She put her fingers in his dangling hand.
‘Papa?’ she said softly. ‘Dormendo?’
Isa spoke Italian to her parents only when she was very tired. The Italian School had helped her recover some of the simple Italian her parents had used with her as a toddler. But like most of the other expats in Lusaka, the Corsales generally spoke some muddled version of English at home. Isa slapped a mosquito from her shin.
‘I went to the servants’ quarters,’ she said.
The Colonel’s whiffling snore continued. Isa got up and went and sat on her stool beside Ba Simon, who was vigorously scrubbing the grill, singing the same tune from before:…waona manje wayamba kulila…Isa could barely muster the energy to gainsay his song with her own. She only got partway through ‘Drive My Car’, her mother’s favourite song, before she decided to ask him a question.
‘What does muzungu mean?’
Ba Simon kept humming for a moment. ‘Where did you hear that word?’ he asked.
Isa didn’t reply.
Ba Simon hesitated. Then he made a face.
‘Ghost!’ he blurted, waving his hands about. ‘Whoooo! Like that katooni you are always watching.’ He smiled and moved closer to her with his hands still waving. ‘Caspah the chani-chani ghost,’ he sang in the wrong key.
‘The friendly ghost!’ Isa sang back, giggling in spite of herself.
They chatted about nothing for a few minutes. Ba Simon wasn’t very clever, Isa thought at one point, and then promptly forgot. But Ba Simon noticed her think it even though she hadn’t said it, and soon enough, he told her it was time for bed. Isa dragged her feet to the glass veranda door with the twisty white security bars. It gave an unhappy moan as she opened it. She looked back over her shoulder.
Ba Simon was getting ready to carry her father to bed. His body was pitched awkwardly over the sleeping man, his dark stringy arms planted beneath the Colonel’s neck and knees. When he saw Isa watching, the strain in Ba Simon’s face dissolved instantly into a smile.
‘Go,’ he whispered.
And she did.
1995
Everyone knew that Balaji sold the best hair products in Kamwala, the neighbourhood inhuska where the Indian traders and their families lived. The other shops in that six-street radius around the market specialised in chitenges or kitchenware or carpets or a desperately motley assortment of goods. Only Balaji specialised in hair. Wig packets lined the walls of his dark, narrow shop, Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc., making it look like a furry animal turned outside in. And inside the belly of that beast was everything you needed to care for your homegrown or purchased hair – tongs, brushes, combs, rollers, pins, clips, bands, oils, creams and a bevy of just-in-cases.
Balaji was widely regarded as a savvy businessman and a decent man. But he was over forty, for goodness’ sake. The women of Kamwala, that chorus of wives and widows who determined the fates of every Indian bachelor in Lusaka, had given up on marrying him off. Whenever they discussed his profound eligibility with his Aunt Pavithra, they never called Balaji single. They said he was unmarried, a word moulded around the absence of what really ought to be the case by now.
Balaji treated the young boys who worked in his shop like sons, ordering them about and smacking their heads with a firm palm whenever they erred. They were all sorts, those shop boys, every shade and type imaginable. Sikhs with sparse beards and bobbling hair buns; Hindus who cursed Balaji’s pubic hair when he made them stay late; blacks with bare feet and lambent eyes; coloureds with sulky charm and bitter eyes. Balaji fired them often for the slightest misdeeds, stories of which he would ebulliently recount to their replacements.
‘That muntu shuffled my wigs, not even asking! I had them organised type-type-type – horse here, artificial here, human there – and the boy decides to line them up by colour! Like a bloody rainbow. Now if Mrs Tembo comes in and wants very-special-good horsehair, I can’t tell the bloody difference – it doesn’t smell like horse, and the labels on the packaging are faded from when that Chinese boy decided to steam the hair scarfs instead of ironing them and…’
The boys listened to his monologue as they wiped counters and changed price tags, their hands and eyes slow. The only reason anyone ever chose to work for Balaji was his endless cache of mbanji, which he freely distributed but of which he never partook. While his stoned boys orbited around