Chapter One
The Boy Who Believed
In our house, God was not a subject. He was more like the electricity: you did not discuss it, you simply noticed when it was off.
I was nine when I first understood that other families did not do things the way we did. A boy in my class, a thin, clever one named Moses who sat in front of me and always smelled of boiled cassava, told me one Monday that his father had never once prayed at the table. "He just eats," Moses said, shrugging, as though it were nothing, as though a man could simply sit down in front of a plate and begin. I remember staring at the back of his neck for the rest of the lesson. I could not picture it. In my house, food waited. Food went cold, sometimes, while my father found the right words.
My father's name was Samuel Kasozi, and he was a mechanic. I tell you this first because it matters. He was not a pastor, or a prophet, or a man with a loud voice. He was a man with a bad knee, a gap between his two front teeth, and fingernails so permanently black that my mother had given up scrubbing them and simply said, every Sunday, "God knows the difference between grease and dirt." He worked at Ssekamatte Motors, a garage behind the Kawempe taxi stage, under a sheet-metal roof that sang like a drum when the rains came. He came home every evening smelling of engine oil and Omo and the particular warm iron smell of metal that has been worked. To this day, if I walk past a garage and the air smells like that, I stop for a moment without choosing to.
Every morning at six, before the day was allowed to start, we had tea.
That was the whole of what my father called devotions. He never used the word. If you had asked him, he would have said we are having tea. But there was a rule, and the rule was simple, and it lasted the whole of my childhood: one verse, one prayer, one cup. My mother made the tea on a charcoal stove on the verandah, the milk boiling up and nearly escaping the pot, the smell of ginger and sugar drifting into the bedrooms to pull us out. My sister Patience, who was a baby in the first years of this ritual, sat on my mother's knee and sucked at the edge of the cup. I sat on an upturned jerrycan. My father sat on the verandah step with his Bible resting on his thigh, the cover softened to the texture of cloth, and he read us one verse.
One. Not a chapter. He thought chapters were for people with more time than faith.
He read it slowly, and when he finished, he would be quiet for a while, as though the verse were still travelling and he were waiting for it to arrive. Then he would say, "Eliya. What did you hear?"
I was seven the first time he asked me. I said, "I didn't hear anything."
"Good," he said, and sipped his tea. "Honest start. Now listen again."
It took me years to understand what he was teaching me. I thought, then, that he was teaching me the Bible. He was teaching me to pay attention, which is a different thing, and a rarer one. Most of what I know about prayer I learned on that verandah step, long before I knew the word theology, from watching a man with oil-stained hands look at a verse the way he looked at an engine: patiently, expecting it to make sense if he would only stay with it.
The verandah was small. It had a concrete floor my mother polished with red oxide until it shone the colour of dried blood, and two plastic chairs, and a rail of rusty iron where Maama hung the washing when the sun was good. In the corner above the door there was a single bare bulb, with a wire that my father had spliced himself, wound in black tape.
That bulb is the thing I think of most, when I think of home.
My father turned it on at six every evening and did not turn it off until the last person in the family was inside. If I was late from football, it burned. If my mother was late from the market, it burned. If a neighbour was sick and my father went to sit with them, the bulb stayed on, and my mother would sit beneath it on the step and wait, her cardigan around her shoulders, saying she was not waiting, she was only enjoying the air.
I asked him once, when I was ten, why it mattered so much. Electricity was not free. Umeme bills came in small yellow slips that made my mother go quiet.
He was oiling the chain of my bicycle at the time. He did not look up. "A house should never be dark," he said, "while someone is still on the road."
"But what if they know the way?"
"Everyone knows the way," he said. "That isn't what the light is for."
I did not ask what it was for. I was ten, and the chain was nearly done, and I wanted to ride. But I remembered it, the way you remember sentences that are too big for you yet, the way you keep a coin you cannot spend.
Our church was called Living Hope Fellowship, and it was a long low building with a corrugated roof and a cross made of two planks bolted together, standing on a lane off Bombo Road where the tarmac gave up and the red earth began. On Sundays the plastic chairs came out in rows. By ten o'clock the room smelled of Vaseline and ironed cotton and the sweet powder the older women wore, and the sound of the drums came through the walls into the street, so that boda riders waiting outside would sometimes nod their heads without meaning to.
