To the taxi driver at Maerua Mall, I’m the woman who’s always alone.
He’s seen me all over the city. In my gym clothes, emerging from the National Art Gallery, causing minor traffic incidents as I haphazardly fling bags and myself into cabs not unlike his own.
Today is the first time I clamber into his and he wants to know if I have any friends.
He asks with incredulity and with a slight air of scolding as he tells me the places I have been.
Caught in the middle of the street between Carl List Haus and Slowtown, ducking down the alley to my hairdresser near Town Square, shaking my head at honking cabs as I try to reach my daily goal of 10 000 steps on Robert Mugabe Avenue.
Always on my own, always in a slight rush and oddly content for a woman who seems to know not a soul.
I laugh about the bit about friends because he isn’t far off.
I’m a loner, a blossoming gym bunny, an art enthusiast, a coffee fiend and an avid flâneur, all of which he’s gleaned from just going about his day. One that starts early, ends late, sometimes catches a glimpse of me and hopes I’m OK.
His relief at hearing I have great sisters and good friends is the unfurrowing of his brow.
He tells me it’s not good for a woman to be by herself and he insists I listen to more R&B. The music advice because the rap that blares out of my phone as I accidentally dislodge my earphones horrifies him. The cussing, the aggression and the fact that I mimic a few bars with unbridled glee.
“You need to make some friends and get a boyfriend,” he says as if it’s the cure for loneliness, rap music and all he believes ails me so I nod to get him off my back but cross my fingers and my toes so it doesn’t count.
As we speed down the road and I follow his glances to see who else he’s unwittingly stalking, I realise how wonderful it is that someone you didn’t know existed a minute ago is praying for you.
Not kneeling down in churches but sparing you thought.
Sending out a salve of earnest, urgent human beams that shine on you for just a moment and which must manifest as those inexplicable bouts of warmth in your heart and fleeting comfort of your soul.
It’s a special kind of something.
All the more so because as humans we do this so freely and without reward, perhaps not even knowing that we are engaged in a manner of prayer sent forth with candour and compassion to gods we may or may not believe in.
I pray for him now too.
For the man who prays for me and another cabbie I meet on a different day who is worried about his blood pressure.
He blurts this out as we make our way from the gym.
He wants to start exercising because his diet isn’t working and every time he goes to the doctor, they tell him his blood pressure is still a problem.
An invisible illness ignoring all his efforts to eat better, drink less, starve it away.
For a minute his cab is a confessional.
A place where he can let his worry show, his mortality unnerve and a strange woman can say “turmeric”.
Not because she’s a doctor, a nurse or a sage of some kind. Only because when strangers silently scream “help!” you hastily rummage through the shelves of your mind, find an article you once read and remember the healing properties of the plant.
The taxi swerves a little as the cabbie reaches for a discarded receipt.
The pen I have in the top pocket of my backpack and he makes me write it down in big, capital letters and asks if he can buy turmeric at the supermarket.
Not down on my knees in church but the way we all do.
Going about our lives, noticing strangers, hoping they survive.
Well and with friends.
