peculiar state

"That's another one in there," the pharmacy assistant says, pointing to my bump. I nod. She laughs, delighted. Her colleague looks at me over the nail polish, bends her head to one side quizzically: "Am I seeing right?" she says.

In OK stores, I hear someone calling my name. It's Mai Silitshena with B. "You are growing BIG," she says with relish. Her son, a teenager now, smiles embarrassed.

Actually, I'm not that big, not for seven months and a bit. But here in Zimbabwe, the expectant mamas contest appears to be among who can get the biggest, plumpest and roundest, fastest. Not, as in the West, who can claim the enviable: "Your bump's looking so neat." Not having seen me pregnant before, Tadiwa told me -- what, six weeks ago?: "You're as big as a house, Mai S", before telling me of her pregnancy diet (2 doughnuts per day, eaten on the trot). I had to swallow a plaintive: "Surely not. Aren't I quite little?"

Mai Silitshena fumbles in her handbag, pulls out a 5 US dollar note. "Here," she says triumphantly. "Buy something for the baby."

"No," I start to say, and then I hug her.

"It comes from the bottom of my heart," she adds.

I've been thinking about a phrase I found in an expat's account of her pregnancy in France: "that peculiar state of grace that pregnancy brings." That's what I've known here, half a world away for the tarte tatin of Normandy. While the anti-white rhetoric mounts due to the indigenisation drive and neighbours whisper of yet another armed attack and how so-and-so was abused at a traffic block (because he was white) and how somebody has hastened to Harare to finally get himself a gun, I think of the people I see each day and the friendship on their faces as they look at me. Of Sekai, whose name means laughter -- and no, she "doesn't have children yet" -- who rushes to push my trolley for me in the supermarket and urges me to consider Tawananyasha (We have found Grace) as a first name. Of the newspaper vendor whose name I do not know, who calls out from above the muffled bundle of her own baby (on the streets all day): "But are you pregnant?" and smiles indulgently.

I feel...privileged.