Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (5 page)

The problem, of course, was that
people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They
needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out
for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best
for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That’s how most
people thought.

Precious Ramotswe had learned about good and evil at
Sunday School. The cousin had taken her there when she was six, and she had
gone there every Sunday without fail until she was eleven. That was enough time
for her to learn all about right and wrong, although she had been
puzzled—and remained so—when it came to certain other aspects of
religion. She could not believe that the Lord had walked on water—you
just couldn’t do that—nor had she believed the story about the
feeding of the five thousand, which was equally impossible. These were lies,
she was sure of it, and the biggest lie of all was that the Lord had no Daddy
on this earth. That was untrue because even children knew that you needed a
father to make a child, and that rule applied to cattle and chickens and
people, all the same. But right and wrong—that was another matter, and
she had experienced no difficulty in understanding that it was wrong to lie,
and steal, and kill other people.

If people needed clear guidelines,
there was nobody better to do this than Mma Mothibi, who had run the Sunday
School at Mochudi for over twelve years. She was a short lady, almost entirely
round, who spoke with an exceptionally deep voice. She taught the children
hymns, in both Setswana and English, and because they learned their singing
from her the children’s choir all sang an octave below everybody else, as
if they were frogs.

The children, dressed in their best clothes, sat in
rows at the back of the church when the service had finished and were taught by
Mma Mothibi. She read the Bible to them, and made them recite the Ten
Commandments over and over again, and told them religious stories from a small
blue book which she said came from London and was not available anywhere else
in the country.

“These are the rules for being good,” she
intoned. “A boy must always rise early and say his prayers. Then he must
clean his shoes and help his mother to prepare the family’s breakfast, if
they have breakfast. Some people have no breakfast because they are poor. Then
he must go to school and do everything that his teacher tells him. In that way
he will learn to be a clever Christian boy who will go to Heaven later on, when
the Lord calls him home. For girls, the rules are the same, but they must also
be careful about boys and must be ready to tell boys that they are Christians.
Some boys will not understand this …”

Yes, thought
Precious Ramotswe. Some boys do not understand this, and even there, in that
Sunday School there was such a boy, that Josiah, who was a wicked boy, although
he was only nine. He insisted on sitting next to Precious in Sunday School,
even when she tried to avoid him. He was always looking at her and smiling
encouragingly, although she was two years older than he was. He tried also to
make sure that his leg touched hers, which angered her, and made her shift in
her seat, away from him.

But worst of all, he would undo the buttons of
his trousers and point to that thing that boys have, and expect her to look.
She did not like this, as it was not something that should happen in a Sunday
School. What was so special about that, anyway? All boys had that thing.

At last she told Mma Mothibi about it, and the teacher listened
gravely.

“Boys, men,” she said. “They’re all
the same. They think that this thing is something special and they’re all
so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.”

She told
Precious to tell her next time it happened. She just had to raise her hand a
little, and Mma Mothibi would see her. That would be the signal.

It
happened the next week. While Mma Mothibi was at the back of the class, looking
at the Sunday School books which the children had laid out before them, Josiah
undid a button and whispered to Precious that she should look down. She kept
her eyes on her book and raised her left hand slightly. He could not see this,
of course, but Mma Mothibi did. She crept up behind the boy and raised her
Bible into the air. Then she brought it down on his head, with a resounding
thud that made the children start.

Josiah buckled under the blow. Mma
Mothibi now came round to his front and pointed at his open fly. Then she
raised the Bible and struck him on the top of the head again, even harder than
before.

That was the last time that Josiah bothered Precious Ramotswe,
or any other girl for that matter. For her part, Precious learned an important
lesson about how to deal with men, and this lesson stayed with her for many
years, and was to prove very useful later on, as were all the lessons of Sunday
School.

The Cousin’
s Departure

The
cousin looked after Precious for the first eight years of her life. She might
have stayed indefinitely—which would have suited Obed—as the cousin
kept house for him and never complained or asked him for money. But he
recognised, when the time came, that there might be issues of pride and that
the cousin might wish to marry again, in spite of what had happened last time.
So he readily gave his blessing when the cousin announced that she had been
seeing a man, that he had proposed, and that she had accepted.

“I could take Precious with me,” she said. “I feel that
she is my daughter now. But then, there is you …”

“Yes,” said Obed. “There is me. Would you take me
too?”

