These Lonely Lilongwean Evenings
on Me Talk Pretty One Day (Malawi), 03/Oct/2008 09:00, 34 days ago
Evening is a lonely time in Lilongwe. Dark comes soon after 6.00 p.m. and does so all year round, summer and winter both. And once rush-hour is over and the night has arrived, the streets are filled with the suffering howls of stray dogs and little more. People stay indoors. I stay indoors. I stay home and deal with the feeling of loneliness that lingers through the night.Fortunately, I have two visitors to keep me company in the evening, both of whom arrive just as the sun departs. My first guest is Richard Mandela, the guard appointed by my employer to keep me safe during the hours of darkness. I don’t think Richard is cut out to be a night-watchman. For a start, he is scared of the dark. Turning off the outside light to save on the electricity bill is an act that is soon followed by a frantic knocking on the door. Richard knows precisely three phrases of English that he likes to practise onthese occasions: “hello”, “please turn on the light” and “thank you”. Impressed with his polite manner, I acquiesce, and Richard quickly retreats around the back of the house and shuts himself in the tiny storeroom attached to the kitchen, from where he is able to see nothing but the shining light bulb and the large and beautifully illuminated papaya tree in the garden. If that papaya tree tries anything untoward in the night, I feel safe in the knowledge that Richard will be ready.My second visitor is an albino gecko whom I have decided to name Chilambula Road in celebration of one of Lilongwe’s few original names. Nearly everything in this town is either numbered or named after Malawi’s first President and I considered ‘Chilambula Road’ preferable to ‘Gecko Number 1’ or ‘Hastings Kamuzu Gecko’.While Richard works outside guarding the papaya tree, Chilambula Road and I like to play. The game involves Bula (for short) scurrying from room to room through the little gaps between the beams and the roof, and me turning the lights on suddenly and attempting to catch my nemesis in an old coffee tin. I have yet to succeed, mainly, I think, because an old coffee tin is not well-designed for gecko catching, while geckos are very well-designed for scurrying from room to room amongst the rafters. Sometimes our fun and frolics are thoughtlessly interrupted by power outages, which usually coincide even more thoughtlessly with my attempts at cooking dinner. On these occasions there is nothing to do but sit in the dark snacking on biscuits while strenuously winding the clockwork radio to get a few minutes at a time of the World Service or some Malawian gospel music.And so my evenings go—not particularly exciting as it happens, but since Bula cheated tonight and escaped outside, and given that I’m out of biscuits and too tired to continually wind the radio, I could think of nothing better than sitting down and whiling away the hours rambling on about these lonely Lilongwean evenings.