After her morning work, Neema decided to find Rehema, but she did not want to confront her at the tea stall in front of the neighbours. She sent a short message: “Please meet me at the bus stop. I do not want to drag you into the quarrel. I have only one question about the meter.” Ten minutes later Rehema replied, “Come when the ten o’clock bus leaves.”
Mtoni’s bus stop smelled of dust, fuel, and boiled maize. Neema arrived early with an envelope of receipts copied from her notebook. She put it inside her bag rather than carrying it in her hand, so that no one would think she had come with a finished case. Rehema climbed down from a boda, paid the driver, and looked behind her before approaching.
“You could have asked me yesterday,” Rehema said.
“Yesterday I was still standing in front of the lock.”
Rehema rubbed her hands. “Mosi told me not to talk.”
“I am not asking you to attack him. I want to know who repaired the meter, and when.”
Rehema watched the buses pass. “That is your one question?”
“It is the first one.”
She did not smile, but she walked with Neema to a concrete bench behind the stop. She opened her phone and searched through old messages. On the screen was a photograph of the meter, its black number visible on the wall. The date showed that Neema had sent money for an electrician that same day.
“Did you take this yourself?” Neema asked.
“I did. The tenants were complaining that the bill had risen. Mosi said the new meter was accurate. Your mother told us not to quarrel in front of people.”
“When was the meter changed?”
“Two days after this photograph.”
Neema opened one of her receipts. “This is money for rewiring, not for a meter.”
“Mosi used part of it for another fundi. I did not know there was money from you as well.”
Neema did not tell her that she often sent money without long explanations because Mama Asha hated appearing to beg. She held the receipt to the light. The meter number on it did not match the number in Rehema’s photograph.
“Why did you not tell me?”
“I did, but you were in town filling an order. I sent the picture to your mother.”
“Did she keep it?”
Rehema tapped the screen. “I do not know. The message shows that it was read.”
When a bus sounded its horn, the people on the bench stood up. Rehema quickly locked her phone. “Neema, I do not want Mosi to say I betrayed him. He lent me money when my husband was ill.”
“Thanking someone does not mean hiding the meter’s date.”
“Family matters do not stay as neat as shop accounts.”
“But when someone pays, electricity enters the house. When a meter is changed, its number changes. A small truth can keep us from calling someone a thief before we know everything.”
Rehema sat again. She enlarged the photograph and sent it to Neema—not because she had chosen a side, but because she was tired of guarding it alone. Neema saved it in a folder labelled “meter” and asked Rehema to write the date beneath it by hand.
“Why?” Rehema asked.
“A phone can be lost. A person’s memory needs to stand beside the photograph.”
Before Rehema could write, the boda driver waiting nearby came closer. “Are you talking about Mama Asha’s house meter?” he asked.
Neema looked at Rehema. Rehema nodded, allowing him to speak.
“I carried the fundi that day,” the driver said. “I did not know what work he was doing, but I carried the box with the new number. Mosi was with him. A woman was there too, sitting inside.”
“Mama Asha?”
“I did not know her name. She was holding a basket of medicines.”
Neema wrote without interrupting. The driver remembered that Mosi paid the trip with two notes, and that the woman had come out to ask the fundi not to take photographs. His memory was not a document, but it lit a gap in the timeline Neema had not known about.
Rehema told him not to use her name anywhere without permission. He agreed and returned to the queue. Neema felt the evidence leaving the family and entering the hands of people who had lived near the house. That helped her, but it also frightened her. Everyone she followed could carry part of the dispute.
When she checked the photograph again, she found there was a second image that had not opened. Rehema opened it. It showed the meter wall wiped with a cloth; the old number was still visible beneath the dirt.
“That is why I called you,” Rehema said. “I did not know whether the number would matter.”
The meter was not the key to ownership, but it was a piece of time. Neema saved both pictures, thanked Rehema, and refused to give copies to anyone else without asking first. As she left, a message from Mosi arrived: “Do not investigate the neighbours. This is our matter.”
Neema read it without replying. On her screen were the old meter number, the date of her payment, and a photograph showing that someone had wiped away evidence before the new lock was installed. Mtoni had begun to speak, but the erased number still had not said who erased it.
At the market corner, Neema wrote down the names of people willing to talk. On the other side of the page she wrote, “Do not put them in danger.” She knew the distance between gathering evidence and hunting people was very small. The final photograph showed the meter number that had been wiped away.
---