Market

Sakubva, four o'clock.
The very best time of day. The worst of the heat is past. There's a slight breeze. You can finally breathe.
Down the street beyond the stalls and the sea of secondhand shoes that lie in front of them, the purple jacaranda trees sway.
I am looking for a bag for my 11-year-old son. A sports' bag, the sort he can fill with things for a weekend.
People brush past me. There are French fries for sale, wrapped in cellophane. Over there in a bucket, dried fish, startlingly yellow on one side.
I stop to consider some shorts in a soft khaki material. Nice quality. Probably too small for him though.
I come to the used clothes market here often enough for some vendors to know me by the name of my first child. They greet me now: Mai Given, Mai Brighton.
A woman swings her toddler off her back and stands next to me. The child stares at me, wide-eyed. I greet him in Shona. His mother smiles.
I hold up a green-patterned blouse against myself, wondering what other things in my wardrobe it will go with.
She does the same. We catch each other's eyes and laugh.
At the end of this line of market stalls, an elderly storeholder and his friend tuck into an afternoon snack: a cake and tea.

"Come, join us," he jokes. "Do you drink tea like this?"

"Of course."

There is something in his eyes that makes me think suddenly of my father, half a world away.
He urges me to look through his T-shirts, 2 US for the ones on coat-hangers, one if they're at ground-level, unfolded. I find a light brown T-shirt, hardly worn, for my son.
I pack it into my already-bulging bag and promise to come back soon.
I am a foreigner in Zimbabwe. I was not born here. I may never have the right to call this place home.

And yet...so often I am happy. Just to be here.

She can make a dress in 30 minutes

"Did you find a good tailor?" I ask. The choir needed new outfits making up in record time. Thirty of them. They'd chosen the fabric. But each choir member wanted a slightly different style.

That didn't faze the tailor.

"We took the material to her on Thursday. She had no electricity all day so she couldn't start the sewing machine until Thursday night."

Zimbabwe's power woes aren't over. Some of the enterprising -- including teachers in the rural areas, so I hear -- work at night to take advantage of a few hours of electricity.

"She'd finished them by Friday morning. She just needs half an hour on each dress."

Pants or no pants

These are today's purchases: one pink pair (Triumph), a khaki-coloured pair (white lace) and a pair of black shorts. Secondhand knickers, all of them. Bought from the market for 1 US a piece.

Former finance minister Tendai Biti once announced that as a man, if your wife was buying secondhand underwear "then you should know you had failed." He said this when announcing a (shortlived) ban on the sale of used underwear in the country.
I think about his words occasionally on one of my many forays to the market. I disagree. I've never expected my husband to buy my underwear for me, for one thing. And it's not as if the underwear on sale in Zimbabwe is affordable where it is of decent-ish quality. The only time I've bought new knickers here was when I was going into hospital and I knew I could throw them out after one wearing (which I did).

I wash my purchases out thoroughly before I wear them, of course. So, I imagine, does everyone else who buys them. I always find the bra stalls slightly off-putting, all those misshapen contraptions with straps tangled together like spaghetti. But I've dug deep in the piles and rifled along those bras stranded on hangers over the wooden rails and always found what I needed: Calvin Klein, Victoria's Secret.

I'm thinking about knickers again because of an unfortunate incident picked up Zimbabwe's state press yesterday. A 21-year-old model has appeared in court for modelling with no knickers. It happened in Harare in July. Apparently other photos were deleted (and possibly the other models also had no pants) but this model's pictures got circulated.

Secondhand knickers are better than no knickers, surely.

Mr Old Mutare

"So is Mr Old Mutare real?" Mr Old Mutare is 30-something's Mr Darcy-equivalent: they got together more than a year ago, then they split up. Now, after various non-serious dalliances on both sides, the two of them are finally engaged. There's just a small problem with paying bride-price, which is making the 30-something Lady have second (or is it third) thoughts...

"He could be but he doesn't really exist," she says enigmatically.

"Look," she explains, hugging the book I've just given her ("Can I keep it? I like to highlight things with a marker, you see, and I can't if I have to give it back"). "I have about five people who do exist and who I write about. Not too closely, of course."

"And I'm always listening out for ideas, for things people are talking about," to get inspiration, she adds. (Don't I do the same?). Some of what she writes is to alert people to things going on - the Small House issue, the way you can exploit phone recharge cards on New Year's Eve, before the computer system's been updated. "I want to say: Hey this is true and things shouldn't be like that."

