Saba was sitting next to Hagos on their blanket outside the hut when Jamal ambled past them. Television is here, announced some of the children marching behind him. We don’t need electricity to watch television.

Hagos, let’s go and watch, Saba said, about to stand up.

Hagos held her by her wrist. He gestured.

Why do I need to wait?

Hagos disappeared inside the hut and returned with a bag. He sat behind her on a stool. Saba looked at the giggling girls and boys gathered in front of them. The TV is over there, she said. Hagos pulled her head towards him. Rubbing her hair with almond oil, he straightened it with the bristle brush. Saba wondered if he had a crush on the Indian actress they once saw in a magazine back home. His obsession with changing her curly hair began then, as far as she could recall. He pinned a flower on the side of her hair. After spraying her neck with some of his perfume, he rose and pulled her up.

Saba and Hagos arrived at a dimmed part of the square where Jamal placed the cardboard box, his television, on a stool, next to an oil lamp shining from an adjacent stool.

The children jumped up and down, urging Jamal to hurry up.

Saba sat next to Hagos in the front row. Mosquitoes buzzed in and out of the open TV box. The little actors emerged in the soft glow of the lamp.

They are here, the children said. The actors are here. Let’s wave.

The applause and the whistles attracted more spectators. Zahra arrived with her grandmother, who was holding a wooden mortar and pestle full of roasted coffee beans. The old woman declined a stool and instead squatted on the ground, beginning to grind the beans. I will stop when the television starts, she assured the children. The black powder scattered in the wind. Samhiya’s mother appeared too, saying she had caught a whiff of the grandmother’s Harar coffee.

Here, take it, I will come to drink coffee at yours after the show, said the grandmother, handing to Samhiya’s mother the coffee she had ground in the mortar.

Jamal slipped his cardboard characters, an Italian mother and her young daughter made from white cardboard, into the TV from a hole at the top. The women stood in front of the image of Mussolini drawn at the back of the box.

The Italian women were silent as if they were suffering from stage fright. When Jamal coughed, the cardboard puppets shook.

Saba waved at the Italian girl who, as narrated by Jamal, was in the luxurious living room of a villa in Tiravolo, Asmara’s posh residential neighbourhood.

The girl staggered to her mother on the other side of the soggiorno, pleading with her to understand that she was in love with a local man.

Saba leaned her head on Hagos’s shoulder as Jamal went on to tell this story of impossible love.

The mother turned her head away from Signorina. When a European country colonizes an African land, there is always this risk, she said. Our leaders have, in anticipation of such a thing, calculated for unfortunate situations like yours, just like taking into account African diseases.