sadness of a seven-dollar toothbrush

The outrage ripples down the line of shoppers. Seven dollars for a single toothbrush? I had been idly watching the man, standing three ahead of me at the till, for some time. He is well-dressed, in a suit. He chatted politely to the man behind him, whose small daughter clutched a bottle of orange juice. She said something to her father -- the way children do about people they think they recognise -- and he waited a second before turning to glance at me. We look furtively in each other's shopping baskets. Do people do this in other countries, I wonder? Or is it a reflex born of the days when there was so little to buy that you didn't even need a basket, when you could walk to the till clutching your "leaves" (bundle of rape) and your soya mince? My basket -- for the record -- has nothing special in it: pilchards, cucumber, some biltong. No more, no less than most of the people standing in this lower-end supermarket, enjoying the buzz of payday. This city has its rhythms and the the 23/24/25 of each month are the 'high' days, when crowds sit in the banking halls to wait for the government to pay its civil servants. Then they flock to the supermarket. Earlier, I watched a boy a bit older than mine check a shopping receipt excitedly for his mother, who was wearing the turquoise blue uniform of a senior nurse. She watched him fondly for a second, in the private way that mothers do. What supper was she cooking for him tonight, I wondered? The suited man is only buying a toothbrush. I hear him talking to the cashier -- quietly first. She calls a supervisor. The supervisor confirms. Yes, the toothbrush costs seven dollars. It is a plain toothbrush, the sort that gets sent to me in parcels. Worth about 90 pence, I reckon. "No," he says and he looks at the rest of us for confirmation. "I just paid my rent." "You can keep your toothbrush!" he says and he stalks off. At the opposite end of the spectrum: a friend of the family who's charging monied expats -- and locals -- in Harare 30 dollars per flower-arranging lesson. That's without the flowers: she goes to the 'student's' house to give a guided tour of the garden to show which flowers said student can pick. So many people want to sign up that she has a waiting list.