you can cook your own food then,’ Master said. ‘Write a list of what you’ll need.’
‘Yes, sah.’
‘You wouldn’t know how to get to the market, would you? I’ll ask Jomo to show you.’
‘Jomo, sah?’
‘Jomo takes care of the compound. He comes in three times a week. Funny man, I’ve seen him talking to the croton plant.’ Master paused. ‘Anyway, he’ll be here tomorrow.’
Later, Ugwu wrote a list of food items and gave it to Master.
Master stared at the list for a while. ‘Remarkable blend,’ he said in English. ‘I suppose they’ll teach you to use more vowels in school.’
Ugwu disliked the amusement in Master’s face. ‘We need wood, sah,’ he said.
‘Wood?’
‘For your books, sah. So that I can arrange them.’
‘Oh, yes, shelves. I suppose we could fit more shelves somewhere, perhaps in the corridor. I will speak to somebody at the Works Department.’
‘Yes, sah.’
‘Odenigbo. Call me Odenigbo.’
Ugwu stared at him doubtfully. ‘Sah?’
‘My name is not Sah. Call me Odenigbo.’
‘Yes, sah.’
‘Odenigbo will always be my name. Sir is arbitrary. You could be the sir tomorrow.’
‘Yes, sah – Odenigbo.’
Ugwu really preferred sah, the crisp power behind the word, and when two men from the Works Department came a few days later to install shelves in the corridor, he told them that they would have to wait for Sah to come home; he himself could not sign the white paper with typewritten words. He said Sah proudly.
‘He’s one of these village houseboys,’ one of the men said dismissively, and Ugwu looked at the man’s face and murmured a curse about acute diarrhoea following him and all of his offspring for life. As he arranged Master’s books, he promised himself, stopping short of speaking aloud, that he would learn how to sign forms.
In the following weeks, the weeks when he examined every corner of the bungalow, when he discovered that a beehive was lodged in the cashew tree and that the butterflies converged in the front yard when the sun was brightest, he was just as careful in learning the rhythms of Master’s life. Every morning, he picked up the Daily Times and Renaissance that the vendor dropped off at the door and folded them on the table next to Master’s tea and bread. He had the Opel washed before Master finished breakfast, and when Master came back from work and was taking a siesta, he dusted the car over again, before Master left for the tennis courts. He moved around silently on the days that Master retired to the study for hours. When Master paced the corridor talking in a loud voice, he made sure that there was hot water ready for tea. He scrubbed the floors daily. He wiped the louvres until they sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, paid attention to the tiny cracks in the bathtub, polished the saucers that he used to serve kola nut to Master’s friends. There were at least two visitors in the living room each day, the radiogram turned on low to strange flutelike music, low enough for the talking and laughing and glass clinking to come clearly to Ugwu in the kitchen or in the corridor as he ironed Master’s clothes.
He wanted to do more, wanted to give Master every reason to keep him, and so one morning, he ironed Master’s socks. They didn’t look rumpled, the black ribbed socks, but he thought they would look even better straightened. The hot iron hissed and when he raised it, he saw that half of the sock was glued to it. He froze. Master was at the dining table, finishing up breakfast, and would come in any minute now to pull on his socks and shoes and take the files on the shelf and leave for work. Ugwu wanted to hide the sock under the chair and dash to the drawer for a new pair but his legs would not move. He stood there with the burnt sock, knowing Master would find him that way.
‘You’ve ironed my socks, haven’t you?’ Master asked. ‘You stupid ignoramus.’ Stupid ignoramus slid out of his mouth like music.
‘Sorry, sah! Sorry, sah!’
‘I told you not to call me sir.’ Master picked up a file from the shelf. ‘I’m late.’
‘Sah? Should I bring another pair?’ Ugwu asked. But Master had already slipped on his shoes, without socks, and hurried out. Ugwu heard him bang the car door and drive away. His chest felt weighty; he did not know why he had ironed the socks, why he had not simply done the safari suit. Evil spirits, that was it. The evil spirits had made him do it. They lurked everywhere, after all. Whenever he was ill with the fever, or once when he fell from a tree, his mother would rub his body with okwuma, all the while muttering, ‘We shall defeat them, they will not win.’
He went out to the front yard, past stones placed side by side around the manicured lawn. The evil spirits would not win. He would not let them defeat him. There was a round, grassless patch in the middle of the lawn, like an island in a green sea, where a thin palm tree stood. Ugwu had never seen any palm tree that short, or one with leaves that flared out so perfectly. It did not look strong enough to bear fruit, did not look useful at all, like most of the plants here. He picked up a stone and threw it into the distance. So much wasted space. In his village, people farmed the tiniest plots outside their homes and planted useful vegetables and herbs. His grandmother had not needed to grow her favourite herb, arigbe, because it grew wild everywhere. She used to say that arigbe softened a man’s heart. She was the second of three wives and did not have the special position that came with being the first or the last, so before she asked her husband for anything, she told Ugwu, she cooked him spicy yam porridge with arigbe. It had worked, always. Perhaps it would work with Master.
Ugwu walked around in search of arigbe. He looked among the pink flowers, under the cashew tree with the spongy beehive lodged on a branch, the lemon tree that had black soldier ants crawling up and down the trunk, and the pawpaw trees whose ripening fruits were dotted with fat, bird-burrowed holes. But the ground was clean, no herbs; Jomo’s weeding was thorough and careful, and nothing that was not wanted was allowed to be.
The first time they met, Ugwu had greeted Jomo and Jomo nodded and continued to work, saying nothing. He was a small man with a tough, shrivelled body that Ugwu felt needed a watering more than the plants that he targeted with his metal can. Finally, Jomo looked up at Ugwu. ‘Afa m bu Jomo,’ he announced, as if Ugwu did not know his name. ‘Some people call me Kenyatta, after the great man in Kenya. I am a hunter.’
Ugwu did not know what to say in return because Jomo was staring right into his eyes, as though expecting to hear something remarkable that Ugwu did.
‘What kind of animals do you kill?’ Ugwu asked. Jomo beamed, as if this was exactly the question he had wanted, and began to talk about his hunting. Ugwu sat on the steps that led to the backyard and listened. From the first day, he did not believe Jomo’s stories – of fighting off a leopard barehanded, of killing two baboons with a single shot – but he liked listening to them and he put off washing Master’s clothes to the days Jomo came so he could sit outside while Jomo worked. Jomo moved with a slow deliberateness. His raking, watering, and planting all somehow seemed filled with solemn wisdom. He would look up in the middle of trimming a hedge and say, ‘That is good meat,’ and then walk to the goatskin bag tied behind his bicycle to rummage for his catapult. Once,
