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Her large spoon hovers between her pot and my plate.

“No, really,” I say, “I had a late breakfast.”

The mother glances at her husband. He nods, barely, and she lets her spoon drop back into the pot. Carefully she covers the leftover food.

“Isn’t anyone else going to eat?”

The father shakes his head. “No, please . . . Thank you.”

The nshima is surrounded by a gray sea of barbel and oil. “This smells very good.”

Schoolboy

The children are watching me hungrily. The disabled youth has stopped patting dust fairies and is staring at me. A trembling, nervous cord of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth to his chin. The toddler has started to cry, weakly, plaintively, like a small goat. The mother absently pats the boy, nurses the baby, rocks and rocks, staring at me. The father swallows. “Eat,” he says. He sounds desperate. I sense that it is only through the greatest exertion of will that my spectators don’t fall on the food on my plate in a frenzy of hunger.

“It looks delicious.”

I make a ball of nshima with the fingers of my right hand, the way I had been taught to do as a small child by my nannies. I insert my thumb into the ball, deep enough to make a dent in the dense hot yellow porridge. Onto the dent, as if onto a spoon, I scoop up a mouthful of the fish stew.

Almost before my mouth can close around the food, the young girl (who has not left my side and whose arms still strain at the ends of the bowl) offers me the water and I see that I must wash my hands again. I am conscious of the little girl’s breath-catching effort to hold the basin, and of the groaning, sometimes audible hunger pangs that ripple through the hut. The food, which is sharp and oily in my mouth, has been eagerly anticipated by everyone except for me. I know that I am eating part of a meal intended for (I glance up) five bellies.

There are bones in the fish, which I try to maneuver around to the front of my mouth. I spit the bones into my hand and carefully wipe them on the side of the plate. I stare at the food. A fish eye stares balefully back at me from the oily pool of gravy. I have a long meal ahead of me.

It is mid-afternoon by the time I wash my hands for a final time and swim backward out of the hut, back into the mellowing heat of a yellowing afternoon, where light from the sun is sucked up and diffused by so many smoking fires over which fish are drying near the edge of Lake Chilwa. I pat my heart and bend one knee behind the other, lowering my eyes. “Thank you very much,” I say, “Zikomo kwambiri. Zikomo, zikomo.”

The family watch as I kick the motorbike into life. I wave, and slowly drive away up the avenue of tenants’ houses, which no longer feel like an anonymous, homogenous row of grass-fronted, mud-stiff huts.

That evening I return to the hut with a good proportion of my already meager closet. I have plastic grocery bags hanging from the handlebars of my motorbike in which I have put shorts, T-shirts, skirts, a dress, one pair of shoes (worn through at the toe), and some outgrown toys and books. Mum has stopped me from taking towels and blankets. “We barely have enough for ourselves,” she told me. But our faux-Spanish house, with its stucco walls and its long, cool stretches of linoleum and its vast veranda and its spacious garden, seems, suddenly, exhaustingly, too much.

Mum shakes her head. She says, “I know, Bobo.”

“But it’s so awful.”

“It won’t go away.” She is watching me stuff plastic bags with clothes. “You can’t make it go away.”

I sniff.

“It was there before you noticed it.”

“I know, but . . .”

She gets up with a sigh, dusts her knees. She says, “And it will be there after you leave.”

“I know, but . . .”

Mum pauses at the door. “And bring back my plastic bags, we’re always short of those,” she says.

At the hut, I feel suddenly self-conscious, aware of all the curious, maybe suspicious, eyes on me from all the other huts up and down the road. Children abandon their games and cluster around me. All are in worn-through clothes; most are swollen-bellied.