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.

At the salon

"My husband was murdered," she says, reaching for a comb. And then I realise -.

Her surname. Of course. It was a big story three years ago. An appeal for a missing man. A few days with no news and then -- a body found in the boot of a car in Harare. Passersby noticed the car hadn't moved and alerted the police. He'd been hit over the head and then suffocated.
This kind of killing is extremely rare in Zimbabwe.
The murdered man was a businessman. State media said he was a gold dealer. His business associate was arrested for his murder.

"They thought he had money," the woman says. He did, in fact, according to first reports: 20,000 US was on the man when he was killed (it wasn't recovered).

Four daughters. One is still in school.

I had not thought a rare trip to the hairdressers' would bring all this back.

Eavesdropping

"No I'm not coming to that meeting. The pastor might start casting out demons and then I'll fall on the floor and you'll all be watching."

Maid or no maid?

"She's not a maid," says one student.

"She is." Her classmate is equally emphatic. "Just look at her clothes."

"She's not."
I'm slightly surprised at the vehemence of this discussion on a sequence in the Zimbabwean short film The Secret Circle. In it, three women mix up the books they were reading after the domestic helper (is she a domestic helper? or a relative?) lets a saucepan of water boil over and everyone's forced to put their books down for a minute. I think - or I did before this discussion started -- that this is a story about secrets and infidelity and the things we don't tell each other.
Turns out it's also about social status, and how difficult it can be to work out who exactly is who.

Those who think the third woman (who is, everyone agrees, the lowest in the female hierarchy) is a maid base their argument on this: her clothes are shabby and the "big" sister says she brought her from the rural areas. Also - and this is key - she's left to mop up the spilt water by herself. If she was a valued close relative who'd hurt herself, would she be asked to do that?
But not everyone is convinced.
Don't the two sisters - the one with cancer, the one with the cheating husband - display more concern than they would for a domestic help, asks one student.

I'm fascinated and out of my depth.
I know what I think. But this is not my culture, nor my country. I did not grow up with domestic help.

So I listen and I learn.

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.

Afterwards

"She phoned me at lunchtime," she says. "Sekai's friend. She was Sekai's friend while she was alive. But now that Sekai is dead..."

"She says she wants 50 dollars. For cleaning up the blood when Sekai was killed. She said she cleaned up the blood and washed the blanket. Now she wants money."

"She says that if she does not get the money, she will go to the police. I told her 50 dollars was too much. But she says she does not want to talk. She says she wants me to send the money by Ecocash. To Mai Taungwa's account."

She shakes her head. "I have to call my father. In case that woman takes the police to his house."

Grief

"Khumbulani has phoned," she says. "The police know who the tsotsis are."

When I first saw her after Christmas, her face was hollow, her cheeks sunken. Grief has aged her: grief, and horror too. Her sister Sekai, an energetic mother-of-two was murdered.

Sekai was managing a general store well off the beaten track in Nyanga, eastern Zimbabwe. I have not seen the store but I imagine what it is like: the long wooden counter, and behind it, bottles of cooking oil, bars of soap, bags of kapenta. Not a lot of choice but the basics, enough to keep a family that grows its own maize and vegetables going.

Sekai slept at her workplace in a room off the back the store. The tsotsis came at 10 pm on the Saturday night after New Year. Sekai heard them truck arrive. She tried to lock herself in. The tsotsis blocked the door. "Do not close it," they told her (the male worker at the bottle store heard this conversation and recounted it to police). "We want the money." "There is no money," Sekai said. But the tsotsis, their heads tied in plastic shopping bags so that she couldn't identify them, had been watching. The owner of the store had not collected the money that night. "Give us the money." Sekai tried to pull out her cellphone. That's when they stabbed her in the chest. She staggered away, screaming. "You've killed me, you've killed me." One of them pulled out a pistol.

Her sons found her by the step just outside the store.

Now what Sekai's sister is telling me is this: that the tsotsis may have disguised their heads with OK bags but Sekai's male co-worker recognised the pair of trousers that one of them was wearing. In the village, clothes are not a commodity endlessly renewed as they might be in the towns which have a market. Here, clothes have to last several seasons, if not years. A pair of trousers is as recognisable in some cases as a person's face.

