, her father, he would have been surprised to know how close his own vision was to Kaniuru’s. But Wangahu 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 Wangahu, 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 Kaniuru 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. Wangahu 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. Kaniuru 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 Kaniuru 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. Kaniuru 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. Kaniuru 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
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 Kaniuru 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 Kaniuru 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,
“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,
“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.
