Sali – 2003
There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens.
Ecclesiastes 3:1
Nodding to a languid R&B composition pouring out of the speakers into the hot air in the car before the news came on, I thought that this was the exact kind of tune my father would call inyimbo yakwe chiwa, no doubt, crediting the devil for anything that wasn’t gospel. He finds R&B especially offensive. To Baba, the lush voices and machine-backed rhythm were a bitter impwa dish, which clung to the tongue even after several glasses of water. “Too much vulgar language,” he’d say so frequently, I had to wonder how he’d caught the lyrics beneath the instrumentals, unless he’d been paying the same quiet attention as he devoted to the shows on Radio Christian Voice.
But Baba wasn’t with me in the car this morning to tsk-tsk as I tapped my left foot. “Last time,” I said to my car. I patted the black faux-fur seat covers, which conceal so many tears of tan polyester it could be on purpose, like ripped jeans. I’d been thinking, bye-bye, sputtering engine. See ya, squeaking brakes. “By this time tomorrow, I’ll be in my very own Benz.”
“Me.” I shimmied my shoulders, finding a rhythm in Case’s heartbreak. The radio glitched, but I didn’t mind. I harmonized so loud I drowned out his lament about the cold summer afternoon, the desert without the sand, the ring without a hand. “Me.” My voice was manic, but who cared? “Me, with a Mercedes Benz!”
I traced the three-pointed emblem of my dream car over the outline of my belly button and grinned. I’d earned this, honestly. I really had mwé. Never mind the wide-eyed looks of the other teachers when they see me rolling between the trees, easing into an open slot surrounded by empty spots, and stepping out of my fucking Merc. Never mind their mulomo. Their rumormongering couldn’t touch me now, and if it did, I wouldn’t feel the pinch. Beneath my chiffon blouse lay the key to my freedom.
Yes, I nodded, letting it all sink in: How I’d swap the sole-staining red floor polish at my parents’ house for glossy tile in my own. At last, I could escape the dim box of a bathroom for a white tub with a hot water tap that isn’t fighting a losing battle against rust. All the scornful gazes of my schoolmates when Doc started to pick me up from campus had been worth it. How I’d swallowed all that initial repulsion at seeing his creased naked body, covered in a gauze of graying, coily hair had been worth it. I’d lived off his measly girlfriend allowance for three months before finally letting him slide into me without a condom. It’s like Baba always says, mwé, “At the bottom of patience, one finds heaven.” My heaven would be my upgrade from the second-hand pink Vitz, which Doc had gifted me the day after my graduation, to something as sleek and quiet as his E40. My well-deserved promotion from side chick to wife. A whole fucking wife! After all, I wasn’t like my cousins, who knew men too young and loved money too much. I was a good girl: still the first in my family to graduate from the University of Zambia. Now, the gold dangling from my neck would also glitter on the fourth finger on my left hand. I rubbed my unguarded ring finger and admired my overgrown French tips. I’m ready.
Ready to leave Kabulonga Girls’ High School, where I’d been teaching since graduation. Thanks to Doc’s connections at the Ministry of Education, I’ve never had to do time teaching at a rural school with roofless classes and barefooted students. But still, I wasn’t created for this hard life, ine mwé. I mean, I don’t have a single blister on my palms, even after years of gripping a pounding stick into my mother’s pots and cooking smooth nsima. These hands are meant to have a maid, please.
I watched Lusaka slink past through my windscreen, my speed close to zero, relishing the thought of how my daily sights would soon change. I cranked down my window and took it all right in, ka last. On the other side of the road, a beggar was nestled at the foot of a mango tree with a baby in the nook of her arm. She lapped out one flattened breast to feed the child. Blue-and-white minibuses, inscribed with misspelt movie quotes and popular local sayings, snaked through the congestion on the narrow road in front of them. Dye Another Day whizzed past. How Be Back. House the La Vista Baby hooted at Don’t Ate the Player, Ate The Game and Waulesi Asadye. My Doc had drivers. With the gift of my car, he’d ensured I’d never have to squeeze into the backseat of a minibus and pinch my nose the whole ride because of the whirling concoction of smells ever again! All that was left was a chauffeur.
A paperboy appeared at my window, offering me his wares. “Sistele,” he drawled, flashing me a toothy grin. “Latest,” he declared while pulling one newspaper out of its fold to show me the headline: MUMBA SACKED! It screamed in red above a picture of our most recent vice president, looking somber as he cradled his chin. “Awé,” I said. I was feeling too jittery to focus on the newspaper.
