Vegetable Dreams

In 2001, I went to visit my sister and her husband, who were living in Mozambique. They were living in Pemba, a city in the north (not to be confused with Pemba Island), and it took over 24 hours to get there: we had to fly London - Amsterdam - Johannesberg - Maputo - two additional stops - Pemba. It was the Christmas after 9/11, and in one of the small airports, on a wall next to the broken X-Ray machine, was a printed off paper sign that read 'Following the events of October 11th, unauthorised people are no longer allowed in restricted parts of the airport.' Somebody had crossed out October in biro and written 'September'. In the market in Pemba, you could buy T-Shirts featuring an image of Osama Bin Laden, or the Twin Towers with planes crashed into them. I felt a long way away from home.  The city was a decent size, but it was remote, and the infrastructure of Mozambique had been badly damaged by sixteen years of civil war that had ended in 1992. Amongst other things, this meant that you couldn't buy vegetables out of season. And Christmas was pretty much out of season for everything. Pemba is on the coast, so we could eat fresh fish, accompanied with rice or chips. And there were plenty of mangoes. But that was it. At the time, I didn't think of myself as much of a vegetable eater, so I didn't think it would bother me particularly. The fish, the chips, the mangoes were all good. But by the end of three weeks, I was craving vegetables so badly that I started having vegetable dreams: I would find myself in a greengrocer with shelves reaching all the way up to the ceiling, packed with huge, lush, gleaming vegetables: fat tomatoes, plump, juicy aubergines, green, red and yellow peppers shining like jewels.  Then one day, my sister came back from the market with a tiny package of shrink-wrapped carrots, soft, wrinkled and encrusted with earth, each about the size of my little finger. She showed them to me, excited. We washed and peeled and grated them to make a microscopic salad. They were so delicious, nothing could have tasted better.  Last night I dreamt of my friends. We were all moving into a big house together. We were singing for joy.