that area?’ Chanda stopped sweeping. ‘It is where all the young mwenyes work.’
‘You don’t know? It is not one of those shop boys. It is the owner of the shop himself!’
‘Ah-ah! An old mwenye!’
‘With a belly from eating the food he should have given to the children he does not have.’
‘Aaaah? But that girl is very foolish!’ said Chanda, wondering if she herself would ever have the opportunity to be so foolish.
‘Shem. She is not becoming a wife, that one. She is becoming a widow.’ Enela raised a soapy finger. ‘He will fall on the ground before he can even fall into the bed.’ They looked at each other and giggled.
Meanwhile, the widow-in-training, oblivious to these footnotes to her story, sat alone in her room, justifying her feelings to the mirror. Though she was no longer a child, Isa’s bedroom had not changed much over the past decade. Her D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths still stood on an otherwise empty bookshelf, its pages now yellow and dog-eared, as if it had undergone one of the metamorphoses it depicted. The cardboard box under her bed was crammed with a genocide’s worth of Dolls.
Only the dressing table felt new. Simon the gardener had commissioned a carpenter in Kalingalinga to build it for her thirteenth birthday. It was heavy wood, painted in white, its table littered with make-up tools she liked collecting more than using: the bristly puffs and metal instruments; the severed fingers of lipsticks and mascara tubes; the iridescent crumble of eyeshadow staining the surface like butterfly dust. The dresser had a built-in mirror, in the glassy depths of which Isa was now pondering her face – bracketed, thankfully, by the straight, reasonable hair she had inherited from her father – and rehearsing the case for Balaji.
Balaji was the only person who listened to her. Balaji didn’t care that she had no sense of fashion. Balaji was a respected businessman. Balaji was strong and kind. The measure of his strength was the stern voice he used with his shop boys. The measure of his kindness was the length of time his hand lingered in the hand of a begging leper: one and two and three and four and only then would Balaji let go, leaving a heap of ngwee in the fingerless palm. Isa looked away from her face in the mirror, down at her hands, when other justifications came to mind. The way his skin, the colour of the caramel inside a Twix bar, made her forget her own, which was the colour of the biscuit. The look in his eyes, the tremble in his lips, when he had kissed her for the first time last week.
They had been standing in the stockroom of his shop in Kamwala. Balaji had finally managed to convey to her through their casual banter that he was burdened with neither child nor wife. Then he’d made some excuse for her to join him in the back as he searched for a special comb he thought her mother might like. There, in the midst of the mess of things to be stored or sold or forgotten, he’d leaned forward and put his lips to hers, sending a fierce boomerang of desire pivoting into her belly and out again towards him. Isa had been startled by the look on his face when they parted. He had seemed almost offended by his attraction to her. His caterpillar eyebrows had bent their backs and she’d nearly heard him say it in a hoarse, indignant whisper: How dare you? It made Isa feel guilty and proud, as if, just by existing in the same world as him, she had done something of note.
Everyone else had ignored Isa all her life. Her parents were too busy distracting themselves to attend to her, and she never got along with the other expat kids. She looked down on them for fear of being looked down upon – a self-perpetuating cycle. As a child she’d felt connected to the workers, especially Simon, who would sing tunelessly to make her laugh, and beckon her with that lilting Bemba call that doubled her name: Isa kuno, Isa. But when she’d learned that black Zambians saw her as a muzungu, Isa had isolated herself from them, too.
As she matured into the not-quite-beautiful daughter of a truly beautiful woman, Isa’s sense of self-pity only grew. Over the years, she had strung for herself a rosary of grievance, all the slights of her life clicking against each other