In the morning I walked to ‘taxi park’. Taxi Park is a giant coliseum at the confluence of 3 hills, and is the main bus terminus of Kampala.  A tout promised a departure in five minutes.  He kept checking his wrist-watch.  The watch was symbolic, the glass had long fallen off, and there were no hour or minute hands, merely a second hand which furiously ticked away. We left in fifteen minutes.

We were out of town in ten minutes, or less. A smirking man sat beside me, his suit was dusty and he stared straight at the windscreen, or perhaps at the dashboard shrine – shared by both the Madonna on one side, and a portrait of Bob Marley on the other. Country music (‘The coward of the county’) whistled through the speakers.

Out of Kampala, the low hills began, and they brought with them the aromatic smells of wet earth, and the sound of chirping sparrows. We stopped. A woman got on the bus, carrying marks of domestic violence – a foot covered in a plaster-cast and a black eye.  Her nails were painted red.  When I looked again, they were just broken and bloody. 

Next to her was a student with watery eyes.  He scribbled intently into a ruled notebook, keeping rhythm with the movement of the bus.  There were small blotches of ink on his shirt, I looked closely and the blotches were holes in the fabric.

The man next to me hadn’t been smirking at all, he had the same look now, but it was one of heroic suffering.  Like someone suffering from constipation.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.
‘I am very much ok sah’, he said, pausing and then said ‘I am praying’.
A bible lay open on his lap.
‘Repent!’ he said quite intensely, for he had been whispering until now, raising an arm and an eyebrow at no one in particular, ‘Admit your sin! And change your mind! Lest he smite you down….’

Ora et Labora -- ‘Pray and Work’-- has been a powerful Christian philosophy since the time of the Benedictine monks.  But when you couldn’t get much work, you tended to pray very hard.

His name was John, and he was training to be a preacher.
Because, people needed saving: ‘People have to get right with God.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the bible says so’ (John 3:3 - Except a man to be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God)
The bus staggered across a ridge and a small forest, and then parked outside a bar.  Its walls were burnt brick, and the roof was twisted sheet metal. A despondent Vervet monkey sat perched atop, eating a piece of sugarcane.  There was a billboard for ‘Tyson Waragi’ (Grappa di Uganda – the grappa of Uganda, a drunken Italian in Kampala had told me).  Men in stained overcoats grilled meat on charcoal braziers.

The student had no money, but he was going for his brother’s wedding in Jinja.  The tout slapped him in a fit of irritation, and made to kick him out of the bus. This made the passengers very cross. A cap was passed around for a collection, and the student’s bus fare was paid for with a heap of coins.  The student had lunch on me. He said he would be okay. The tout sulked.

We passed Mabira, a stretch of road cloaked by a dense tropical forest on both sides. It was past mid-day, but the lofty trees threw long shadows. John the preacher, revived by lunch, turned to evangelizing me, with small talk. My path to salvation could begin if I bought a book from him.
I looked at the book, and it had an alarming title: “Faith for Earth’s final hour”.  Faith was a leering man with a big bushy moustache posing on the back cover – someone by the name of Hal Lindsey.
‘If you are not with Him, you are with the Devil’ said John, trying his most lively marketing speech.

The stretch through the forest, and the preacher’s prattle reminded me of something, and I wrote in my notebook – paraphrasing Dante, Canto 1:
            “half-way upon the journey of our life,
            i found myself within a shadowy forest,
            for the straight pathway had been lost”

‘So you think, if I buy the book, I’ll be on the way to getting saved?’ I said turning to the trainee preacher.
‘Yes!’ he said, switching on his smirk.
‘But if you read John 2:12, Jesus himself says: “My house shall be one of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves”… ’ – I said, reminding the preacher of the time when Jesus had lost his cool and started beating up people.  He had come to Jerusalem during Passover and found merchants and money lenders hawking livestock within the temple. 
“Merchants in the Temple!!!” -- he had yelled and whipped every one of the them without remorse.

The smirk was turned off again, and the preacher abandoned me.

I got off at a cross-road just after Owen-Falls dam. There was a broken signboard pointing to ‘Kenya’ in one direction, and ‘Rwanda’ in another. Rwanda, pointed towards a gas-station with an attached fast-food restaurant.  I walked to the town centre.