When the price of cooking oil jumps, I see it in the eyes of mothers who come in just before Maghrib prayer—how they linger, how they calculate. I don’t need a UN report to tell me inflation has a blade; I watch it cut daily. The government says subsidies hold, but the men at the back of the queue whisper otherwise, and I believe them. They always do—shift the weight to the poor while claiming to steady the ship. I extend credit on paper because I remember 1967, remember what hunger looks like when borders change faster than the flour runs out. No policy survives contact with an empty stomach, and no politician has ever filled one without first listening to the grocer.
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