This is also the time of year when 8-hour power cuts aren’t unusual. The other day I went down to the atelier to find out how the patchwork trousers were getting along and he was sitting at the back, silence around as machines lay dormant, fanning himself with a wicker hand fan.
I eventually took him to my flat, left him a key while I went out to a meeting, and let him work on my machine.
The trousers are finished, and are beautiful, and it’s not just me who thinks it.
Thursday night was the debut sortie of the trousers. I set out from my flat, through the cooling dusky streets, and walked down the main boulevard that leads to the presidential palace.
As I crossed the road, I saw one of Dakar’s crazy folk sitting in the road wearing only a ripped and dirty cloth around his waist. He had dreadlocks yet half of them had fallen out. He was dirty, grinning like a mad man, and holding his arm out towards me. Having just passed the group of wheelchair women who congregate on this road and wait for the lights to turn red so they can ask for money from the drivers who have nowhere to turn, I assumed he was holding his hand out for money too.
When I got closer, and smiled at him in place of giving him coins, I realised that the reason he was holding his hand out was not to collect coins, but to tell me, with a big thumbs-up and a crazy grin, that he liked my trousers.
*****
This morning, having been out till 5 listening to music, I wandered out of my flat in the midday sun to go and see how Omar was getting along with my tunic. It was hot, bright, and I hadn’t eaten.
Crossing the roundabout at the end of my road, a taxi crossed my path and stopped. The driver stuck his hand out to stop me.
I hate Dakar taxi drivers, I thought. You try and cross the road and if they don’t try to run you over, they stop in your path to try and get a fare out of you. I wasn’t in the mood.
Then I heard my name called. It was Sow, my taxi-man.
“Where are you going in this sun?” he called out, shaking my hand and laughing as another taxi sped by and nearly knocked me flying.
“I’m going to the tailor,” I replied in Wolof. Although Sow has worked in Dakar his whole like, he doesn’t speak a single word of French.
“Get in, I’ll take you,” he said, and we sped through the quiet Saturday streets, round the back of the bus station where the women and children have made a tentative home on its perimeters, their bright clothes hanging out to dry on the railings, to Omar’s shop. He dropped me off and drove away.
*****
I watched Omar piece together my tunic. We talked about setting up a proper atelier where he could work on his own. We talked about the patchwork trousers, how Cheikh Lo, musician and famous wearer of all things patchwork, had made me dance last night with him at his concert, delighted that I have at last joined the patchwork family. I drank some coffee from the toothy boy who pushes a Nescafe barrow around mixing up coffee and powdered milk into something almost delicious. I wandered around and talked to the other tailors.
I watched silly dancing on the TV with the rest of the guys as they took a break from their backbreaking work.
My friend Now sent me a message. ‘Madam, how is the morning, did you have a good repose?’.
Dakar takes and takes and takes. It so very rarely gives so much all at once.
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