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evening three years ago. I must dig deeper. Our wedding? No, still further. A hastily sketched background is called for, a swift hop, skip and jump over my infancy, adolescence and bachelorhood, just to provide some context.
    Yes, the more I think about it, the more I am aware of how little I have told you about my life before we met. You, my darling, were always the talker, the divulger of your thoughts, your inner life, your past. I have never been much of a communicator, never great at putting feelings into words. So you only know the basics of my past, the superficialities of what makes me tick. I pray I gave enough away to reassure you always of my love for you. But beyond that, I fear I have told you little. Well now is my chance to make amends.
    So, a brief perambulation through my early years, a leisurely stroll just like my family’s regular six o’clock passeggiata along Harnet Avenue, central thoroughfare of Asmara, the heat of the day relenting as my father would nod and greet acquaintances, occasionally stopping to shake hands and exchange a word or two with a few of his more favoured friends as they too accompanied their families on this early evening ritual.
    Some families would indulge themselves, stopping to buy macchiatos and pastries at one of the numerous cafés, beautiful examples of art deco colonial architecture that I only learned to appreciate after I had left the city. This was needless frivolity in my father’s eyes, particularly when we had such delicious home cooking waiting for us on our return. So we would amble along with the crowds of families, past the Catholic cathedral, turn around at Sematat Avenue, then head back towards Fenkil Street. Once home, my mother would hurry off to the kitchen to supervise the final stages of the evening meal, leaving us children – my elder brother, two younger sisters and myself – to kick off our shoes and settle down in the dust of the back yard to continue our games and jokes and squabbles.
    Our mother’s shout, some twenty minutes later, was our signal to call a truce and head for the communal room. We would sit round the table while Fatuma the maid, her face shining from kitchen efforts, passed around a bowl of water and hand towel. Father washed his hands first, then my brother and I. My mother would go last, of course, too anxious to ensure that her family’s needs were met to contemplate her own physical requirements.
    And then it would be the usual feast of earthly delights, a scramble to break off the still-warm injera, dip it into the delicious kitcha, perhaps a bowl of steaming zigni spiced with berbere, a fragrant, meaty tsebhi, or an aromatic alicha birsen curry. My father liked it best when my mother joined us for the meal. He would ask her about her day, listen attentively to her funny stories of market shopping or neighbourly gossip, relate the events of his taxi-driving labours, the fares he had taken, conversations he had had.
    Sometimes my mother might make an excuse, disappear off into the kitchen – she had very erratic eating habits – and father would turn to his children to question us about our school day. He had a great thirst for education, having been deprived of his own by family obligations – the eldest in his family, he had left school aged ten to add an income to his family’s finances and help support his younger siblings’ schooling – and he would ask us for the smallest minutiae of our day’s learning, listening with absolute absorption.
    When we had finished eating, Fatuma had returned with washbowl and father had wiped his bushy moustache with his carefully folded handkerchief, we would go back to our backyard activities. My mother would disappear back into the kitchen, father would head out to the mosque to meet his friends, as much a social ritual as a religious one. My sisters would take their places on rush mats plaiting each other’s hair, while my brother, always the most earnest and self-righteous