community

"Amai Tinashe?" The shelf-stacker (milk section) positively runs across the store. "It's your baby?" She stretches out her arms to hug me.

'The baby' is swaddled slug-like in fluffy blankets, Shona-style. She's not yet strapped on my back, though I haven't ruled out doing that completely. It's just I don't want to have to bounce her on my back in the middle of the night when she won't sleep.

"What did you call her?" And I tell her, slightly embarrassed we didn't use a Shona name again.

The vegetable weigh-er -- not my favourite one, who has a battered Old Testament that he reads between polishing tomatoes and parcelling out lychees -- breaks into a smile.

"It's a girl? I will be your son-in-law one day."

It rained this morning. I wondered whether it was wise to take the baby out. But it's five weeks since I set foot in a shop, and we only needed to go to two. Now, under the glaring fluorescent lights, I'm beginning to understand what community means. And how, half a world away from the community I grew up in, I have somehow tumbled into another one, just as warm, just as familiar.

"Like me," approves the till-supervisor. She has strolled over in her stilettos to take a look. "I have one girl, one boy. Now I am finished."

I am 'finished' too. At least that's what my husband says.