Read Online The Magic of Saida by M. G. Vassanji - Free Book Online Page B

question?—the past is over—or a profound one?—we are part of a continuity.
    I would have given him a publisher’s answer: it’s important if it’s interesting, and you have made it so.
    I was of course keenly waiting for him to get back to Mzee Omari the blind poet, our historian.

• 8 •
    He had been drafted to be her teacher, the mwalimu, superior and domineering, who was privileged to go to the Asian school. He had agreed to share with her the precious knowledge he himself received, with which she could hold her head up with pride in that world away from the humble Swahili quarter of Kilwa, on the other side of the German monument. She could become somebody special, just as he would become. Over the months they’d become friends; her former awe and respect had yielded to a certain kind of familiarity. But he had ruefully come to accept that she was not very bright, her interest in his lessons limited, often feigned and fleeting. There were weeks when she did not show up. And when she did, the sessions on the floor ended at times in their moments of amusement. Her nickname for him was Bwana Hodari, Mr. Clever.
    But one day she surprised him, and all his fragility was exposed. All his orphan shallowness, his want of inner anchor. He would often wonder how much smarter she was than him; surely she had toyed with him even at that young age. But never out of malice, only mischief; and humility.
    They had gone over the silly line “A man, a pan, a man and a pan,” from her English reader, over which they had had many a laugh, she mangling it in her African accent, “A many and a pany and a many and a pany” in the nasal voice that he could always recall. Wasn’t his own accent the same as hers, that way of saying
ende
for
and
? It must have been. Now he gave her a division problem, 9999 divided by 11, which impressed him no end about his own capabilities and terrified her by its monstrous morphology. While she was attempting this impossible sum, he helped his mother pick an eggfrom the vendor. There was a science to picking a good egg: you dropped it into a pan of water; if it sank, it was bad, if it floated, it was good. The puzzle was that intermediate case, hanging undecidedly, between here and there, and he would help her guess. There was no money-back guarantee, of course. There were women who had run chasing after the vendor, cheated by an egg. As Kamal and Mama debated the buoyancy of eggs, from behind them came Saida’s voice, low and irresistibly sweet. Absorbed in herself, she was singing a verse.
    “Weh Saida!” Mama shrieked. “Who taught you that? And beautifully too!”
    “My Bibi …” Grandmother.
    Mwana Juma herself, as everyone knew, was a poet’s daughter from Lindi.
    “Sing that again.”
    And Saida sang:
                    
Negema wangu binti
                    
mchachefu wa sanati
                    
upulike wasiati
                    
asa ukazingatia …
                    
Come near, my daughter
,
                    
listen to this advice
                    
young as you are
                    
pay close attention
    Later he could not recall the words exactly, he had to find them in a book, the first lines of a famous poem written by a woman from Lamu called Mwana Kupona.
    Kamal and Mama standing at the door with the vendor, a stained egg half-floating in the bowl of water in her hands, Saida’s voice delicate and soft, the words clear, the modulations beautiful; in that moment there was not another sound in the world, not a stray thought, his heart had stopped beating. And he felt cheated.
    “Weh shetani, weh,” Mama said simply. “You little devil. What do you hide in that head of yours?”
    He could not believe she was that same girl—his pupil, whom hehad considered inferior. All the while she had been playing dumb. She had a depth he was not aware of, a