He shoved it back over his arm and dragged out a string of white and black cords, dangling them in front of me. “Nga charger? Small pin na big pin, I have.”
I shook my head, feeling for my charger beneath the CD slot of the radio. “Ni nkwata.”
“Okay, flash disk?” he insisted, refusing to take my answer.
“Fyonsé ninkwata!” I had meant only to shoo him off, but the tingle I felt saying I had everything was one I could get used to.
“Hmm, sistele,” he continued, my cue to crank my window back up.
He slipped his fingers into the space between the window and its frame. These boys were nothing if not persistent.
“Fyonsé mwalikwata, nabalumé?” The foolish boy laughed. As if he’d just asked if I had breakfast that morning and not, “You have it all? Even a husband?”
What a stupid fucking question. I kissed my teeth, clenched the hiss between my lips, and spat out the sound just before my window shut his voice out. Once Doc and I got married, I’d never have to take this shit again. “I’ll have a husband soon,” I whispered to myself.
He flipped me off then moved on and pitching to the driver in the car behind me.
To my left, a girl was hawking chikanda out of a bag in a plastic dish mounted precariously on her head. Normally, I’d beckon her. But this morning, the thought of the spicy cake of tubers, wild orchids, and peanuts churned my stomach. I picked my small metal flask from the cupholder and spat the saliva, which, since last week, pooled beneath my tongue every ten minutes. In the rearview mirror, my reflection was dotted with fat, angry pimples, sweating and growing more aggressive in their itch. But none of that shit mattered because when I’d meet Doc later, he’d finally have the reason to tell that ugly wife of his about us. He’d escape that mirage of a marriage. My man had already served twenty-six barren years.
I didn’t let the But why hasn’t he called me back yet? linger. Even though it wasn’t like him to wait so long to respond. He should’ve at least texted back, no matter how late he got the Gravindex 1!☺ message. I probably should’ve just waited for him to be relaxed while eating a T-bone supper across from me. I should’ve waited till after our shower while he was sprawled, sated, on my breasts.
What if that bitch saw and deciphered it?
“No, relax, Sali. Relax,” I said, straightening my back and tightening my grip on the wheel, but my thoughts kept wrestling. Awé! I shook my head. He probably just hasn’t seen the text yet.
I smacked my lips and touched the gold necklace tucked in my cleavage. He bought the chain for me on his last trip to Dubai. Rubbing something his hands once held eased my racing pulse. I slipped my hand down to my abdomen again. He’s probably just planning a big surprise for me. I twisted the volume knob up on the radio and let the hollow guitar strings spill out and caress my ears. As the music wound down, it blended in with the eagle’s whistle to announce the news.
If only that could’ve been the only sound I heard for the rest of the day.
Instead: “The time on Radio Phoenix is 8 a.m.,” said a husky voice. “The news read by Jam Wonga. The headlines at a glance. In international news. Three car bombs—two in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad and one in Mosul—killed at least twenty-six people. In local news, President Levy Mwanawasa has sacked his vice president, Nevers Mumba, for insubordination. And on a sad note, celebrated Zambian cardiologist Doctor Eben Kuchiza Moyo has died from a reported heart attack at the University Teaching Hospital in the early hours of this morning.”
Has died noosed itself around me. The time held captive by my shock until a strangled “No” made it out of my mouth. I whimpered, ripping a button off my collar. Sweat rushed down my back. “No!” I screamed, reaching for the door.
The newsreader moved on to “Zambia’s Chipolopolo boys all set for the World Cup qualifier match against Congo” while I scrambled for my handbag. I rummaged through the neat compartments inside—makeup, diary, and toiletries—until I found the cool, sleek corners of my Razr. I flipped it open, dialed the last number, and waited.
It rang once. “Answer,” I whispered. We’d meet at the Taj.
Twice. “Come on, my love. Answer!” I’d wait for him to roll off me.
Thrice. I’d revisit my good news, the source of all his previous disappointment, whenever I told him I was on my period.
I blinked back hot tears and imagined him on the other end, clearing his throat, cocking his head to the left and checking the time on his watch before saying, “Baby girl,” and my insides would liquify.
Four times. “God, please.” He’d give me his laugh-smile.
The image filmed over—nails clipped, hands defying his fifty-four years.
Five times. “Please, please.” He’d envelop me in a bear hug.
Instead of his baritone, a bland voice told me, “The mobile subscriber you have dialed is either outside the coverage area or has their phone switched off. Please try your call later.”
