The Saturday market always began for Amina before she reached it.

From her doorway, she would catch the faintest traces of it: the warm perfume of ginger, the sharp bite of garlic, and the smoky sweetness of chilies. As she walked, those scents would gather strength, mingling with the clatter of tin bowls, the calls of hawkers, and the hum of bargaining voices that rose and fell like a familiar song.

Today, the song was missing a verse.

She wove between stalls piled high with imported rice, tins of sardines stacked like miniature towers, and brightly coloured packets of instant noodles. The air smelled flat—a dull mix of dust and engine fumes from the motorbikes that weaved through the narrow aisles. She passed a woman selling onions, their skins papery and thin, then another selling cooking oil in recycled bottles. But the knobbly ginger roots she came for and the garlic cloves she crushed into every stew were nowhere to be seen.

By the fourth stall, Amina’s patience was thinning. She asked a young man arranging vegetables if he had ginger. He gestured to a small wicker basket pushed to the side. The roots looked tired under the morning sun, their once-plump bodies shrunk and wrinkled.

“How much?” she asked.

When he told her, she almost laughed. It was triple what she had paid last season.

“It’s the season,” he said with a shrug. “Or maybe not anymore.”

She moved on, weaving through the crowd, her basket still light in her hand.

Halfway home, a memory came to her: Kofi, her husband’s older brother, sitting beneath the wide canopy of his mango tree, his laughter carrying across the yard. If anyone still had ginger, it would be Kofi. He had always been proud of growing the things his neighbours neglected—the long green beans, the fiery bird’s-eye chilies, and the garlic with skins streaked purple.

Amina turned her path toward the road out of town.

The city fell away in layers. First the concrete shopfronts and their tangle of power lines, then the neighbourhoods of breeze-block houses painted in hopeful pastels, then the scattering of kiosks selling phone credit and bottled water. Soon she was driving past fields, the road narrowing into a red-dust ribbon that unwound toward the horizon. She opened her window to the smell of earth and woodsmoke.

Kofi was exactly where she pictured him—under the mango tree, repairing a hoe whose handle had split. His hands moved with patient precision, binding the wood with strips of fibre. When he saw her, he stood and brushed the dust from his trousers.

“Amina! What brings you here without warning?”

“Ginger,” she said with a small smile. “And garlic. I went to the market, and…” She shook her head. “Nothing. Or too expensive to touch.”

Kofi laughed softly, but there was little humour in it.

“Ah, sister. Those roots have become strangers to this soil.”

He poured tea into enamel cups, the steam curling into the warm air, then led her toward the fields.

The maize rose before them in perfect rows, each stalk as tall as its neighbour, each leaf broad and glossy. There was no stray weed, no variation in size, and no gaps where a plant had failed to grow.

“They look… strong,” Amina said.

“They look obedient,” Kofi replied. “These seeds—they are not like the ones our fathers planted. You cannot save them for the next season. You buy them new each year, along with the fertilizer they demand, along with the pesticides they will need after a year or two, when the pests get wise.”

He crouched and scooped a handful of soil into his palm. “And this… It used to smell rich. It used to have weight. Now, it is tired. The ginger will not grow here. The garlic tries, but it withers. The land forgets.”

Amina knelt beside him, letting the soil slip between her fingers. It felt fine, almost sandy, without the small stones and fibrous bits she remembered from her childhood garden.

As they walked, Kofi spoke of the first year he planted the new maize. The company’s agent came in a crisp shirt and smooth shoes, handing out glossy pamphlets. They promised higher yields, fewer pests, and less backbreaking labor. And for a time, it was true—the harvest was heavy, and the profits were good.

“But then the costs rose. The seed price climbed. The fertilizer price climbed. And the maize… it gave less each year unless I gave it more. More water, more chemicals.”

Neighbours who once planted ginger and groundnuts now grew only maize, or nothing at all. Some sold their land. Others took jobs in town.

“The companies do not force you,” Kofi said, “but the market does. The buyers want uniform maize—the kind that fits the sacks, the kind that ships well. They do not want the small heads of millet or the crooked carrots. And so, little by little, we stop planting them.”

They paused by a smaller plot behind his house. Here, the order of the fields gave way to a patchwork of plants—green beans climbing thin poles, herbs pushing up through the soil, and a few rows of sweet potatoes. In the far corner, a cluster of garlic plants reached toward the sun.

“I keep these for myself,” Kofi said, plucking one from the earth. It was smaller than the supermarket kind, its skin streaked with purple, its shape uneven. “If I lose this, I lose more than food. I lose the story of my farm.”

Amina rolled the clove in her hand, its skin papery, its scent already clinging to her fingers. She thought of her mother’s kitchen—the grinding stone turning ginger and garlic into a thick paste, the air filling with a fragrance that meant dinner was on its way. She thought of the sauce simmering in the heavy black pot, ladled over rice or swallowed with warm bread.

Food was never just food. It was memory, and comfort, and the thread that tied one generation to the next.

They sat again under the mango tree as the sun shifted west. Kofi spoke quietly now, almost to himself.

“They tell us these seeds will feed the world. But they do not tell us at what cost. The soil loses its life. The pests return, stronger. The crops we have known for centuries disappear from the markets. And we become… customers, not farmers.”

Amina sipped her tea, the bitterness of the leaves lingering on her tongue. She wanted to ask what could be done, but the answer was already in Kofi’s small plot behind the house—stubborn plants growing against the tide.

When she left, he pressed the garlic into her hand, wrapped in a strip of cloth. “Plant it,” he said. “Even if it is only in a pot by your door. Let it remember.”

The road back to town felt longer, the sky deepening to gold. She kept the garlic on the seat beside her, careful not to crush it.

At the market the following week, she passed the same stall with the same tired ginger in the same basket. The price had not changed. Around her, shoppers haggled over instant noodles and imported biscuits, the noise filling the narrow aisles.

No one seemed to notice what was missing—or perhaps they had already learned to live without it.

Amina thought of Kofi’s words: The land forgets. She wondered how many more ingredients, and the stories they carried, would fade quietly from their kitchens. She wondered if, one day, even the memory of fresh ginger would be just that: a memory.