“This I know: to be murdered is to become eternally more interesting.”
– Kate Morton, The Clockmaker’s Daughter

I used to think we died the way we lived. I thought if a girl whittled away her one life puffing smoke at the blackening sky and posing for one weed-selfie after another knowing that her head-dress-wearing aunts gnashed their teeth in the blocked list of WhatsApp contacts, then she was more than likely to die of a stab wound behind a dingy bar or alcohol poisoning. I thought that sweet, slow-talking girls with warm hearts and large eyes died of too much indulgence from their lovers or perished contentedly at a ripe old age after lauding their grandchildren with exaggerated tales of that one time they went to an open mic after dark.

We were just children when we met. I remained a child long after I grew into my breasts. To entertain such a simplistic view of life could mean nothing else. How myopic and stiff-necked I was! What an awakening I’ve undergone since!

Was it shining when we met? I suppose so. We were in primary one, one of the two classes in Ugandan primary schools that cared a jot about the weather outside the window. Each morning, when we opened our Picfare exercise books, we scribbled in the adorable baby scrawl that loses its charm with age:

My name is Justin Teopista Nagundi. 

Today is Wednesday 10th June 1998.

I am six years old.

The weather is cloudy. 

The weather is sunny.

The weather is windy.

The weather is rainy.

When the sun shone, it was a big, wobbly circle with stick rays poking out. When it rained, fat, dotted lines poured down the first two lines of my ruled paper. When the wind blew in my book, it pulled hairy black trees sideways. We had a distinct sense of what weather looked like back then.

Therefore, I am certain that the weather was sunny. I would remember a stormy third day of school, right…?

She was the girl in a red T-shirt and a pair of blue shorts; that is, she was dressed just like me. We were both in Rhino House. She had charmingly wide eyes, unlike my own. The shy smile on her face was an abashed confession, a fact corroborated by her greasy hands, that she had filched my chapati from my bag as we studied a-e-i-o-us.

Time is a fickle woman and my memory, I’ve learned, is her lover. Perhaps my brain created innocent first memories to gloss over the jagged ones that followed. Perhaps my mind spun all these sugary facts as an adult version of a baby blanket—my night light when I think of her. What I remember for a fact was her bag. It was light blue, like a callous midday sky, with fat clouds aligned too symmetrically all over its surface. It preserved this cheerful tropical day under a plastic lining. It was the most beautiful bag I had ever seen.

Sixteen years from the day we met, I stood dry-eyed on the brown earth of her father’s hometown while she slowly turned into memory before my very eyes.

Her name was Fortunate.

The day was Wednesday, August 28, 2013.

The weather was mercilessly sunny

And she was gone.

***

I do not do best friends; I used to declare with pride. In life, if we are lucky, we will recognize our stupidity and fear for the impediments they are. Maybe then they won’t become our crowning vices. Maybe then we will refrain from trumpeting them as though they were accomplishments.

Before I met her, I liked to think of myself as a polythene bag spinning in the air on a windy day. I could not be pinned down by the attentions of one person. I will never know how she wormed into my defenses, defenses that had gone up unaccountably early in life. I don’t know how we became the girls who shared each ludicrous fear in the hollows of each other’s ears before the school day ended.

Our birthdays were three days apart. She was the first friend whose birthday stuck in my mind. We were so terrified of getting our period. I was convinced that mine would come first because my sister had been blighted with hers at nine years old. She believed hers would come late because her mother had suffered her first symptoms at fourteen.

Hers came at eleven on a day when I had missed school to gig as an unpaid camerawoman at my sister’s graduation. The next day, I narrated my dismay at having lost all the video footage. She narrated to me (with terrifying detail) how excruciating menstrual cramps were. I lived in heightened terror of my first period but never got to share my ordeal with her because, well, my Doomsday came at fourteen. By then, the world had flung us in two opposing directions (read secondary schools).

During the years in which we painted Kampala red with our matching house T-shirts, she gave me the first piece of pre-teen jewelry I ever owned: a blue heart that winked purple if you squinted. She got the BE FRI. I got the ST END.

That necklace was the stuck-out thumb of God declaring that He would not forsake a friendship stamped on two jagged fragments of a cold, metallic heart.

I thought I would bathe with it on until time broke into old threadbare rags and took us both kicking feebly to our long-awaited graves. I would be a wrinkled old woman in an open casket with the keepsake my friend had given me when we were twelve.

I do not know when I lost it. I know how I lost her.

We were in secondary school at a time before shiny buttonless phones. We were the kids born before QWERTY, who had to write letters on floral paper if we were to keep our pen pals from floating away.  I was no good at it. Once more, I was the polythene purposelessly flung about. Who would have thought a simple thing like a pen to paper, a thing I know I am very good at, dulled our/my ardor? She wrote to me for years, but I never had the time or the inclination to answer. With time, I succumbed to the fear that we would be too awkward in person. I grow fearful after time apart from somebody I have loved. I fear that our bond has broken beyond saving and dread having to stand vigil as ardent love breathes its last breath. I am a coward in that way, and therefore, I grew estranged from my best friend because of my fear of potential estrangement.

Yes. It is as ridiculous as it sounds.

***

She called my father often on his pre-QWERTY phone, using her mother’s (I imagine) Nokia 3310 during the holidays. I made faces of pained ennui before I picked up each time. I cursed the awkward conversations about the weather, about how I was doing. To me, radio silence was better than watching an old bosom friendship flounder like a slowly dying goldfish. I had no new best friends at the time—not like the kind I had had in her. Friendship meant separation. Post-separation teenage angst felt awful, awkward. I was done with that.