No! and then “No!” to the swelling heat inside my car, because it simply could not be true. Not while I was still panting for the other side of Lusaka, with its restaurants devoid of flies and the servers who smile without leaning over you when they serve. I wasn’t done soaking it in, dammit. That tourism-ad Zambia, with views of Mosi-oa-Tunya and sunrises that bled color into the marshmallow-white of the clouds through the raging waterfall, or the sound of Lake Bangweulu whipping the white beach as lullaby. I tried to swallow. There had been panicked moments, yes.
There had been furiously fleeting seconds when I imagined our relationship ending. I’d pictured Doc’s haggard wife storming into my office and yelling at me to leave her husband alone à la dramatic Lusaka wives. The unwelcome thought would befall me suddenly when I was unguarded, like while peeling pumpkin leaves in my mother’s kitchen. I’d try to shake it off quickly, like the pumpkin leaves’ fuzzy skin, but like the vegetable, it would stick to my spine even after being pried away. Or I’d be staring blankly at my reflection as a stylist braided my hair into tight little cornrows, when my image would be replaced by someone older—my face instantly withered by my mother’s frown lines, turning my expression into a scowl. And just like that, time would race, my age eventually forcing Doc into a younger body owned by someone who could give him the only thing he couldn’t buy. But, no, I always comforted myself. That could never be me.
Maybe my mind had been trying to prepare me. Perhaps its tendency to catastrophize was a bed of feathers for this future. But even in my most sweat-drenched nightmares, where Doc turned from flesh to smoke, I’d awake to his presence assured. Even in those quiet hysterics which statued me unprovoked, my imagination had not conjured this rapid an unspooling. And if I had, so what? I’d have been paralyzed still, the air in my car more stifling by the second.
There was no priming my heart for the kind of torrent my chest became as Lusaka misted over. I thrashed for the door.
I must have released the foot brake. The speedometer must have ticked up from zero to a speed impermissible in Lusaka morning traffic jams. My car must have rammed into another, the boom alerting drivers and pedestrians alike. I had never been in an accident before, and even now, that still feels true. Because all I remember is the off-key choir of screeching tires that snatched me from memory to reality. My right foot pressed into the brake lever was useless. Impatient honking rose with the slight plume of smoke from my car bonnet. What I remember is the consuming stench of singed tar and my voice emerged again as the most useless sound of all, “No.”
When my eyes refocused, they found the outline of a small woman in a chitenge climbing out of her car to investigate the damage. Her steps were harried—just another thing surging at me before my thoughts could dust on my mind’s floor.
The woman glared at the steam whizzing out of my car, her eyes cutting through it to find mine. Before the words twisting in her mouth could emerge, a bespectacled cop materialized through the thin line of smoke, speeding past her, toward me.
The policeman appeared at my window. Unlike the traffic police I usually met on my morning commute, in shabby uniforms and cracking lips, this one’s dark skin gleamed in the sunlight as if he was dipped first in coconut oil and then perched at my door to act as a peculiar distraction from the pain crushing my lungs.
“Madam,” the beautiful, uniformed man said in between rapid knocks, “open the door!” A small crowd was fanning out behind him.
Fuck!
I looked away. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I’d pictured Doc’s useless—no, ugly—no, useless and ugly wife forcing him to leave me, claiming she’d finally fallen pregnant. I’d imagined him weeping, as he had the first time he came inside me, like a child unsure if he liked or loathed the taste of something new. I’d imagined pretending I didn’t care, snapping that it was just as well. I was, after all, still fresh at twenty-eight. I’d find someone else.
Each time I gulped in air, it was as if I was also swallowing my dreams of leaving Misisi, with its teeming people and houses so close that neighbors hear each other’s grunts as they shit.
“Madam!” the policeman shouted again, pulling the door open and assaulting my nostrils with his scent—something woody and sharp. I crouched and spat onto the ground, peeling myself from the seat to face him.
“What?” I managed to shoot back. I was in there, after all. The word appeared to push him back a step before he asked,
“Do you have insualance?”
Rhotacism, some part of my brain thought, stupidly. That’s what this speech impediment—a difficulty in producing the “r” sound correctly—is called. I’d looked it up as a teenager, befuddled that the smartest girl in my grade ten history class was fumbling over republic or revolutionary. I knew it was not an indicator of anyone’s intelligence. But I was sixteen, with a pocket dictionary that the smartest girl in my grade ten history class had said I carried around like a pet. I hated being the butt of anyone’s joke, but more than that, I hated not being the smartest person in a room. So, the next time she was reading a part of the textbook out loud, I spoke over her, sounding out the “r”s in tandem with her hesitation, until the whole class was in stitches with me, laughing at her.
