Yusuf had been a tailor for forty-one years, and in that time he had made clothes for three generations of one street.
He was very good. He could look at a man walking in and know, within half an inch, what the shoulder would measure. Brides came to him from two districts away. He never wrote the measurements down; he claimed the tape told him and then he remembered.
His own shirts never fitted. They hung loose at the collar and short at the wrist, and the buttons sat slightly off-centre, and everyone on the street had noticed and nobody had mentioned it.
One afternoon a young woman collecting a blouse finally asked.
Uncle, you make everything perfectly. Why are your own clothes like that?
Yusuf looked down at his sleeve as though seeing it for the first time.
Because I make mine last, he said. At the end of the day, with whatever cloth is left, when my eyes are finished. Every time I sit down to do it properly, someone comes in with something urgent.
He smiled, and it was not a sad smile, only an accurate one.
Forty-one years of leftovers, he said. You get used to a loose collar.
She came back the following week with two metres of good cotton and refused to take it away. He made himself a shirt. It fitted.
He wore it only on Fridays, because it seemed too fine for ordinary days — which, his wife said, rather proved the whole point.
