Mansa.

Maun isn't a town that shows up on postcards. It's the gateway to the Okavango Delta, yes, but for whoever lives there it's something else: unpaved streets, forty-degree heat in December, red dust that gets into everything, loose chickens, trucks on the Nata road passing from five in the morning, and power cuts that last just long enough to thaw whatever's in the freezer — if you have a freezer, which not everyone does. On the outskirts, the elephants cross roads and break the fences of vegetable plots. Mansa has learned to go the other way when there's a herd on the Shorobe road. It isn't fear — it's habit.

The Boseja neighbourhood is to the east, where the houses are cement block with corrugated-iron roofs and the dirt yards have a washing line, a plastic chair and a blue drum for storing water. Mansa's house has two rooms, a kitchen with a gas ring and a yard where her mother hangs the washing. The Thamalakane River runs ten minutes' walk away. Mansa goes there in the afternoons, when she's allowed, and sits under a sausage tree — Kigelia africana, with those enormous fruits hanging like lamps — throwing stones into the water and watching birds. She does nothing useful. She doesn't need to.

Keitumetse is twenty-six. She's a seamstress at a textile cooperative in Maun that makes bags, tablecloths and clothes for tourists and the local market. In safari season (June to October) there's work. The rest of the year, less. In the good months there's meat on Sundays. In the bad ones, bogobe — sorghum porridge — and morogo, wild greens bought from a woman at the market who never changes her price or her expression.

The pink jumper Mansa wears in the portrait isn't just any garment. Keitumetse started knitting it during the pregnancy: pastel-pink wool, thick stitch, round neck. She ran out of wool halfway and put it in a drawer. Seven years later, she found wool in the same shade at a shop in Nata (three hours away by road) and finished it in three months, knitting at night after putting Mansa to bed. She embroidered the daisies on top: white petals, yellow centre, like the gazanias that come up in the Kalahari after the first rains. When she gave it to Mansa — a Saturday in June, unwrapped, with no ceremony — Mansa looked at every daisy, touched an irregular stitch on the left collar (where Keitumetse changed needles seven years earlier) and asked: "Can I sew one?"

The last daisy, bottom left, is slightly crooked. Mansa sewed it. It's the one she likes best.

She wears it even when it's hot. If someone tries to take it off to wash it, she negotiates terms. It's clothing, but not only clothing: it's the proof that someone sat for nights making something for her.

Grandmother Koko was Shona by origin — her family crossed from Zimbabwe two generations back and settled in Serowe, in the Bamangwato area, four hundred kilometres southeast of Maun. She was a practical woman: she knew which stones are good for sharpening, which for grinding and which are simply pretty. She taught Mansa to listen without interrupting and to bake sorghum bread in an iron pot over coals. Well, first she taught her not to burn herself. The bread came later. The technique is the same one Keitumetse uses now on Saturdays: dough kneaded for twenty minutes (Mansa counts under her breath to two hundred), a preheated iron pot, low heat. It doesn't always come out right. The last one burned on the bottom. It doesn't matter.

Koko died on a Wednesday in July, at the hospital in Serowe, of a pneumonia that started as a cough. Mansa was six. She didn't travel to the funeral — she stayed at Mma Tsheko's, the neighbour's, for three days. She didn't cry in front of anyone. When Keitumetse came back with a plastic bag holding Koko's clothes and a pair of reading glasses, Mansa asked for the glasses. She doesn't use them — the prescription is an old woman's. She keeps them in the bedside drawer, wrapped in a handkerchief, and sometimes takes them out to look at them.

That night she moved the stones from the living-room shelf to her bedroom windowsill. Since then, she touches them every night before sleep. The closest thing she has to a conversation with someone who is no longer there.

At school, Mansa doesn't stand out in any obvious way. Maths is hard for her. But in language and science she's the best in her class, and Mma Kgosidintsi, the science teacher — early forties, glasses, serious — lends her books on African wildlife that Mansa returns read in three days. Mma Kgosidintsi sees something in her and doesn't know exactly what, but she keeps an eye on her.