To the cop, I snapped, “You mean insurance?” almost forgetting the accident, almost forgetting the news that had triggered it. Policeman style, I expected he’d seize this opportunity to demand a bigger bribe. He’d take my correction as an attack on the false authority endowed by the gold-embossed eagle above his breast pocket, between the words Zambia and police. But there was no tightness in this one’s jaw, and his dark eyes remained fixed on me still.
I shifted my gaze.
The woman in the chitenge was, by then, standing next to the cop, pinching her neck with one hand, dangling a set of keys in the other. How had it taken me so long to recognize her? Over Doc’s shoulder, I’d studied the skin tags under her eyes, the bow curve of her lips, and the voice that chased me in dreams each time she called Doc’s phone whenever we were together. “Yes, insurance,” she said. Calm, because why the hell not? Karma was laughing somewhere, I was sure. This woman obviously hadn’t sat with my face on a screen and memorized the contours of my cheeks for smile lines as I had hers. And the worst of it, beneath this grief disorienting her features, even I could see that Doc’s wife was stunning. She didn’t have a stitch of makeup on, yet her skin looked like a matted magazine cover.
I located the black keypad, the sparkle on her ring finger, and then her sleek black ML parked behind her with a V-shaped dent at the back.
Run, my mind said. Run!
But when I found her face, this woman with the ring that
could have been mine, she looked as pained as I.
I wanted to scratch her face. To simultaneously hug and strangle her. So this is how I meet Doc’s fucking wife? Like this?
I swallowed at the echo of the cop’s words. Swallowed my urge to scream. I crossed my arms. She’d obviously get angry any minute. Call someone to the scene, insist I pay for the damage.
Instead, she scrunched up her nose and said, “Madam,” glancing around at the growing crowd like she was looking for someone, then, when she didn’t find them, turned to face me. “I have to go home. Please, you need to fix that.” She looked about my mother’s age, if my mother had the right lotions to stop the lines from settling in her face.
It wasn’t the politeness that threw me off balance but the quavering in her entire sentence, like she’d been the one to slam into me. As if she had wronged me.
“I really need to go,” she decided, when I took too long to answer. “Listen. Just let me have your number, and we can resolve this later.”
More people were starting to pool around us. Without turning, I felt for my diary and found it with the pen still wedged on yesterday’s date.
“Do you have the insulance?” the policeman said, wedging himself into our conversation and the space between Doc’s wife and me. He reeled out the last word and faced her with narrowed eyes this time.
She fingered her wedding rings. They were those three-banded clusters, the fashion of women who had been and would be married forever. She looked from her shining fingers to him with disdain, deciding, it seemed, not to be pitiful any longer. “I’m not the one who needs insurance here,” she said.
I gripped my stomach, defensive. “I have insurance.” Doc always paid for it a year in advance.
The policeman turned to me. “Ni mulandu uyu, madam,” so close to my face that his stale alcohol breath was all I inhaled.
I suppressed the urge to puke. “I’ll pay for the damage,” I said to her. This time, my eyes slid to the fresh silver polish on her fingernails, her cascading perm thick but without any undergrowth, and those eyes darting from me to the cop, glistening as if on the verge of pouring. “Let’s exchange numbers,” I told her, flipping my phone open.
“524116,” she said, “Zamtel.”
“Ni dangelous dliving iyi,” the cop said, talking too fast and playing with the silver rims of his glasses. “Fineable, ka. Three hundred kwacha.” He squinted at the dent in her car, looked from her to me, weighing something in his mind, and then stretched a hand in my direction. “What’s your name?”
I ground my teeth. Doc would’ve fixed this in minutes.
I eyed the cop. From his flat top, cleft chin, starched collar, and tight shirt to the crease in his trousers tucked into black boots. I swallowed spit and said, “Salifyanji Nanyangwe. And you, Officer, what is your name?”
“Assistant Superintendent Penda.” He held my eyes a little too long when he said this. “But you—” He paused for a beat and smiled. “You can call me Kasunga. License, please, madam?”
I didn’t have it in me to slap him, or even to say something snarky. But I must have risen too quickly from my slanted position, because I doubled over and retched into the patch of dirt between his shoes, which snatched the smirk right off his face.
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From The Shipikisha Club by Mubanga Kalimamukwento. Used with permission of the publisher, DZANC Books. Copyright © 2026 by Mubanga Kalimamukwento.
