WHEN VISITORS GET NIGGLING

Am in my bed, ready to catch forty winks and then the visitor we are expecting gets home. But he's not alone. He’s with his son. I start wondering about what they will chomp for dinner. The food left can only serve the two people it was meant to serve. It has to serve three now Stress attacks me immediately – and such small things can really be overwhelming in the short run. I don't know how to do this. Maybe what I have to do is give them a small share of the food no matter what is going through their minds - in all probability thinking I’m parsimonious with cuisine. However I have no alternative. What be said may!

I go ahead and meet this little boy in the sitting room. I start interacting with him. Such an interesting chap he was! Telling me about how despite the fact that he lives in Gulu, he hardly knows neither Acholi nor Langi but the worst thing anyone can ever do to him is affront him in those languages! How will he know that he’s been offended anyway?

I impulsively ask if he is hungry and he replies that he isn’t. Impulsive, yes, because it’s uncultured to ask visitors if they are hungry but maybe I did because he’s just a kid and he might not understand these things after all. I convince myself that maybe he is just being humble like the way some kids are brought up. I insist on him having some food all the same. He then tells me, diffidently, about how they had just had dinner in a restaurant enroute home. He insists on the time ''now now''.

I immediately loom to his father and tell him about how his son has rebuffed to have dinner, to which he says that he’s just being obstinate and timid. He approaches him and austerely orders him to have masticated all the food that will be doled out to him. He also appends that the little boy was mendacious about having dinner before. Food is dished out but the boy still squeals on his pap, '' but daddy did we not eat from a restaurant before reaching here''!?

The visitor, meanwhile, feels at home and starts giving orders. He asks my younger sister to wash his shirt and have it ready by the next day, because it’s the only one he came with. He also adds on a handkerchief that’s copiously logged with ‘you know what’. Of course no one would wash that one; she hands him a new one and disposes off his. He sets his eyes in the kitchen, spots some boiling water on a kettle and diktats me to prepare him a hot bath.

But the timing for a visit is just too bad. The kids are on holiday and all beds are taken up. I’m so bothered and seriously wondering how I’m supposed to prepare beddings for them. Unfortunate for my sister, she has to crash on my floor.

This whole episode then draws back reminiscences of visitors in the past. One day while in Kabale with my mum, we had a visitor over and his tête-à-têtes only got on my nerves. We were having beef but somehow he managed to talk about how he couldn’t eat fish unless somebody got the bones out of it. I badly wished we were having fish that night. I thought of Zeddechaus’ powers, I would definitely have turned the meal into the fish that has the most number of bones –hoping the number differs. I would have wanted to see how he was going to spend the night ravenous.

Another common visitor always came very early in the mornings, we needed not a cock to crow at 6:00 am nor a singing clock at that. She always got us out of bed, yet I thought I had survived matrons for the rest of my life. Also another uncomprehendable thing about her was her love for chips that she actually had to come and order for them at home, by passing about 20 restaurants on her way. In fact she always had her breakfast from home but then how about her husband and kids? She definitely double dealt breakfast - I only could conclude.

Breakfast is also another issue. With the current trend of having Nido and avoiding the whole milk boiling process, while at the table, I emulate by adding two full table spoons in my cup hoping they would learn that by observation. But the visitor feels the milk should be concentrated like the unprocessed milk they are used to directly from their farm. I stare at him adding about five table spoons in his cup and his kids’. I want the air to swallow me that I even lose my appetite. I decide, ''No more nido for visitors''. I think just about how much one tin cost me yet it can’t last for two days and seriously it ‘pains’ me all day!

The word ‘visitors’ itself, sometimes, inflicts substantial twinge on whichever sense takes it in!