She gave up. Eventually. I was glad. That should have been the end. No more small talk where hushed whispers used to live. No more left-over memories of cooled boy-flames. No more sacred secrets about body changes. We had done that at twelve and our breasts no longer hurt when we crashed into walls.

As we come of age, we abandon what we believe is childish and in the stir-crazy throes of adolescence, sometimes we discard even those things—and people—that we should have kept.

***

I met her again on the street at nineteen years old. The weather was as sunny as it will always be when I think of her. She looked the same, but with long box-braids pulled back. Her breasts grew at eleven while I was still being mistaken for a boy, and that early spurt of womanhood had made her uneasy with the whole concept of femininity. Facing her in the busy street, I saw the remnants of her apologetic stoop, developed as her mortification grew back then that she would soon need a bra.

Standing at the Naalya taxi stage, both of us one awkward foot from walking off in different directions, she told me about a video library she worked in nearby. I bought a movie called The Yellow Handkerchief for old times’ sake. It was a terrible movie with Kristen Stewart and Eddie Redmayne. It was the first time I ever saw Eddie Redmayne. Pre-Fantastic Beasts, he looked sickly and strange. It was the last time I ever saw Fortunate in the flesh. She was still slow talking and reminded me of a tortoise. She had a demeanor that saved up the energy to live 400 more years.

***

Two years of small talk over the phone later, we promised to meet. She wanted to console me about the loss of my mother who had passed away on August 21, 2013. Death has a way that sharpens our need for love and comfort, and she was my earliest memory of both. I agreed enthusiastically. I wanted to make up for the lost time. I wanted to patch us up. From my mother’s loss, I had recognized that I had been too flippant for much too long.

On Facebook, her last message in my inbox was, “Yo Included In My Prayers Dia Lv
U .”

I resent that she died when shorthand was the mode of expression in vogue for young Ugandan adults. I detest that this shorthand rendered her last words in print vapid because we were only twenty-one; neither children nor adults, we still clung to the secondary school jargon and heinous diction. “thanx 4 the support” I had said to her love. No punctuation considered.

To the world, her last Facebook post was, “August, The Black Month! God!”

Pressed for an explanation by her virtual friends, she had no obvious reason for that uncharacteristically dark post. It was August 21, 2013 as she typed that cryptic message. Too busy and too barefooted in my grief, consoling mourners for my loss, I didn’t see it until it contained a grimmer meaning.

Over the phone, Fortunate promised to meet me on August 28, 2013. The weather was cloudy when she called me — when we made our last plans.

It was cloudy on August 28, 2013 when our friend in common, Ray called to tell me she had passed on. I remember that I was playing a game of Name-City-Country in a bedroom plastered with greying newspaper clippings of lyrics from the nineties. Our mourners had left their children behind to keep us company as we grieved for my mother.

As I digested a death in the family, my Fortunate of the large, affectionate eyes, of the slow gait and soft voice expired in broad daylight after a stroll to buy airtime. They say somebody she knew, somebody who probably had the stomach to wear a faux frown as her distraught brown mother kissed her child’s icy face, murdered her. He murdered her in her house. She was all alone. You are right to imagine that he did the very worst.

Did he feel any remorse? Did he know that she and I had never even talked about sex? Did he care when he stole her SIM cards erasing all evidence of who he was, that a warm-blooded girl had turned into a cold case?

Fortunate’s mother recognized me at once. “Oh Justin,” she said. Asking distractedly after my father, she consoled me for my loss. She still knew my name and my minute details, though I had last seen her at twelve. “Your mother is so lucky that God granted her the mercy to die first—before her child.”

I did not cry at Fortunate’s funeral, just as I hardly cried at my mother’s. It didn’t think I had the right.

***

In Uganda, we do not avenge our loved ones. We do not have the luxury of closure. Our grief lives on like a mocking spectre, and years later we harbor ill will for those who look guilty. We color motive into the dotted lines of their every gesture and treat them with hostility or scorn. At funerals, we suspect everyone—especially those that cry too loud. The police interrogated the guy who called her last; he was so distraught that he couldn’t even stand upright. She had texted him last. Outside, the sun shone merrily as her attacker zeroed in. She told him that a movement outside her window had scared her. That was the last thing she wrote.

So he said.

I have never understood why serial killings, whodunnits and murder mysteries remain a staple on American television; I have watched some in my time, but often their morbidity hits too close to home. We live in a jurisdiction where money equals might, and justice weighs as much as the size of your purse. We live a life with too many killers walking brazenly among us. They hug us, console us, and tell us to be strong. The entire time we imagine they are having the last laugh.

The departed are lessons to the ones that still survive. I try to learn from her never to discard the gift of love.

Since Fortunate, I try to call more, love more. I try to do the best-friend thing. I am always scared that I’ll never do enough. I am a good friend most of the time, but when I fall short, I expect the worst. I am still afraid of phones that ring in the night.

Every fifth day of June, as her birthday rolls around, I remember her eyes, shy smile and the sunny day she still wears in my memory sealed in plastic in a tiny blue bag.

Author’s Note: In Uganda, QWERTY keyboards were familiar to the population only after the Blackberry (and similar smartphones) became widely available. They were collectively referred to as “QWERTY.” Typewriters had long been accessible solely to the very wealthy in Uganda. As a result, many people had never known a QWERTY keyboard until smartphones and computers became ubiquitous.

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