Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (2 page)

Mma Ramotswe found
herself staring in frank wonderment at Happy Bapetsi. There was no doubt but
that she was telling the truth; what astonished her was the effrontery, the
sheer, naked effrontery of men. How dare this person come and impose on this
helpful, happy person! What a piece of chicanery, of fraud! What a piece of
outright theft in fact!

“Can you help me?” asked Happy
Bapetsi. “Can you find out whether this man is really my Daddy? If he is,
then I will be a dutiful daughter and put up with him. If he is not, then I
should prefer for him to go somewhere else.”

Mma Ramotswe did not
hesitate. “I’ll find out,” she said. “It may take me a
day or two, but I’ll find out!”

Of course it was easier
said than done. There were blood tests these days, but she doubted very much
whether this person would agree to that. No, she would have to try something
more subtle, something that would show beyond any argument whether he was the
Daddy or not. She stopped in her line of thought. Yes! There was something
biblical about this story. What, she thought, would Solomon have done?

MMA RAMOTSWE picked up the nurse’s uniform
from her friend Sister Gogwe. It was a bit tight, especially round the arms, as
Sister Gogwe, although generously proportioned, was slightly more slender than
Mma Ramotswe. But once she was in it, and had pinned the nurse’s watch to
her front, she was a perfect picture of a staff sister at the Princess Marina
Hospital. It was a good disguise, she thought, and she made a mental note to
use it at some time in the future.

As she drove to Happy
Bapetsi’s house in her tiny white van, she reflected on how the African
tradition of support for relatives could cripple people. She knew of one man, a
sergeant of police, who was supporting an uncle, two aunts, and a second
cousin. If you believed in the old Setswana morality, you couldn’t turn a
relative away, and there was a lot to be said for that. But it did mean that
charlatans and parasites had a very much easier time of it than they did
elsewhere. They were the people who ruined the system, she thought.
They’re the ones who are giving the old ways a bad name.

As she
neared the house, she increased her speed. This was an errand of mercy, after
all, and if the Daddy were sitting in his chair outside the front door he would
have to see her arrive in a cloud of dust. The Daddy was there, of course,
enjoying the morning sun, and he sat up straight in his chair as he saw the
tiny white van sweep up to the gate. Mma Ramotswe turned off the engine and ran
out of the car up to the house.

“Dumela Rra,” she greeted
him rapidly. “Are you Happy Bapetsi’s Daddy?”

The
Daddy rose to his feet. “Yes,” he said proudly. “I am the
Daddy.”

Mma Ramotswe panted, as if trying to get her breath
back.

“I’m sorry to say that there has been an accident.
Happy was run over and is very sick at the hospital. Even now they are
performing a big operation on her.”

The Daddy let out a wail.
“Aiee! My daughter! My little baby Happy!”

A good actor,
thought Mma Ramotswe, unless … No, she preferred to trust Happy
Bapetsi’s instinct. A girl should know her own Daddy even if she had not
seen him since she was a baby.

“Yes,” she went on.
“It is very sad. She is very sick, very sick. And they need lots of blood
to make up for all the blood she’s lost.”

The Daddy
frowned. “They must give her that blood. Lots of blood. I can
pay.”

“It’s not the money,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“Blood is free. We don’t have the right sort. We will have to get
some from her family, and you are the only one she has. We must ask you for
some blood.”

The Daddy sat down heavily.

“I am an
old man,” he said.

Mma Ramotswe sensed that it would work. Yes,
this man was an impostor.

“That is why we are asking you,”
she said. “Because she needs so much blood, they will have to take about
half your blood. And that is very dangerous for you. In fact, you might
die.”

The Daddy’s mouth fell open.

“Die?”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But
then you are her father and we know that you would do this thing for your
daughter. Now could you come quickly, or it will be too late. Doctor Moghile is
waiting.”

The Daddy opened his mouth, and then closed it.

“Come on,” said Mma Ramotswe, reaching down and taking his
wrist. “I’ll help you to the van.”

The Daddy rose to
his feet, and then tried to sit down again. Mma Ramotswe gave him a tug,

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

“You must,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Now come on.”

The Daddy shook his head. “No,” he said faintly. “I
won’t. You see, I’m not really her Daddy. There has been a
mistake.”

Mma Ramotswe let go of his wrist. Then, her arms
folded, she stood before him and addressed him directly.

“So you
are not the Daddy! I see! I see! Then what are you doing sitting in that chair
and eating her food? Have you heard of the Botswana Penal Code and what it says
about people like you? Have you?”

The Daddy looked down at the
ground and shook his head.

“Well,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“You go inside that house and get your things. You have five minutes.
Then I am going to take you to the bus station and you are going to get on a
bus. Where do you really live?”

“Lobatse,” said the
Daddy. “But I don’t like it down there.”

“Well,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Maybe if you started doing
something instead of just sitting in a chair you might like it a bit more.
There are lots of melons to grow down there. How about that, for a
start?”

The Daddy looked miserable.

“Inside!”
she ordered. “Four minutes left now!”

WHEN HAPPY Bapetsi returned home she found the
Daddy gone and his room cleared out. There was a note from Mma Ramotswe on the
kitchen table, which she read, and as she did so, her smile returned.

