immigration, the littler girls in the back seat were stacked against one car door like tumbled dominoes. Naila alone drowsed against the other door, her breath fogging a pulsing halo over the window.
‘Do you remember when we went to Livingstone?’ Daddiji asked Mother.
‘Our honeymoon?’ Mother murmured, turning her head to the back to check on the girls. Naila closed her eyes and feigned sleep.
‘And the accident?’ Daddiji asked. Naila could see the thick edge of his glasses. ‘The drunk man. On the bicycle. Sometimes, I’m thinking-thinking. And just now. With the cow—’
‘Yes,’ Mother said sombrely. ‘I thought of it, too.’
‘What do you think happened to him?’
After a moment, Mother replied: ‘It was just a broken leg. I’m sure he—’
‘But do you remember his face? There was a hole in his face, Bella. In his cheek—’
‘Shhhh.’ Mother turned back again. Naila let her eyes slide shut. After a moment, she heard her mother say, ever so softly:
‘We left that little boy with him. And money. Plenty of money.’
Behind her closed eyes, Naila saw the hole in the man’s cheek, releasing red bubbles one by one. She saw kwacha floating up out of her father’s pocket and her mother’s purse, fluttering down over a group of villagers clapping with gratitude, clapping to catch the cash.
* * *
Sibilla had decided to take matters into her own hands. Sitting in the taxi on the way to Kalingalinga, she looked over at her granddaughter. Naila, in her Namununga school uniform, was in three-quarter profile, her head turned to look out of the window as Lusaka scudded by. The girl was twelve, still bone thin, her temples shadowed with soft fur. Her beige skin was darker than usual – the family had just come back from their annual holiday at Lake Malawi.
The girls were always excitable upon their return, bubbling with stories for their nonna: how the waves in the lake were big enough for surfing, how they saw the treetops waving in the game park – a herd of elephants silently passing through. This time, they were all agog about an accident with a cow. A cow? Yes, a cow that fell from a lorry and then two men stole it for the Hilly Bottoms! Oh, and they found a moth sleeping on the hood of the car – the size of Daddiji’s hand! It was all very sweet and charming.
But later that evening, when the younger girls and their parents had gone to bed and Sibilla and Naila had stayed up watching Idols South Africa together, Naila had told another story. About a drunk man and an accident and money falling like rain over the villagers and Daddiji driving away. And wasn’t it funny, the bicycle? And wasn’t it strange, the hole in the man’s face? Sibilla had hidden her shock from the girl as she pieced it all together. They had left that man there. Not just Isabella, but Balaji, too. And in front of their children. This was what trading bodies for money yields, she’d thought: creature comforts, a life of family holidays and unworried purchase, and a man left to die on the side of the road.
Sibilla looked out of the taxi window. She had never got used to the flatness of Lusaka, so unsettling after the mountains of Alba. Here, it felt like there was too much sky pressing down on the levelheaded trees. She sat back and closed her eyes, relaxing into the peace of grandmotherly love, a love without need or resentment. Naila. Here was someone she could sway, someone she could teach. You do not have to succumb to inhumanity, Sibilla practised in her head. It’s not a question of power. It’s a question of generosity, what is freely given, tossed from a window to help others. Do you know the story of Petrosinella? It would be a small intervention, but…
‘You are sick, Madam?’ the taxi driver interrupted her thoughts. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her in the rearview mirror with a frown.
‘Sick? No, I’m not sick,’ said Sibilla, puzzled.
‘Sick,’ he persisted. ‘Like mwenyes, how they wear their hair…’
‘Oh!’ Sibilla clapped her hands, the hairs on them shivering like tassels. ‘You mean Sikh. No, I’m not Sikh. But my son-in-law, he is from India.’
‘Oh-oh?’ he said. Black Zambians always pretended to be shocked that people intermarried.
‘Yes, this is my granddaughter.’
Naila waved at him and grinned. He waved back. Sibilla was about to ask how many Sikhs he knew personally when he slowed and turned