That Shop Isn’t There Any More

From The Invisible Man

In my neighhourhood, in the mornings as I head for work, I walk past a dark and dingy shop. It is one of the riddles that came with Museveni’s little economic boom that shops will cluster like this. Each one is identical to the next, none giving you any reason to enter it and not another. But this one shop seems to have missed Museveni. It looks just like all these hollow caves used to look back in the days..

This shop is still cavernous and dark. There is nothing inside. To the left and to the right the shops are crowded with sacks of sugar, flour, rice and other grains, powders and substances no yuppie would be able to identify. Milling around the sacks, falling off shelves, are toothpaste, bread, detergent, headache tablets, bad-tasting squash concentrate, insecticide, light bulbs and margarine. Dangling from strings stretched across the rafters of unceilinged roofs are socks and handkerchiefs and bathing loofahs and safety pins and hair extensions and in the midst of all this cornucopia, struggling to find her way from product to customer, there is a small, pregnant girl with a western Ugandan accent who speaks no English in the right hand shop, and a boisterous, dark boy who should be in school in the left hand shop.

In between them is the cave. With nothing to sell in it. Nothing in it, not even light.

Every morning as I pass by I see the woman who… owns? Just works in? Lives in? the shop. She wears a threadbare, careless busuuti which serves not to adorn or to beautify the wearer. It is just there because going naked would be too much surrender.

She has surrendered. Her skin is the obvious grey-brown that occurs to skin when it was bleached years ago but the bleaching stopped, and the skin was allowed to fall into whatever hue it found most easy to settle into.

Her skin is threadbare and careless and serves not to adorn, or to beautify. She just wears it because she has nothing else to do with it.

Every morning I see the threadbare woman bent over a charcoal stove. I want you to see her too, before I tell you what she does at that stove:

She is flabby and amorphous, shapeless in the way a polythene bag full of shit is shapeless.

It is four o’clock now. I am sitting at my computer naked. Calling people bags of shit.

She is a polythene bag full of some semi-solid and unimportant matter, draped in an old, ugly busuuti and having a head on top. The head is covered with a headscarf, I think. I told you- these things never stay long enough to register, so I cannot recall accurately what it is she has on her head. Maybe it is a hairnet- and beneath the hem you can see what is a rarity in Uganda these days: unsalonned, untreated hair on an adult woman. Little tufts of it stand out from the part beyond the hem of her headgear, malnourished and scanty, like savanna grass.Her flat, broad, grey-brown face has eyes ringed in dark patches. This happens often with skin-bleachers. Is it that the skin under the eyes resists the decoloratives, or that it is extra-sensitive round there and when you apply bleach there the skin gets burnt? Is it these patches that make me see that her eyes hold a deep, deep, ancient sadness? Is such a thing really there, or is my mind just playing tricks on me now, trying to construct a detailed figure out of an image I have only ever glanced at in passing? No, it is there. I never noticed it when I looked at her, but I saw it. And when I remember now, I can see it. Eyes that are deep, old, bottomless wells falling into a soul as cavernous as her shop.