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pump up their breasts and behinds. Bwana had always left me alone, and if his latest bride-to-be was anything less than a perfect size 20, she was sent to the fattening farm out in Onga to be beefed up for him. She’d be there all day, forced to do nothing but sit around eating yam dumplings, doughnuts, eba, fried plantain, greasy chips, starchy rice, sorghum, hunks of beef and lamb, fried pork fat, cashew nuts, bread rolls, cheese, chocolate cake, avocados and whole chickens with their skins on.
    I walked on through the market, relieved not to be followed, then turned off into Paddinto District. In a few minutes I would be at the station. The sun had gone down hours ago, but I could still feel its hot, rancid tongue scratching my neck.
    I held my breath as I walked past the mud tower blocks that housed the city’s offices, in between the proliferation of trendy coffeehouses that were springing up to meet the twin demands for coffee and business.
    The coffeehouses in Paddinto were legendary-some even had auction blocks. Stupidly I’d thought they’d be closed on this most sanctified of days, but to the traders, I guess, wealth was more important than worship. Several were doing business. Damn!
    I slunk past the Cocoa Tree, Coasta Coffee, Hut Tropicana, Cafe Shaka, Demerara’s Den, Starbright and then the highly fashionable Shuga, part of a trendy chain store of cafés that stretched from the West Japan Quays all the way to Amersha, a distant northwestern outpost of the city.
    Shuga specialized in the novelty of cappuccino with rum, known as rumpaccino, the gimmick of the daily news relayed via talking drum “On the Hour Every Hour” (even though this antiquated postal service went out of fashion moons ago), homemade star-apple pie with peanut ice cream and, advertised in chalk on a black signboard, “Fresh Slaves.”
    The men inside Shuga could sniff out a slave a mile away. Hounds to a fox, one and all. Some were agents for Amarikan or West Japanese planters, there to buy new Europanes; others were middle-class householders seeking new staff.
    I had always tried to console myself with the fact that while they were destroying us they were also destroying themselves. Such was the demand for sugar, the price of a sweet tooth was a toothless smile. Such was the demand for coffee, the price of caffeine was addiction, heart palpitations, osteoporosis and general irritability. The price of rum was chronic liver disease, alcoholism and permanent memory loss. The cost of tobacco was cancer, stained teeth and emphysema.
    I had stopped directly outside Shuga while my mind took off on yet another sprint of its own. Years of suppressed rage were rising to the surface because freedom was so close. I had done the very thing I should not. I had looked inside its “rustic” spit-and-sawdust room with the mandatory portrait of President-for-Life Sanni Abasta in prime position above the counter.
    I found myself staring at a male on the auction block.
    The air was charged with tobacco smoke and pungent with steaming coffee beans.
    Men were bidding for him.
    He was about fifteen, I reckoned. A prize buck, then. He had his back to me but his pimpled, fisted face was turned toward the door, away from the men.
    It was flushed with adolescent shame rather than the teeth- grinding rage of a fully fledged male.
    He was completely naked, and his pallid back and buttocks were crawling with what looked like cockroaches but were lumps of congealed blood. Maybe he’d tried to run away or had spoken his native language or had committed some similar crime.
    My eyes roamed over the crowd of men with their animated, perspiring faces, hand-printed robes draped over a shoulder or knotted at the waist, puffing on pipes, sitting with their legs akimbo so that they took up twice their body width. Their hoarse, booming Ambossan voices batted back and forth as they bid for the boy. I suddenly locked eyes with a very young man sitting apart and looking