"The police beat that man. He said: Do you want to kill me? And the police officer said: Yes, I will kill you because you killed Mai Khumbulani. So then the tsotsi cried: OK. I will talk."

There is no relish on her face as she says this. Only pain.

The attacker is from the village. He says it was not him who stabbed Sekai. That was his friend from Rusape, a two hour-drive away. The one who owned the truck. The police have gone to find him.

Back to school

I have left school shopping to the very last minute, as usual. I dive into a stationery shop. Ten minutes, that's all I've got. Pens, rulers (those brittle plastic ones that will shatter in days), rubbers (There are no rubbers. Sold out. Help. Will have to raid his father's pen tin), gluesticks (ditto). Three other customers are picking up stacks of exercise books and rolls of plastic book covering. They're together, I realise. Teachers, I think. "Are you shopping for your school?" I ask one of them at the counter. The man who is overseeing the purchases, checking items against a list, replies: "Our children are going to be educated. Very educated." He smiles, but in a grim way. "But there are no jobs in Zimbabwe. We are teaching these children for what?"

in the bank

"They should do e-banking here," the woman behind me says loudly. "It's dangerous to be moving round with large sums of money this time of year."

 

I look down at my fistful of dollars: an advance payment on next term's school fees. Inside the crowded banking hall, I feel safe.

 

"It's getting like Jo'burg," she tells me. She is youngish, bespectacled, well-dressed. Spends six months of every year in the UK "where my parents are. Wandsworth. Do you know it?"

 

The night before last, she tells me, she found a taxi idling on Herbert Chitepo, the main street. It's a busy street, lined with flamboyant trees in full bloom this time of year, dotted with phone card vendors. It wasn't late. Glancing inside, she realised something wasn't right.

 

"The driver was dead. He had a bag on his head. His wallet was open on the seat. They'd taken everything."

 

She called the police, who confirmed the man had been murdered for his takings. It was a Saturday. Somebody -- some people -- must have reckoned that by the end of the day, he'd have made a pretty penny.

 

"The worse thing was, he was old. And from Malawi. His family are all there. There's no-one to bury him here."

and if the baby doesn't breastfeed...

A five-month old baby exposed his mother's affair, a local paper reported -- because he refused to breastfeed. When the baby refused to feed for three days, the parents went to ask why at a local church. "The wife was told to confess her transgressions," according to the Manica Post. When 17-year-old Laiza Makufa revealed she'd had an affair with a married neighbour since the baby was born and begged for her husband's forgiveness, the baby started to feed again. The three -- and the baby -- were photographed in the paper: the neighbour in his blue city council trousers, Makufa in a red top holding her baby. "I just felt like I loved him," she said.

visiting

"But where is the blanket?" Mai D asks me. Blanket? It's 30 degrees at least this afternoon. The baby doesn't need a blanket, surely? Mai D tut-tuts. "I have never held a baby without a blanket," she tells her husband, who is sitting dutifully in the living-room next to her, summoned no doubt, to welcome The Baby. He nods awkwardly.

I've always been fascinated by different approaches to child-rearing. And now I'm getting a Zimbabwean lesson first-hand. Mai D asks me about nappy rash, tells me she washed her babies (and she had four, and she raised a grand-daughter, who, aged 12, has finally left for mission school) in Sunlight washing-up liquid (same as green Fairy), used Vaseline on their bottoms (Blue Seal is the best, she told me firmly), and always, always used a blanket. She watches me breastfeed critically. "Are you sure you're not suffocating her?" I shift position as I'm told. "Did you come on your own?" she asks. "But who held her?" Mai D is envisaging my daughter bumping around in the backseat, unrestrained. "I have a seat," I tell her, and think of all the mothers I've seen clutching their babies in the backseats, wrapped up thickly like sausage rolls. No-one checks you have a baby seat when you leave a Zimbabwean maternity ward.

