Housewife in Nigeria

My mother’s taken up crosswords, now she can’t leave the house too often to attend her crochet group. I did the crossword with her on the phone while she was sitting in the lounge. Neither of us were too sure what a trough for washing ore was (5 letters), but at least we could share our sense of defeat at not being able to do a lousy crossword in a two month old women’s magazine from SA. I’ll miss the way our phone calls used to be. People in Nigeria only have cell phones and have completely skipped using conventional landline phones. So whenever I used to phone my mum, she was rarely at home. There’d always be the buzz of traffic and honking car horns in the background. On her birthday last year I called up and she was gambling at a lady’s house playing mahjong. When I first ever gave her Nigerian number a try, she was at a huge vegetable market and had to end the conversation by saying, ‘Right, I must go now, there’s always a man at this corner with a portable sewing machine and I need to find him to sew up your father’s trousers.’ Most often she’d be in the back of the car stuck in traffic with the windows up, and she’d prattle on about how many of the company’s wives had been jacked in traffic that month. It would sometimes annoy me that I’d always have to compete to get her attention, and vie off vendors selling fruit and boys on mopeds racing past to tell her what I’ve been up to. But how sad it is to always catch her when she’s at home. Sometimes there’s nothing I’d like more than the chance for the both of us to go and shop for vegetables together.