When Jamal arrived at her door, she had been waiting for the monsoon rains to begin their long pour. The rains were late again and watching from her bedroom window day after day, Nadia couldn’t stand the pregnant expectancy in the cumulus cover over the city. She wasn’t the only one. All around her, Dakar’s residents had their eyes trained skywards. The city’s poor drainage meant fares doubled when it rained, a great way to make or lose money.
Across Almadies and Plateau, housemaids and housewives kept vigil over windows, watching the hanging lines as the day’s wash blew a chorus of goodbyes and hellos. But when the downpour seemed all but certain, a brazen sun would break through the clouds only to precipitously hand the skies back to gloom. It was an unending will-it-won’t-it, playing out in the vast sky.
Nadia hated waiting. She had told Jamal as much. Not knowing when or if she would see him made her anxious, as if suspended between states, like the push-off on a bicycle. “You should be a poet,” he had told her, and she’d lost her cool, admonishing him about never taking her seriously. Now, Jamal was standing at her doorstep, feigning a knock with his knuckles, blinking past the confused look on her face.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well, color me surprised. What are you doing here, Jamal?” She hadn’t expected him, not now, at least. Besides, it was not Jamal she had been summoning.
Nadia did not receive guests often and the neighbor’s children, borrowing her corner of the housing estate that morning, had stopped mid-play to engross themselves in the exchange at her door. The older of the two made circles in a slow inspection of the mango tree sitting at the edge of her perimeter, his eyes teetering towards them. The younger, who had yet to learn discretion, stared pointedly at them, an idle stick in his hand. Even they could sense the man at Nadia’s door meant something, the kind of something they could add to an inventory of the housing estate’s events when the opportunity arose.