The proposal4
A borrowed umbrella, eight years on
They met in a downpour outside the library at the University of Zambia. He asked under the jacaranda in her grandmother’s garden — and left the ring in the car.
It was the first rain of November, the kind that arrives all at once. Kabwe had an umbrella; Mutinta had a lecture in four minutes and a stack of borrowed books. He walked her across campus, and somewhere between the library and the lecture theatre he forgot where he had been going.
Eight years, two cities and one very long-distance year later, he planned the question for her grandmother’s garden in Kabulonga, under the tree she climbed as a girl. Everyone was in on it. Nobody remembered the ring, which was still in the glovebox.
He ran for it. She waited, laughing, under the jacaranda. When he came back she said yes before he had finished the sentence — and in August, under the acacias, they would like you there to see them say it again.
“I said yes before he had finished the sentence.”
