My father always struck me as the sort of man who, under the right circumstances, might have invented the microwave oven or the transistor radio. You wouldn`t seek him out for advice on a personal problem, but he`d be the first one you`d call when the radio broke or your little Tecno burner phone loses network. As children, we placed a great deal of faith in his ability but learned to steer clear while he was working. The experience of watching was ruined, time and time again, by an interminable explanation of how things were put together. Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.
Ions might charge the air, but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination — my imagination, anyway. To this day, I prefer to believe that inside every television there lives a community of versatile, thumb-size actors trained to portray everything from a thoughtful newscaster to an alleged man of God miraculously healing people by use of a taser. Fickle gnomes control the weather, and an air conditioner is powered by a team of medium-sized rats, their cheeks packed with ice cubes. Some of these weird unscientific imaginations still run in my child-sized brain to this date.
To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests. We certainly expressed enthusiasm for our mother`s hobbies, from miming Lingala songs to gardening and occasionally throwing curse words at those who may have crossed our paths. (Ask my mother how the radio worked and her answer was simple: “Turn it on and pull out the goddamn antenna.”) I once visited my father`s office and walked away comforted to find that at least there he had a few people he could talk to. We`d gone, my sister Jackline and I, to settle a bet. Yes, you read that right. She thought that my father`s secretary had a sharp, protruding chin and uneven pair of ears like they were molded from different shapes, while I imagined that the woman might more closely resemble a tortoise — chinless, with a beaky nose and a loose, sagging neck. The correct answer was somewhere in between. I was right about the nose and the neck, but Jackline won on the chin and the ears. The bet had been the sole reason for our visit, and the resulting insufferable tour of Buildings A through D taught us never again to express an interest in our father`s workplace.
My own scientific curiosity eventually blossomed, but I knew enough to keep my freakish experiments to myself. When my father landed on my jugs of eerie-looking millipedes in an old water pot, I chose not to explain my complex theories of submerged animation. Why was I filling the hamster`s water beaker with moonshine? “Oh, no reason.” If my little experiment failed, and the drunken hamster passed out, I`d just put her in the deep water tank, alongside the millipedes. She`d rest in the open for a few weeks and, once thawed and fully revived, would remember nothing of her previous life as an alcoholic. I also took to repairing my own record cassette player and was astonished by my ingenuity for up to ten minutes at a time — until the rubber band snapped or the handful of tape came unglued from the arm, and the damned thing broke all over again.
It was my family`s yearly habit every last week of January to rent a makeshift beach house on Wansolo Landing Site, a thin strip of land almost in the middle of nowhere in Lake Kyoga Basin. As youngsters, we participated in all the usual lakeside activities — which were fun, until my father got involved and systematically chipped away at our pleasure. Miniature lakeside football match with local kids was ruined with a lengthy dissertation on impact, trajectory, and wind velocity, and our sand castles were critiqued with stifling lectures on the dynamics of the stress and strain in engineering and material science. We enjoyed swimming until the mystery of tides was explained in such a way that the lake seemed nothing more than an enormous saltwater toilet, flushing itself on a sad and predictable basis.
By the time we reached our late teens, we were exhausted. No longer interested in the water, we joined our mother on the papyrus mat and dedicated ourselves to the higher art of sunbathing. Or at least pretending to.
Like the old saying, like mother like daughter, my sister took sunbathing lessons with mom a little too seriously. Always armed with the right lotions, Oraimo earbuds, and sunglasses. All this she did because she had seen one picture of Danai Gurira on the beach on the television and decided she would try her luck in the beauty contest world. And so she took sunbathing religiously. For her, sunbathing had moved from an intense hobby to something more closely resembling a psychological dysfunction.
It is difficult for me to sit still for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, so I used to interrupt my sunbathing sessions with walks to the pier. On one of those walks, I came across my father standing not far from a group of illegal fishermen who were untangling knots in a net the size of a circus tent. A lifetime of work beneath the scorching unforgiving rural sun had left them with what my sister and I referred to as the Samsonite Syndrome, meaning that their enviable color was negated by a hard, leathery texture reminiscent of the suitcase my mother stored all our baby pictures in. The men’s skins had darkened beyond redemption. The men drank from tiny PET bottles of Riham Funtime as they paused from their work to regard my father, who stood at the water`s edge, staring at the shoreline with a stick in his hand.
I tried to creep by unnoticed, but he stopped me, claiming that I was just the fellow he`d been looking for. “Do you have any idea how many grains of sand there are in the world?” he asked. It was a question that had never occurred to me. Unlike guessing the number of pickled eggs in a jar or the amount of human brains it might take to equal the weight of a portable television set, this equation was bound to involve the hateful word googolplex, a term I`d heard him use once or twice before. It was an idea of a number and was, therefore, of no use whatsoever.
I`d heard once in school that if a single bird were to transport all the sand, grain by grain, from Lido Beach to Zanzibar at the coast, it would take… I didn`t catch the number of years, preferring to concentrate on the single bird chosen to perform this thankless task. It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a chicken or a duck, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. Birds search for grubs and build their nests, but their leisure time is theirs to spend as they see fit. I pictured this bird looking down from the branches to say, “You want me to do what?” before flying off, laughing at the foolish story he now had to tell his friends. How many grains of sand are there in the world? A lot. Case closed.
My father took his stick and began writing an equation in the sand. Like all the rest of them, this one was busy with x’s and y’s resting on top of one another on dash-shaped bunks. Letters were multiplied by symbols, crowded into parentheses, and set upon by dwarfish numbers drawn at odd angles. The equation grew from two to four meters long before assuming a second line, at which point the fishermen took an interest. I watched them turn from their net and admired the way they could smoke entire cigarettes without ever taking them from their mouths — a skill my step-grandfather had mastered and one that continues to elude me. It involves a symbiotic relationship with the wind: you have to know exactly how and when to turn your head in order to keep the smoke out of your eyes.
One of the men asked my father if he was an accountant, and he answered, “No, an engineer.” These were poor vulnerable men, who could no longer afford to live by the lake, let alone fish freely. The army had declared their fishing gear illegal and each of them was required to acquire a fishing license for upwards of UGX 4,000,000. A sum majority could make in 6 years of religious fasting and aggressive saving. Their once lucrative sources of income, the nets and canoes are now being used as goalpost nets for the soldiers’ kids and platforms on which the soldiers step on when bathing in the open lake.
“Let me ask a little something,” one of the men said, throwing his spent cigarette butt at an aging female dog that was causally jogging past. “If I got paid twelve thousand shillings in 1962 for a half-acre lakeside plot, how much would that be worth per grain of sand by today`s standard?”
“That, my friend, is a very interesting question,” my father said.
He moved several steps down the beach and began a new equation, captivating his audience with a lengthy explanation of each new and complex symbol. “When you say pie,” one man asked, “do you mean a real live meat pie or one of those funny shapes they put on Rupiny Newspaper whenever the budget for a financial year is out ?”
My father answered their questions in detail, and they listened intently — this group of men with nets, blowing their smoke into the wind. Stooped and toothless, they hung upon his every word while I stood in the lazy surf, soaking in the cold Kyoga water. That’s when it hit me that, science really has answers to almost all of life’s greatest mysteries.