Every time the baby opens her mouth, Mai D tells me to feed. (The baby, unused to being offered milk every few seconds, licks hesitantly, to cries of horror from Mai D). She plies me with Coke. I already know -- because my doctor told me - that locals think this increases milk supply. Ditto for peanuts. Once, visiting a friend in a maternity ward, I watched her aunt ululate when she saw the baby -- and promptly hand over a bag full of peanuts.

Mai D rummages in her freezer. "You must have this chicken," she says, handing me a huge lump of frozen bird. "It'll help you make good milk."

a good wedding

"Was it a good wedding?" I ask. I've staggered out of the bedroom, baby in hand, to greet our guest. We were supposed to go to his daughter's wedding in December, but were out of the country. Secretly, we weren't quite sure we'd be able to afford to attend anyway. Guests have to dig deep in this place.

"Very good," he says. He ticks off on his fingers. "Two fridges, a stove, a deep freeze. Six microwaves."

"And lots of dinner services. The biggest one had 65 pieces. Oh -- and they got about 6,000 dollars."

things I still can't understand

It is a smallish bird, bigger than a canary, smaller than a thrush. A bulbul, I think. And somehow it's on the floor of the doctor's surgery, on its back, and people are laughing.

I'm trying to work this out. I think that the bird "belongs" to the maid of the woman who's wearing stilettos and a cordoroy suit and studying a file on "International Best Practice in Labour Relations" (I read it over her shoulder). The maid took the bird out of her handbag, and gave it to the toddler ("Chichi", the pair keep calling her). The toddler is fed up -- I am too, I've been waiting for two hours -- and the bird is hurt in some way. To begin with, I think it may be some kind of a pet. But as I reassess the sitation, horrified, not knowing what to do, I think that what's more likely is that the maid has found/trapped the bird and plans to eat it tonight.

The child squeezes the bird. The receptionist comes out from behind her desk to see what the squawking is, joins in the laughter.

Chichi runs outside with the bird and when she comes back, it's nowhere to be seen. Then the maid zips up her handbag. There are tiny little downy feathers on the waiting room floor.

I give the wailing child a plastic pink pocket mirror I got as change in a zhing-zhong shop (Better she plays with that, why on earth didn't I give it her before?) and stare out of the window. There are things here I still can't understand.

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.

wedding blues

"We can understand where she's coming from," Mai N says.

She lives in the the dale-dailies, the plush leafy suburbs of Zimbabwe's towns and cities. Her oldest son, a research engineer just got married. That's married in the true Zimbabwean sense: he paid lobola, or bride price. That's no mean feat these days: the official Herald reports that the going rate is around 18,000 US these days.

Have a daughter, make some money. Nothing like being innovative.

New daughter-in-law is well-liked. She's degreed, has agricultural experience in China. She sends Mai N text messages while she drinks tea on my verandah. Mai N worried about this son-who-would-not-marry. The groom is 31, the bride 29. Western ages for marriage, I'd say. Or maybe just modern ages.

But now the bride wants a white wedding too.

"The whole thing," sighs Mai N. "We said to N.: keep it simple. Don't use all your money. He wants to buy a car."

"But she wants the 200-guests-at-Mutare-Hall, the triumphal parade through Main Street (Saturday: bakkies blaring: beribboned bridesmaids hanging out the windows, that sort of thing). Oh yes, and the dress."

What does N say, I wonder? "He says, you've got to see why she wants this. She's a ghetto girl."

N grew up firmly esconced in the middle classes. His parents moved into the plush suburbs in 1980. They have a nice house, a large garden. Roses in the beds. Vines trailing over the walls. The car might have have been in the garage for the last five years -- but that's because of Zimbabwe's crisis.

But as for the bride: she grew up in Damgamvura, an eastern township. "She wants to show she's finally Got There," says Mai N ruefully.

will you wash my socks (or worse)?

The test of real love in Zimbabwe is...whether you'll wash his underwear. The recent case of a 30-something man who left his young wife for a 55 year old in Zimbabwe has got tongues wagging. Apparently the drawcard was that the 55 year old shebeen queen knew how to treat her man AND she washed his underwear. (By hand, it's understood). Which the liberated 20-something lady refused to. It's an absolute no-no to let your maid wash your underwear (or your husband's): in fact, press reports have speculated on the number of career women who've lost their husbands to their maids simply because the maids washed the man's underwear. Quite how this works in post-shortage Zimbabwe -- where you can buy washing machines in OK supermarkets (power to the people) -- is unclear. Though, come to think of it, the number of people I know who actually own a machine (a snip at 700 US..not if you're earning <200 per month) is tiny.

older than you look

This is to keep me humble.

