a red hand cupping her crotch. When the pain came, it was so intense that she vomited.
She cleaned herself up, left Naila in her nonna’s care, and took a taxi to the doctor. He gave her an exam, told her she’d had a miscarriage, gave her a pill and sent her home. Isa told everyone she was having a bad menstrual period and a migraine and needed to be left alone. She didn’t tell Daddiji what had happened, knowing that his caterpillar eyebrows would stitch into a look of concern that would only irritate her. And she dared not tell Sibilla, who had on more than one occasion made oblique comments about what an ‘unnatural’ mother Isa made. Isa felt vaguely ashamed, as if her body had betrayed her. While she healed, while she mourned the lack of a baby to mourn, she staved off Daddiji’s nightly advances.
Things went back to normal and they dove back into their usual lovemaking. And then it happened a second time. Again, Isa went to the doctor alone and, again, nobody noticed because she always did things alone. She had kept it secret once, so it only made sense to keep it secret this time too. After the third miscarriage, it became too painful to keep trying, to keep running up against her body this way. That was when Isa started making Daddiji use contraceptives all the time and arguing that they didn’t have enough money to grow their family. This was the true origin of the Battle of the Price Tags.
Somehow, by virtue of this domino effect of secrecy and subterfuge, Isa’s life had become a closed circle. Even now, mingling in the supermarket with other middle-class Zambian shoppers, she felt set apart. How had her mother, a freakshow of a woman, managed to find a sense of belonging here? How had her father, a drunk and a racist to boot, managed to die surrounded by love and respect? Isa paid for her groceries, ignoring the cashier’s polite greeting, and directed the driver to load the bags into the boot. She didn’t speak as he drove them home, staring instead at the traffic outside, the buyers and sellers on the side of the road.
Isa was so focused on her own loneliness that she was doubly disconcerted to find a crowd of people outside her house when they got back. As soon as the driver turned onto their road, they both saw the cars parked up and down the driveway, some on the kerb.
‘Ah, Madam, it must be a funeral,’ he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.
This seemed unlikely, but what if it was the prelude to a funeral – an accident, an emergency? What if the spinning wheel in her mind had been a premonition? Terror zoomed into the centre of Isa’s chest. Oh God, oh God, her pulse was chanting as she jumped out of the car, pushed past the lingerers in the driveway towards the front door, and started wrestling through the crowd of people inside. She found what she sought in the kitchen: Naila sitting cross-legged on the floor over a cigar box overflowing with kwacha. Isa swooped down and picked her up. Daddiji strode into the kitchen, counting out change, joking with a man who was clutching an old boombox.
‘Welcome home, Bella!’ he beamed at her.
‘What’s going on?’ Isa looked over Naila’s head at him. ‘Who are all these people?’
‘All these people?’ His eyebrows darted up and down. ‘They’re customers! I put an ad in the paper. We’re selling the things you kindly-kindly priced for us.’
Everything went: the furniture and the cutlery and the plates and the books and even the little Lord Vishnus. That ought to have been the end of it: the house swallowed in emptiness, the mice in the ceiling now audible. Naila doing knobbly-kneed cartwheels across the parquet. The members of the family eating with their hands like real Zambians, sleeping on the floor like poor ones. Isa and Daddiji back to their nightly tussle.
But there was one final parry. It came after they had replaced all that was replaceable and properly forgotten all that was not. Naila had got a new bed, bigger than the one they had sold. Isa sat in a chair beside it, watching her daughter sleeping, Naila with her milk-tea cheeks, with eyelashes so thick and dark they looked wet. What would become of Isa’s precious little girl if she were to wake up and look down and