Strangers on a Lane

The boy in shorts waits on a veranda near a grocery store in Kagugube, a Kampala suburb. With his hands stretched out, he jumps around a movie poster. He looks very serious as another boy (his size) approaches. The other boy grips at his hand to drag him away. He explained what he was doing there but the other boy persists and they start fighting, pushing and tugging at each other until they fall to the ground. Through the gather of young men and children, curtains draw in one of the rooms of the residences above the lane. A woman peeps, the boys untangle. The other boy moves away as shirtless men come to off load boxes on a lorry parked on the other side.
At the end of LDC road is a grand student’s hostel. Sitting below a window on the ground floor, an old man recites the names of God: Shalom, El-Roi… The street is dimly lit when I return, but the boy in shorts still waits. In his palm he holds his chin like a grown up lost in thought. It is 8:00 PM, to mean, the boy has spent more than four hours on that cold veranda. Out of the yellow light of the grocery store, a woman emerges. If she is his mother, am not sure, but she would be the one. A slim woman in her late thirties, punctuated in a long skirt and sleeveless blouse.
He is telling her something as they walk but she stays firm and straight, and not listening. In my need to know them, I named them God’s names. Shalom: the Lord is Peace, for the boy in shorts who stays waiting on his mother and El-Roi: the strong one who sees, for the mother who disappears for hours in a grocery store. I think of them while waiting to be served in a restaurant on another lane; my hungry eyes heavy with sleep. But the boy, whose khaki shorts are memories of innocence, still waits. This time not on a veranda but inside my head, watching his mother dry her hair in the hooded dryer of a salon in the suburbs.