mealies

"When can you come to my house?" she asks on the 'phone. "I've got something to give you."

It's a short conversation. The state TelOne phone company has just hiked its charges by 200 percent. E is minding her money. A grandmother, she used to run a church creche but left last year when her monthly salary barely stretched to a bottle of cooking oil. Now she minds neighbours' preschoolers at her home in the mornings, using a cardboard box full of toys and books. And she works in her garden. Much more profitable.

When I arrive -- having negotiated potholes big enough to hide a baby giraffe in -- she's waiting, her three-year-old granddaughter skipping beside her. There's another child too this time, a boy. "Sean," she says. "I've taken in his mother. She had a problem with her pelvic bones." Mai Sean turns out to be her sister's grandchild's wife, if I've followed the family relationships correctly.

We sit in the sitting room, which is like so many sitting rooms I've sat in here. Minimalism certainly isn't in in Zimbabwe, not if you are or ever were middle-class. You cram everything you've got into a small space so knees are touching coffee tables (plural) and antimacassars graze the wall. There are glass-fronted cabinets and family photos and trophies and religious pictures. A DVD player in pride of place amid the crocheted doilies. Everything is scrupulously polished. Outside is a swimming pool with a few centimetres of brown water in and an open fire with a black saucepan on. There's no power, of course.

"When we have power, I get up at 1 in the morning to make some bread," she says.

(The minister of energy development insists today the reason there's no power has very little to do with sub-economic tariffs the goverment insists on maintaining so as not to anger voters. Our bill for a bungalow with security lights but no washing machine came to about four pounds last month. Power cuts are because the World Bank stopped financing Zimbabwe's energy sector some time back, the minister says. That and investors who haven't fulfilled their "recapitalisation obligations.")

"Do you want to come and see?" she says. We push through a sidegate and what I see is a field, no, two fields and the far banks of the stream full of mealie plants, all tall as -- well, baby giraffes. "These are all mine," she says proudly.

When E's sister last came (from the UK), she brought no presents. "No perfume," E stresses. Perfume is a favourite gift from relatives in the diaspora. But when she got here she bought a bag of maize seed and gave it to her sister.

The sun is about to set. Night falls fast in Zimbabwe, around 6 to half past, whatever the season. This is my favourite time, five o'clock, when the light is soft. I look at the fields of mealies, months worth of mealies, mealies as far as the eyes can see, in front of me and behind the backs of the neighbours' houses and my heart lifts. There are not just mealies. In the sun by the wire security fence, there's a big pumpkin, orange and green speckled. We decide it is not ripe yet, not quite. If it was, I know she'd insist I take it.

She presses a plastic bag (they call them packets here) into my hand, full of plump, milky cobs.

"Don't ever buy any," she says. "Come back here whenever you need some more."