Ticha

"Christmas box?" he says, with a leer.

Ticha -- that's the name he's given me though I have some doubts it is on his birth certificate-- is smartly dressed in a white shirt, spanking gold tie and fresh-pressed black trousers. He's talking to an equally-elegant lady by the bread stand in OK stores.

I look down at my scuffed flip-flops.

"What about MY Christmas box?" I suggest, with a half-laugh. I am suspicious of Ticha. He seems to be everywhere I go.

The first time I met him was in the Tel-One banking hall. He appeared to be a minor clerk, simply receiving payments and logging them, not working in the Fat Cats' offices upstairs.

But somehow Ticha was living in one of the town's best suburbs. I bumped into him several times on my evening walks.

He left and went to work for ZIMRA, the state tax authority, he told me.

I bumped into him again outside the Mutare Magistrate's Court, when Roy Bennett appeared there last year. He was standing just inside the gate, talking to the police officers.

"Aha, so you follow what is happening in our country?" he said. I mumbled something about a family friend, a son of Bennett. "I did not know Bennett had a son," Ticha said (was it my imagination or was he watching me closely?). "What is his name?" He told me I should call him with news of the court ruling. I didn't.

Years ago, the now-disgraced Roman Catholic archbishop Pius Ncube said 1 in 4 Zimbabweans worked for the CIO. They needed to, to supplement meagre salaries, to get hold of hard-to-get food.

I met Ticha again yesterday as I stumbled out of Spar, laden with plastic bags. "You are doing your shopping?" he said. Was he calculating the value of my groceries, I wondered.

The paranoia that ruled our lives for nearly a decade here still isn't gone.