him, Balaji held forth like a man at a bar, his voice a heavy ball rumbling over a wooden floor. That’s how Isabella first encountered him: a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, moustachioed mwenye behind a counter, thundering on about the placemat a dullard coloured had sold as a doormat.
Isa had ended up at Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. by chance. After picking her up from the new Shoprite in town, the driver had slowed down just past the bridge on Independence Ave and turned into the market area around the Hindu temple and the mosques. Her mother, the driver said, wanted them to pick up some hair oil. Isa sighed. She was twenty-two and jobless, certainly the right person to do the family shopping, but she didn’t like the markets, preferring the fluorescent lights and clean parquet of the South African chains that had cropped up everywhere when Zambia had dropped its embargo after Apartheid fell. Although Kamwala had real shops, not just wooden stalls, and was chock-a-block with imported goods, she did not enjoy navigating the dirt roads and the shouting people.
Parking was a nightmare near the market, so the driver stayed in the car while Isa got out and searched for the shop that sold the special olive oil her mother used. She wandered for ten minutes before she located Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. in a side street. Its outer wall was covered with a fading mural of products – scissors, brushes, combs – each with a thin shadow painted behind it. She stepped from the trashy bedlam of the road into the cool cave of the shop, relieved to escape the experience of walking outside while female. She wiped her hair off her forehead and brushed her hands down her denim skirt. Then she raised her eyes and realised the ordeal wasn’t over.
The shop boys had locked on to her, their blunt eyes sharpening at the relatively unusual sight of a young white woman in Kamwala. Behind the counter, a large blustering Indian man was booming about a doormat. He paused when he saw her, then boomed on, slapping some of the heads that had frozen with her entrance, as if to jumpstart them. The telephone rang and he interrupted himself to blurble into it: ‘Patel and Patel Limited, Incorporated, Balaji speaking. No, no kettles here, sorry-sorry. Fine and classic hair products only…’ He was big-boned, but his eyes were light and skittish, flocking to Isa then fluttering off again.
She approached him and asked for the olive hair oil. He nodded and stooped behind the counter, lowering his thick body into the recessed space. She heard him shifting some things. The shop boys veered lazily around the store like flies around a piece of offal – erratic but curious. He stood up quickly.
‘Very-very sorry, Miss,’ he said, tilting his head equivocally. ‘It has not arrived.’
‘Oh. Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Well? No.’
‘You’re not sure? Or it’s not here?’
‘What I am sure,’ he said, leaning towards her, ‘is that you must come back for it.’
The boy polishing combs to Isa’s left giggled. Heat flurried into her cheeks and the corners of her mouth twitched, tugged by a tangle of competing strings – amusement, annoyance, attraction. Balaji smirked – his teeth were yellowish but she liked his pointy incisors. She smiled. He grinned. By the end of this hitching exchange, they were both beaming.
Embarrassment sent Isa scurrying out of Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc., but she returned the following week, when Balaji sold her just a little oil, so that it would run out faster and she would have to come back. When it didn’t run out fast enough, Isa applied it to her own scalp so that she could come back even sooner. He never did tell her that he’d had surplus of it in stock the day that she first came in.
* * *
Eventually, word of Balaji followed Isa home. It was like a mosquito, that word – invisible but unavoidable – and it even sounded a bit like one: mwenye. It whined around among the other words winging from the mouths of the workers in the Corsales’ kitchen.
‘Heysh, but what did they expect?’ asked Chanda, whisking a broom. ‘Sending her to the shop. Alone? Cha-cha!’ A young woman now, Chanda was both deeply judgmental and deeply envious of those with greater liberty than she.
‘At first, they didn’t know,’ Enela said, up to her elbows in dish-soap bubbles. ‘Isa was supposed to be fetching hair creams, not kawaya-wayaring.’
‘But Aunty,