According to Radio Katwe Reloaded, ‘The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely defined area in the western North Atlantic Ocean where a number of planes and ships have reportedly disappeared. Its vertices are generally considered to be Bermuda, Miami, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. While popular theories range from the supernatural to the scientific, experts state that the area is where missing State funds could further be disappeared.’
In 1998, I visited the Triangle. At the time, it had been relocated to Wandegeya. Surrounded by the still dance of kiosks under the generic name of Kafunda, the Triangle was a circumference of potentially dizzying heights.
Amid plastic chairs left askew by boozehounds having a howling good time, I saw three of my friends and a plus one. I had never seen the man before. However, as soon as I sat down, his eyes widened to lusanias as he sprung up like a man possessed by more than the spirit of Uganda. This man had drunk so much waragi, he’d need an exorcist to get him sober. If the Bermuda Triangle was an ocean of booze, this guy was drinking like a fish in its liquid depths. Looking at me with deadly intent, he rounded a plastic table and then outstretched his dangerously accommodative hands like he wanted to greet my neck with them. Before I knew it, he was strangling me! My neck squeezed into a noodle; I was only saved by my three buddies after the beer I had not yet drunk was peremptorily released into my zipped ‘basement.’
My friends were a motley crew. We had Davi, he’d misplaced his second ‘D’ on somebody else’s birth certificate. This guy worked at a health spa for free, demanding compensation in the shape of massages with ‘happy endings’. He always told us that the masseuses with the most discernible backsides were called Daphne. So, we now knew who took his ‘D’, a girl originally called ‘Aphne.’ Then there was Clever, he was his name by half. Or maybe more. Because his name being monosyllabic, halving it would leave him with six of one and half a dozen of the other letters. Besides, he was drinking soda because it was being sold at a discount. According to him, a discount would enable him to ‘dis’ a count and thereby impress a countess.
Then there was Recoba. It was a nickname. He loved Álvaro “El Chino” Recoba, a Uruguayan former professional footballer and coach known for his powerful left foot, set-piece expertise, and dribbling skills. He most famously played for Inter Milan in Italy from 1997 to 2008. Recoba would never say a word, until he drank four beers. After which, he would be seen dancing ‘paka chini’ with every waitress. To his correct mind, ‘paka’ meant ‘cat’ in Swahili and ‘chini’, meaning ‘down’ in the same language. His (miss)behaviour put the ‘why’ in Uruguay. That night, we all sunk in the Bermuda Triangle. But remember, we were still in Wandegeya.
Being still while drowning, our state obeyed Newton’s first law of motion: when inside the Triangle, we were at rest because our position relative to the seats, drinks, and floor of the Triangle was not changing. The Triangle being our immediate surrounding, with us moving with it as a single system. The politics of survival required that we change our state, possibly to what Clever was drinking. Since, as Mao once said, it could offer us a discount on the democracy of this shared drinking spree, and we could then reject it outright. The discount, that is. Our state was another matter altogether. We were drunk with the powerlessness that convinced us of our power. However, being four friends, we sat at the four ends of a plastic table like a square peg in a round watering hole. This state was a poor fit. Or were we to blame? As the bard said:
‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.’