Supermarket scene. Have dragged husband so we can do a whole-week shop for once, instead of me trawling the store every morning with my basket. The shop assistants - who know me well - watch quizzically as I take a big red trolley and he pushes.

I arrive late to the till after foraging for raisins. My husband is already unpacking. This is always the worst part. We shop in OK (Where Everyone's a Winner). Traditionally whites don't, preferring the more upmarket Spar or - at the very least -- TM. A shopping trolley total of 50 US raises eyebrows here and lots of silent studying from the rest of the till queue (and requests for us to pay for their tea-leaves/bread/sugar too). Even though we are far from the only shoppers in the store with a trolley.

The security guard smiles at me as I pack.

"Amai," he says. "Is that your boy? Your son?"

"Son?!" I manage to keep my voice down. "He's my husband."

Now what does that mean?

bottom enhancers

"They're called apetitos but they enlarge one's butt," texts Tadiwa. I've just read about Zimbabwe's latest craze -- bottom-building pills -- and sms'ed her worriedly.
The pills are called Super Apetito, Power Apetito and General Apetito. They're smuggled in from Angola and Mozambique and -- according to Kwayedza, the Shona-language daily -- they're selling like hot cakes. Zimbabwe is, after all, a country where a recent survey concluded "men are looking for women with huge behinds." (You can count me out then, and probably Tadiwa, since she fits into my cast-off Paris trousers)
At around 60 pence a packet, the pills are eminently affordable, even for working girls struggling to get by on Zimbabwe's standard monthly salary of less than £120.
But there are side-effects: sleeplessness, strange gait (one woman said her client was now "walking like a crab") and goodness-knows-what-else in the future. Local doctors are urging women to stop buying them but it's an uphill struggle: the standard wolfwhistle here translates to (and I've got this on state media authority): "This woman is very attractive, she wiggles."
"Don't use those pills, girl," I text Tadiwa. "You've got a beautiful figure."
She doesn't reply.

wedding fever

-- The (white) Zimbabwean version: 120 guests (OK, so not 2,000). Booked into Mana Pools, a rapidly-regaining-in-popularity tourist resort in western Zimbabwe for the only free weekend in weeks. Camping for three nights. The bride's parents must provide food -- and loo-roll -- for all of them during that time. Wedding at sunrise (so coffee and rusks first) on the river (Zambezi) banks. ( Slight possible problem: last time crocodiles were feasting on a just-dead hippo. Do you really want that as background for your vows?). Ablution blocks seriously not up to scratch: no plugs, no toilet seats, no shower roses (Bride's father has had to redo the lot at his own expense, but National Parks and Wildlife Authority who run the place won't give him a discount). Another problem: the monkeys. They've been fed by ignorant tourists so now they're unafraid and vicious. The bride's mother is currently working on a huge gauze creation, not -- as you might imagine -- for her daughter's veil, but to slip over the thatched gazebo that's housing the food to keep the monkeys out (a kind of giant black see-through four-poster thing). Caterers -- for caterers there are a plenty -- want 1,000 US just to get themselves from Harare to Mana Pools. Another possible problem: water levels. Lake Kariba is spilling. If they open the floodgates (as they did in Jan/Feb), the bit of Mana the wedding's being held at will be.. wait for it... underwater. "I'd have put my foot down," sniffs my mother-in-law.

-- A prospective groom legged it from the wedding ceremony late last month when he spied his current wife in the congregation. Wife Mercy Ncube had come to watch Inspector Resistant Ncube wed his lover Sergeant Faith Kaseke in Kuwadzana township in April. When Resistant spotted Mercy he pushed aside his best man, "panicked and bolted out of the venue." She'd been tipped off by -- amazingly -- his relatives. Resistant Ncube is the editor of the police magazine The Outpost.

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."