Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [9]
“I could tell you but, as the saying goes, I’d have to kill you.” She waited for the translators to render it, for the requisite laughter that followed, then added: “If you’d asked my grandfather, he’d have said I was born to it…”
The old man sat watching the sunlit pattern of the leaves at his feet. The morning was quiet enough for him to hear the chirring of insects, the squawk of the go-away birds, the sough of the breeze through the feathery leaves of the jacaranda whose powerful branches arched above him. He shifted his bony frame on the bench, his long-fingered hands clasped contentedly on the knob of the cane he used more as a symbol of his dignity than as an aid in walking for, even at 120 years, he was still straight and limber and strong.
The silence and his contemplation were broken by the sound of something wild running breakneck through the bush.
A blur of skinny arms and legs shot out of the trees, zigging left and right, but headed toward him. He could hear her labored breathing, see the terror in her eyes, and could only imagine what was pursuing her. When she was almost past him, the old man snaked out one remarkably quick hand and snagged her by the shirttail.
Nyota jerked to a halt, her bare feet kicking up dust, and ducked behind the old man, making herself as small as possible.
“Polepole, my girl!” the old man chided her in kiSwahili, trying not to laugh at the sight of her. Her little ribs were heaving; there were twigs stuck every which way in her halo of small braids. “Slowly, child. Where do you think you’re going so fast?”
“They’re after me, Babu!” she wheezed. “They’re going to get me!”
“Who is?”
“Juma and Malaika.” Her ten-years-older cousin and his girl.
“And why would they be doing that?”
Nyota took one deep breath and calmed herself, drawing herself up to her full height, looking very serious. “They were kissing,” she reported, saying the word with a frisson of intermingled disgust and delight.
“And you were spying on them,” her grandfather suggested.
“I was not!” she said, indignant at the very thought. She settled herself on the bench beside the old man, legs swinging, confident he would protect her. “I was only climbing the old mangrove tree. They just happened to be kissing under it.”
“The same place they go every afternoon, and you know it,” the old man said dryly. “You were spying. So. What happened?”
“The branch I was sitting on started to crack. I was falling, but I caught myself. I wasn’t hurt, but they heard the snap and they saw me. Malaika was laughing so hard she fell off the big root where they were sitting. But Juma said he was going to get me. So I ran.”
“Ah, I see,” the old man said, just as the young couple emerged from the bush, holding hands and laughing, and looking not at all as if they were chasing anyone.
Most of the year, Nyota lived with her parents in Mombasa, a coastal city of high-rises and traffic and noise, where her entire childhood was regimented into school and after-school and music and dance lessons and swimming classes and gymnastics and languages, and it was only during the height of the January heat, just after her birthday and the holidays, when her parents packed her off to the country for a month to be with her grandparents and a raft of cousins, that she felt truly free. The happiest memories of her childhood were here.
But Babu was right; she had been curious from the day she was born.
“You’re a terror, you!” the old man told her more than once. “Tumbiri, monkey-child, climbing trees and spying through windows and listening on the stairs. Asking questions ever since you could talk. ‘Why, Babu, why?’ You are uhuru. Independent. Free as the wind and completely untamed. But someday your spying is going to get you into trouble, and I may not be around to save you…”
She was the same age now that Babu had been then, Uhura realized with a start, hoping the lapse had only been in her mind and not something the reporters might have noticed. They were still smiling up at her expectantly.
“I have an idea!