I loved it. I want to say that plainly, because later I would try to persuade myself that I had always been bored there, that I had only ever been performing. It was not true. I loved the noise and the heat of it, the way the whole room would stand at once as if a wind had come through. I loved Pastor Lubega, who had been a taxi driver before he was a pastor and still spoke slowly, with long pauses, like a man steering through traffic. I loved that on the first Sunday of every month, we all walked to the front with our offering, dancing, even the stiff old men, even Mr. Tumusiime from the third row who never smiled at anything, and put our small notes into the basket while the choir sang something that made my mother's eyes shine.
Most of all I loved that I was known there. Everyone knew my father. Everyone knew me as Samuel's boy, and when I did something right, an auntie in a head-wrap would pinch my cheek and say, "Ah, you see? Like his father."
I wanted that more than I wanted anything. To be like him. To be a person you could say that about.
When I was eleven, I started praying on my own.
It began with a fear. That year, the electricity in our zone went out for four days in a row, and on the third night, the dark in the house was so complete that I could not see my own hand. Patience was asleep. My parents had gone to a neighbour's, where someone had died. I lay on my mattress in the room I shared with my sister's cot and I listened to the iron roof tick as it cooled, and to the dogs in the lane, and to the slow drip from the tap in the yard, and I became sure that something in the room with me was breathing.
I did not know what to do. So I said, in my head, the only thing I had: God, I'm scared.
I think I expected nothing. I think I expected the way you expect nothing from a phone call you make by mistake. But something eased, not the room, not the dark, but something in my chest, the way a fist unclenches when you finally decide to let go of whatever it was holding. I said it again, out loud this time, in a whisper. God, I'm scared. Please stay.
I fell asleep still whispering. In the morning, I told no one.
That is the thing about a first real prayer. It does not feel like religion. It feels like a secret. For months afterwards, whenever I was frightened or happy or ashamed, I would find a quiet corner, behind the water tank, or under the mango tree at the end of the lane, and I would talk to Him in my ordinary voice, the one I used with Patience and with my friends. I told Him when I had cheated at marbles. I told Him that I hated mathematics. I told Him that Moses's father still did not pray and that I felt sorry for Moses, and that if He had a spare minute, He might look in.
I have thought about those prayers a great deal since. There was nothing clever in them. They would have embarrassed a theologian. But they had a quality I would spend years trying to get back and could not manufacture: they were unguarded. I did not think He might be disappointed. I did not choose my words. I talked to Him the way you talk to somebody who is already, certainly, on your side.
I told my father about it once. He was lying under a Corolla at the garage on a Saturday, and I had brought him his lunch, a flask of tea and a cold chapati rolled in newspaper, and I stood there turning the flask in my hands until finally I said, "Taata, I talk to God. Not at tea time. Other times."
His legs, sticking out from under the car, did not move for a moment. Then he rolled out on the creeper, slowly, looking up at me with a smear of black across his forehead. I braced myself, I do not know for what.
"Where?" he asked.
"Behind the water tank."
"Mm." He sat up and took the flask from me and unscrewed the cup. "That's a good place. Quiet. Water tank is like a small church. It holds something."
"You're not going to tell me it's wrong?"
"Why would it be wrong?"
I did not have an answer. I think I had expected to be corrected. I had absorbed, by then, the idea that prayer was a thing you did at certain times, in certain words, under the supervision of adults.
My father drank his tea. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the open bonnet of the Corolla as though it were an old friend with a long story. "Eliya," he said. "Listen to me. You can run from many things. You can run from school, and you can run from me, and one day, you may even run from your mother, God forbid. But He is not far from any of those places. He is the nearest thing in the room. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"You don't," he said, and smiled the gap-toothed smile. "But you will. Pass me that spanner."
I should tell you about the bicycle, because it belongs here.
My father taught me to ride on a bicycle he had rebuilt himself from three different wrecks: a frame from one, wheels from another, a seat from a third that did not match anything and had once been, I think, part of a woman's bicycle. It was a monstrous green and yellow thing that I loved beyond reason. He repaired it as often as I broke it, and I broke it often, because I was a boy who believed that brakes were a suggestion.
"Come here," he said one Saturday, when I had ridden it into the drain beside our gate and come out with a bloody shin and a bent front rim. "Sit."
I sat on the verandah step. He knelt in front of the wheel and showed me how to true it, how to hold the spoke key and turn each nipple a quarter-turn, and how to spin the wheel and watch where it wobbled against the brake block. "A wheel is not broken because it wobbles," he said. "It is only out of true. You do not throw it away. You find where the tension has gone wrong, and you bring it back."