THAT WAS not your Daddy after all. I found out
the best way. I got him to tell me himself. Maybe you will find the real Daddy
one day. Maybe not. But in the meantime, you can be happy again.

CHAPTER TWO

ALL
THOSE YEARS AGO

W
E DON’T forget, thought Mma Ramotswe. Our
heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes
be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of
places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly,
to remind us who we are. And who am I? I am Precious Ramotswe, citizen of
Botswana, daughter of Obed Ramotswe who died because he had been a miner and
could no longer breathe. His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down
the lives of ordinary people?

I AM Obed
Ramotswe, and I was born near Mahalapye in 1930. Mahalapye is halfway between
Gaborone and Francistown, on that road that seems to go on and on forever. It
was a dirt road in those days, of course, and the railway line was much more
important. The track came down from Bulawayo, crossed into Botswana at
Plumtree, and then headed south down the side of the country all the way to
Mafikeng, on the other side.

As a boy I used to watch the trains as
they drew up at the siding. They let out great clouds of steam, and we would
dare one another to run as close as we could to it. The stokers would shout at
us, and the station master would blow his whistle, but they never managed to
get rid of us. We hid behind plants and boxes and dashed out to ask for coins
from the closed windows of the trains. We saw the white people look out of
their windows, like ghosts, and sometimes they would toss us one of their
Rhodesian pennies—large copper coins with a hole in the middle—or,
if we were lucky, a tiny silver coin we called a tickey, which could buy us a
small tin of syrup.

Mahalapye was a straggling village of huts made of
brown, sun-baked mud bricks and a few tin-roofed buildings. These belonged to
the Government or the Railways, and they seemed to us to represent distant,
unattainable luxury. There was a school run by an old Anglican priest and a
white woman whose face had been half-destroyed by the sun. They both spoke
Setswana, which was unusual, but they taught us in English, insisting, on the
pain of a thrashing, that we left our own language outside in the
playground.

On the other side of the road was the beginning of the
plain that stretched out into the Kalahari. It was featureless land, cluttered
with low thorn trees, on the branches of which there perched the hornbills and
the fluttering molopes, with their long, trailing tail feathers. It was a world
that seemed to have no end, and that, I think, is what made Africa in those
days so different. There was no end to it. A man could walk, or ride, forever,
and he would never get anywhere.

I am sixty now, and I do not think God
wants me to live much longer. Perhaps there will be a few years more, but I
doubt it; I saw Dr Moffat at the Dutch Reformed Hospital in Mochudi who
listened to my chest. He could tell that I had been a miner, just by listening,
and he shook his head and said that the mines have many different ways of
hurting a man. As he spoke, I remembered a song which the Sotho miners used to
sing. They sang: “The mines eat men. Even when you have left them, the
mines may still be eating you.” We all knew this was true. You could be
killed by falling rock or you could be killed years later, when going
underground was just a memory, or even a bad dream that visited you at night.
The mines would come back for their payment, just as they were coming back for
me now. So I was not surprised by what Dr Moffat said.

Some people
cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and
wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did
not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me
sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my
mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa, because
they say that where you go, wherever that may be, there is no smell and no
taste.

I’m not saying that I’m a brave man—I’m
not—but I really don’t seem to mind this news I have been given. I
can look back over my sixty years and think of everything that I have seen and
of how I started with nothing and ended up with almost two hundred cattle. And
I have a good daughter, a loyal daughter, who looks after me well and makes me
tea while I sit here in the sun and look out to the hills in the distance. When
you see these hills from a distance, they are blue; as all the distances in
this country are. We are far from the sea here, with Angola and Namibia between
us and the coast, and yet we have this great empty ocean of blue above us and
around us. No sailor could be lonelier than a man standing in the middle of our
land, with the miles and miles of blue about him.

I have never seen the
sea, although a man I worked with in the mines once invited me to his place
down in Zululand. He told me that it had green hills that reached down to the
Indian Ocean and that he could look out of his doorway and see ships in the
distance. He said that the women in his village brewed the best beer in the
country and that a man could sit in the sun there for many years and never do
anything except make children and drink maize beer. He said that if I went with
him, he might be able to get me a wife and that they might overlook the fact
that I was not a Zulu—if I was prepared to pay the father enough money
for the girl.

But why should I want to go to Zululand? Why should I
ever want anything but to live in Botswana, and to marry a Tswana girl? I said
to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of
his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. I
told him that in Botswana we did not have the green hills that he had in his
place, nor the sea, but we had the Kalahari and land that stretched farther
than one could imagine. I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then
although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not
mind the sun that beats down and down. So I never went with him to Zululand and
I never saw the sea, ever. But that has not made me unhappy, not once.

So I sit here now, quite near the end, and think of everything that has
happened to me. Not a day passes, though, that my mind does not go to God and
to thoughts of what it will be like to die. I am not frightened of this,
because I do not mind pain, and the pain that I feel is really quite bearable.
They gave me pills—large white ones—and they told me to take these
if the pain in my chest became too great. But these pills make me sleepy, and I
prefer to be awake. So I think of God and wonder what he will say to me when I
stand before him.