In the playground, Mansa doesn't shout or push. But when there's a conflict — who goes first, who's cheating, who said what — the other children come to ask her. She listens to both sides, thinks a moment and says something that usually settles the matter. She doesn't always please everyone, but no one disputes her verdict. The headteacher told her once: "You're like a judge." Mansa didn't know what to say. She touched her left ear (she does that when she doesn't know what to do) and went back to her place.

Her friend Bontle is the same age and lives on the same street. She talks for both of them. She's the one who drags Mansa out to play when Mansa would rather stay reading. They fall out and make up every week. Lesego, a year older, is the other friend: quieter, the one who walks with Mansa to the river without needing to talk.

And then there's the sandwich. Mansa's backpack always carries an extra sandwich — sorghum bread — and a handful of peanuts. It's not that she goes hungry. It's that she needs to know the food is there. If a friend has none, she shares without a word. If more than four hours pass without eating, she turns quiet and irritable. Keitumetse knows it: "Eat, Mantsi, and then tell me."

There are things Mansa doesn't tell. Her father, Thato, worked at a safari lodge in the delta. He left when she was five. There was no fight, no slammed door: a month without coming, two, a message on Keitumetse's phone that said "I need time" and then nothing. Mansa stopped asking about him after a few weeks. What stayed was a reflex: if someone says "I'll come back" and doesn't, Mansa registers it. She doesn't say it, doesn't bring it up. But she knows it.

And the other thing that isn't said: Mansa is afraid her mother will fall ill. She doesn't put it like that — she's eight — but the nights she sleeps best are the ones she hears Keitumetse moving in the next room. If her mother is late back from work, Mansa doesn't sleep until she hears the door. When there's a water cut, she checks the blue drum every twenty minutes. "There's still some, Mantsi." "I know, mma." But she keeps looking.

She's quiet with strangers. With her mother and her aunts, she talks non-stop — long sentences, no filter, full of detours. She mixes Setswana and English without warning. She says "Ee mma" (yes, ma'am) even to her friends. When she's concentrating, she murmurs. When she's afraid, she goes very still, finds the nearest wall and slips her hand into her pocket — where she sometimes carries the grey stone.

She rearranges things. Shelves, drawers, the stones on the sill (their orientation, not their order: she turns them but doesn't change their position). Every few weeks, the kitchen has a different layout. Keitumetse no longer asks why. It's her way of processing what she can't control outside: if the world is unpredictable, at least the kitchen can be the way she wants it.

Mansa isn't alone. Mma Tsheko, the neighbour — sixties, widowed, chickens in the yard — is the one who looks after her when Keitumetse works nights. She gives her dinner, lets her watch TV and combs her hair before bed. She isn't affectionate with hugs; she's affectionate with deeds.

Aunt Boitumelo — Keitumetse's cousin, thirty-two, a nurse at the Maun hospital — comes on Sundays. She brings her children's hand-me-downs, which are too big for Mansa. She's loud, funny, the opposite of Keitumetse. Mansa adores her and fears her a little.

And Rra Otsile, the shopkeeper — seventy, skinny, a shop the size of a container — saves her a strawberry chappie every day. Mansa passes on the way to school, takes it, says "Ee rra" and carries on. Sometimes she stops and tells him something she read in Mma Kgosidintsi's book. Rra Otsile listens carefully and then says: "And is that true?" Mansa nods, serious, and leaves. The shop smells of bar soap and old sweets.

Every night, before switching off the light, Mansa touches three stones. Grey. Red. Black. Always in that order. Sometimes she says something to them softly. Sometimes she just touches them and switches off. If she's had a bad day, the conversation is longer. If she's had a good one, the contact is enough.

Keitumetse hears it from the other room. She says nothing.

Outside, the neighbourhood dogs bark. The Thamalakane runs its course. Somewhere on the outskirts, the elephants cross the Shorobe road in silence. Mansa closes her eyes with her hand on the grey stone — the one with white veins, the favourite, the one Koko washed with her in a plastic bucket four years ago in a river that no longer carries water.

The stones don't move. Neither does she.

> **Canonical quote:** Three stones in the pocket of the pink jumper. One for Serowe, one for Maun, one for the matriarch I saw walk toward the water without looking back.