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.

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."

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.