Everything that matters, in one small shop Through my eyes

On an ordinary Tuesday at the local mall, between a shattered screen protector and a need for a girlie phone cover, I found birth and near-death sharing the same four walls.

A story about Mamun, my trusted cellphone technician, a stranger, and the unexpected grace of showing up unannounced.

I didn't plan to stay long. I never do, when I visit Mamun. A cracked screen protector, maybe a new phone cover - something pink, something mine and then back to the Tuesday I had already mapped out in my head. That is not what happened.

Mamun has been my phone technician for over a decade. He has my security codes. He has, in the way of people who handle the most personal object in your life, become something closer to a trusted friend than a service provider. When I walked into his shop unannounced, he looked up from his workbench the way he always does; unhurried, warm, like your arrival is the thing he was waiting for.

He is always genuinely happy to see me;

"Hello Kasia." He says.

Then he told me about his wife.

She had come from Bangladesh to be with him just a few months ago it seems and now this, she was going to have their first baby. I watched Mamun's face as he said it. There was a particular kind of pride that doesn't perform itself - it just sits there, steady and luminous, in a man's eyes. That was what I saw. Joy that had nowhere else to be.

New life, coming. Right here, in the same shop where phones get mended and people linger longer than they planned to.

And then, in the corner of the shop, I noticed her.

A woman. Standing with the particular stillness of someone who has recently been through something that rearranged everything. She was watching Mamun work on her phone with an anxiety I recognised not as impatience, but as need - the need to reach back towards the world, to respond to the thousands of messages and prayers that had poured in after the accident. A few days earlier, her husband and her thirteen-year-old daughter had been in a car crash. Gruesome, she would later say. The word sat in the air between us like a stone.

Her voice, when she finally spoke, was careful and shaken at the same time.

"It is through God's mercy that my baby girl is alive. God saved my little girl."

We spoke for a long time. A woman with a new phone cover she didn't really need, a woman holding her family together by a thread, and Mamun between us - steady, capable, fixing things.

I think about what it means that we ended up in the same place on the same Tuesday. A baby arriving. A child who nearly didn't. Grief and joy, sitting close enough to touch in a cellphone repair shop at the mall, not performing anything for anyone, just - there. Human. Real.

There is so much to be grateful for. Even now. Especially now. I keep thinking about Mamun's eyes, and that woman's voice, and how the most sacred spaces are almost never the ones we expect.

If you are looking for a trusted and knowledgable cellphone expert please support Mamun at Fixtech at the Odyssey Mall in Ballito.