I was twelve, and I thought he was talking about the wheel.
He turned the key a quarter. He spun it again. He did this for an hour, while the sun climbed, and the neighbour's radio played a Luganda song about a woman who would not wait for a man, and Patience, who was five by then, sat beside us making a dress out of bean pods for a doll that was really a plastic spoon. My mother came out twice to say lunch was ready. He told her, soon, soon. At the end of the hour the wheel spun so evenly that when he flicked it, it hummed.
"There," he said. "Now you."
I did it badly. He did not take the key from my hand. He only said, "Again," and then, "Again," and at some point I realized I was not frustrated anymore, only absorbed, that the wobble had become a kind of question I wanted to answer. When I finally got it right he did not say well done. He put his hand on the back of my neck, his whole broad greasy hand, warm as a loaf of bread, and left it there, and said nothing.
I have felt many things since then that I would call love. Very few of them have equalled the weight of that hand.
When I was fifteen, I began to think my father was embarrassing.
It is a normal thing to feel, I know that now. Every boy has a season of it. But I had been so close to him that when the distance came, it came as a kind of grief, and I handled it badly. I stopped sitting beside him on the verandah step; I sat on the jerrycan and looked at my phone, which was a cracked old Tecno that Ronnie had sold me. When he read the verse, I let my eyes drift. When he asked, Eliya, what did you hear? I said, "Nothing, Taata," in a tone that was meant to say this is boring and which I hoped he would not notice.
He noticed. He noticed everything, in that quiet way he had. But he did not make a speech. One morning, when I answered "Nothing" for the fifth day in a row, he only looked at me for a long moment over the rim of his cup, and then nodded, and said, "Mm. Some mornings it takes time to arrive."
He did not mean the verse.
Around that time he began to have headaches. I knew only because my mother started to buy Panadol in the long strips, and because he sat on the step with his hand pressed against the back of his skull, eyes closed, for longer than the verses took. "It's only the heat," he said, when my mother asked. "It's the garage. All that noise." He went to the clinic once, and the nurse gave him tablets for his pressure, and he took them for a week and then forgot. A man who has worked with his hands his whole life does not think of his body as something to be managed. He thinks of it the way he thinks of a tool: it works until it doesn't.
On the last Friday of August, the year I turned sixteen, I woke at ten to six to the smell of ginger and charcoal smoke, and lay there a moment resenting it. I had stayed up late. I had a mock exam on Monday and a half-finished essay and a feeling in my stomach that I did not name. I pulled the blanket over my head. Through the thin wall I heard the clink of the cups being set down on the concrete, and Patience, ten years old and fully awake, asking my mother whether she was allowed sugar.
"Eliya!" my mother called. "Tea!"
"Coming!"
I did not come for another five minutes. I want you to know that, because it is one of the small facts I have never been able to put down. Five minutes. I was lying in bed, annoyed at being woken, scrolling through nothing on a phone with a cracked screen, while on the other side of the wall my father sat on the step with the Bible on his knee.
When I finally went out the sky was the colour of milk, and the bulb above the door was still on, pale and a little ridiculous against the morning, because he had forgotten to turn it off. My father was sitting very straight. He had the Bible open. He had, in his right hand, the enamel cup, held a little out from his body, the way you hold something that is too hot, though the steam had stopped rising.
"Taata," I said, "I'm here."
He did not look at me. He was looking at the verse. Or at something. His mouth was open a little, and a thin line of spit had run from the corner of it down his chin, and one side of his face seemed to have been drawn lower than the other, as though someone had pulled a thread.
"Taata?"
He turned his head, very slowly, and I saw his eyes find me. I saw him know me. I saw him try, with everything he had, to say my name, and what came out was a thick, wet sound that did not have any edges.
Then the cup slipped out of his fingers.
It did not make much noise. It hit the red concrete and rolled in a half-circle, and the tea ran out of it in a long brown tongue, steaming a little, across the floor my mother had polished the day before, and into the crack beside the step, where it soaked away so quickly that by the time my mother's scream began I had already stopped being able to hear.
I remember the verse. I could not tell you why. It is the last thing in that morning that I can still say word for word, because it was lying open on his knee, and the first thing I did, before I did anything useful, was read it.
Be still, and know that I am God.
I looked at it. I looked at my father, whose hand had begun to shake. And a small, clear, terrible thought rose in me, the first of its kind, a thought I did not yet have a name for and would spend years trying to bury:
Is this what You do?