This and That

Why Kalitera, why?

Good people, the best of the times can be the worst of the times.

The dichotomy of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities resembles what The Nation’s entertainment page of The Nation carried Wednesday when we learnt about the death Why Father Why author Aubrey Kalitera on Monday and the secret engagement of urban music hitmaker Piksy’s to his sweetie Vitumbiko Pagaja.

Experience seldom teaches us how to react when fate’s right hand gives us smiles and the left takes it away.

These ailing words are for the two who will forever send tongues wagging in my second home—the creative sector.

The death of Kalitera on Monday left many sighing: ‘Why Kalitera, why?’

This is what I sighed in 2012 in reaction to his umpteenth self-published book, The Cement Slab Grave, based on thrilling police accounts linking runaway Masonic Chanthunya to the killing of accountancy student Linda Gasa whose body was buried under a concrete floor of a private cottage in  Mangochi.

Then, my “why Kalitera, why?” was necessitated by the uncurbed intensity of errors in spellings, grammar, setting, plot, points of view and logic that had gone scot-free in the course of unregulated self-publishing.

Today, the same is a tearful tribute to Kalitera’s undying ambition to write and publish, the enduring spirit that fathered To Ndirande Mountain with Love which later became Malawi’s first film. Self-acclaimed writers must not kill this light.

As for the mistakes that came begging a vigilant editor’s third eye, they are lesson for the living—signposts to everything wrong with self-publishing.

Rest in Peace, Kalitera.

As for taken Piksy (apologies to Exes) and his secret love affair, I am an outsider with no words—except best wishes for the former Atumwitalented half. Listening to the rhymes, rap and love in the released and unreleased songs of the man born Evans Zangazanga, Vitumbiko seems the luckiest woman living. Imagine all that yabooh, sendeza and kumatamata in her ears.

With that sweetness, even darkness would escape to light, crying: “Gimme a hiding place and you’ll rule for eternity.”

Good luck love birds, may your love story be a real life love song.

 

 

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