teapot

In Shona culture, you don't arrive with a gift in your hand. You leave with one.

This is all very well in times of plenty: when you have laden fruit trees for example. It's harder in winter -- when all I have is lemons and unripe avocados -- and when there's been no parcel delivery that week.

The 'phone rings well past shopping time. "Mum, it's Shamiso," he says. "No,it's not," she says when I pick up.

"It's Tadiwa. I'm in town with my mother. Can we come see you tomorrow morning?" They're in town for a funeral. Tadiwa's 20-something cousin Melody has died, leaving a baby in Damgamvura township. They arrive bang on time, both in black. The traditional colour for mourning is red here (if you see a red ribbon tied to a gatepost, you know someone's just died and the relatives are gathering). but most urban dwellers have adopted black for mourning. We sit in the dark. There is no power. I offer four slices of dry sponge cake, left over from yesterday. "No-one expected it. He was fine at the weekend. Then he got sick on Monday and died on Tuesday." There's a muddled murmur of pneumonia. No-one voices the unmentionable. Tadiwa is close to tears but she steers the conversation valiantly to her teaching job at a township highschool. "I earn more than she does," she says, gesturing to her mother, a typist in the police force.

As they get up to go -- they must leave town tomorrow and the bus-ride to Rusape is tricky -- I reach for my cobbled-together present pack: a novel (Tadiwa teaches English) and a teapot that's still miraculously bubble-wrapped, two years after I bought it. For her room at the University of Zimbabwe residences, when lectures finally resume.