"I write too," I tell her.

"You do? I have seven novels I've written at home, and I don't know what to do with them."

tracking down the 30-something lady

"It's you, isn't it?" I can't hide the triumph in my voice. "You are the 30-something Lady!"

I've been looking for this writer for months. She writes a column in the local paper called Diary of a 30-something Lady. I know I'm not the only one who looks eagerly for the tell-tale red heart on the leisure pages: other readers text in advice and comments to Zimbabwe's Bridget Jones. ("Diary of a 30-something needs more sugar in it:" someone suggested last month).

Through the last years of Zimbabwe's crisis, she's written faithfully about what it means to survive as a professional 30-something singleton when your salary doesn't arrive in the bank at the end of the month and when the power keeps getting cut (but the bills keep going up). She writes about dress dilemmas, her love of shopping, the problems of styling her hair, weekends away in the Vumba mountains, about watching her married friends with kids ("I would just like to have lunch one day with my friend without the kids or the maid or relatives tagging along. Now every conversation is interrupted by small voices,") She writes about her men dilemmas -- Mr Gorgeous, Mr IT, Mr Old Mutare, Stan: which should she marry -- and dealing with prospective mothers-in-law who are intensely suspicious of her (why isn't she married and yet she's past 30?). She observes friends who've got into relationship messes: her Small House friend (who's dating a married man), her friend who's HIV-positive -- and talks about the refuge of church on Sundays. Her column's a refreshing lively look at life in Zimbabwe's vibrant, never-cowed middle-classes, struggling to better themselves instead of crumbling in despair.

And it's that struggle that helped me to find her. She writes anonymously --"90 percent of it is true," she tells me now, standing on the steps of the church-building. "Ten percent isn't. I don't want to get sued."

I've had my suspicions for a while. I'd noticed that a column on dress sense that appears in the paper was similarly well-written (though prescriptive rather than descriptive). I'd wondered if it was the same woman, Ann R. But how to prove it? Then the author of the dress column was interviewed by an English lit. teacher who publishes study guide-pieces on Animal Farm in the paper. In that piece, Ann R revealed she was "setting up a coffee shop." I cut out the interview, and asked around for new coffee shops in town. No-one seemed to know anything. There were still three cafes"up-town" -- and goodness knows the ladies-who-lunch would have surely have heard of a new one. Meantime, the 30-something Lady had spoken of her new coffee shop, and her plans to take time off from work to get the business off the ground. Curiouser and curiouser...or maybe closer and closer. I put a book I thought she'd like into my car: The Dress Doctor, by Bessie Head (an autobiography of a dresser-to-the-(film)-stars) and drove around with its plastic cover glinting at me on the passenger seat for a few days. Then I took my child to his sports club, organised by enthusiastic 20-somethings at a local church on Wednesday afternoons. Normally I drop him at the door but today, I had to pay. I walked inside... and found a new coffee shop, the inside draped in vibrant blue. And there, inside, was a girl (30-something, definitely) wearing bouncy orange tear-drop ear-rings and the kind of wedge shoes that befit a fashion critic. I felt like I was meeting a friend.

"You're not supposed to know it's me," she laughs. "But people are guessing."

who wears the trousers?

"You mean, it's not really acceptable to wear trousers?" asks my friend, who's white and from Malawi (and wearing fitted jeans).

"No." The two Shona women choose their words carefully. "It wasn't. You know, there are some churches you can't go to if you're wearing trousers."

"One time, I went to that UBC (United Baptist Church)," says Mai D. "It was cold, and I was wearing tracksuit bottoms under my skirt. They came to me after the service: "Amai, we do not like you to wear trousers."

I remember -- it's years since I thought about this -- a meeting I went to in Harare. Women of the Noughties, or something like that. It must have been 2004 or 5. I was the only white invited. The glamourous guest speaker was well-known, highly successful and married to a top tourism official. She kindly took time to explain zambias to me. Zambias are the wraparound skirts you see women wearing traditionally, often over trousers or a short skirt.

"I might be a businesswoman but when my inlaws come, I must put on my zambia," she said.

My white friend remembers growing up in Malawi under Kamuzu Banda, who banned trousers and short skirts. She recalls having to change quickly after tennis: the short wrapround tennis skirts weren't acceptable in public.

"Things are changing now," says Mai D. "You know, that young son of mine, he told his father and I: 'I will not marry a girl who wears dresses.' "