All are cheap. When we return, every stitch of the fabric has been sold. We've learned a lesson. We keep walking, duck into a cool alley to avoid the zipping bicycles and slithering children packing the main streets. The shaded passage leads to a courtyard surrounded by high white walls.
Roosters scratch around.
A man is stretched beneath a shrub, snoring. We take another alley, then another. Through a window, a glimpse of children hunched over school books. Garden, alley, alley. We push back into the streets, lost in the clamor and squalor of noon.