The cousin laughed. “My new husband is a rich man,
but I think that he wants to marry only one person.”

Obed made
arrangements for the wedding, as he was the cousin’s nearest relative and
it fell to him to do this. He did it readily, though, because of all she had
done for him. He arranged for the slaughter of two cattle and for the brewing
of enough beer for two hundred people. Then, with the cousin on his arm, he
entered the church and saw the new husband and his people, and other distant
cousins, and their friends, and people from the village, invited and uninvited,
waiting and watching.

After the wedding ceremony, they went back to
the house, where canvas tarpaulins had been hooked up between thorn trees and
borrowed chairs set out. The old people sat down while the young moved about
and talked to one another, and sniffed the air at the great quantities of meat
that were sizzling on the open fires. Then they ate, and Obed made a speech of
thanks to the cousin and the new husband, and the new husband replied that he
was grateful to Obed for looking after this woman so well.

The new
husband owned two buses, which made him wealthy. One of these, the Molepolole
Special Express, had been pressed into service for the wedding, and was decked
for the occasion with bright blue cloth. In the other, they drove off after the
party, with the husband at the wheel and the new bride sitting in the seat
immediately behind him. There were cries of excitement, and ululation from the
women, and the bus drove off into happiness.

They set up home ten miles
south of Gaborone, in an adobe-plastered house which the new husband’s
brother had built for him. It had a red roof and white walls, and a compound,
in the traditional style, with a walled yard to the front. At the back, there
was a small shack for a servant to live in, and a lean-to latrine made out of
galvanised tin. The cousin had a kitchen with a shining new set of pans and two
cookers. She had a large new South African paraffin-powered fridge, which
purred quietly all day, and kept everything icy cold within. Every evening, her
husband came home with the day’s takings from his buses, and she helped
him to count the money. She proved to be an excellent bookkeeper, and was soon
running that part of the business with conspicuous success.

She made
her new husband happy in other ways. As a boy he had been bitten by a jackal,
and had scars across his face where a junior doctor at the Scottish Missionary
Hospital at Molepolole had ineptly sewn the wounds. No woman had told him that
he was handsome before, and he had never dreamed that any would, being more
used to the wince of sympathy. The cousin, though, said that he was the most
good-looking man she had ever met, and the most virile too. This was not mere
flattery—she was telling the truth, as she saw it, and his heart was
filled with the warmth that flows from the well-directed compliment.

“I know you are missing me,” the cousin wrote to Precious.
“But I know that you want me to be happy. I am very happy now. I have a
very kind husband who has bought me wonderful clothes and makes me very happy
every day. One day, you will come and stay with us, and we can count the trees
again and sing hymns together, as we always used to. Now you must look after
your father, as you are old enough to do that, and he is a good man too. I want
you to be happy, and that is what I pray for, every night. God look after
Precious Ramotswe. God watch her tonight and forever. Amen.”

Goats

As a girl, Precious Ramotswe liked to draw, an
activity which the cousin had encouraged from an early age. She had been given
a sketching pad and a set of coloured pencils for her tenth birthday, and her
talent had soon become apparent. Obed Ramotswe was proud of her ability to fill
the virgin pages of her sketchbook with scenes of everyday Mochudi life. Here
was a sketch which showed the pond in front of the hospital—it was all
quite recognisable—and here was a picture of the hospital matron looking
at a donkey. And on this page was a picture of the shop, of the Small Upright
General Dealer, with things in front of it which could be sacks of mealies or
perhaps people sitting down—one could not tell—but they were
excellent sketches and he had already pinned several up on the walls of the
living room of their house, high up, near the ceiling, where the flies
sat.

Her teachers knew of this ability, and told her that she might
one day be a great artist, with her pictures on the cover of the Botswana
Calendar. This encouraged her, and sketch followed sketch. Goats, cattle,
hills, pumpkins, houses; there was so much for the artist’s eye around
Mochudi that there was no danger that she would run out of subjects.

The school got to hear of an art competition for children. The Museum in
Gaborone had asked every school in the country to submit a picture by one of
its pupils, on the theme “Life in Botswana of Today.” Of course
there was no doubt about whose work would be submitted. Precious was asked to
draw a special picture—to take her time doing it—and then this
would be sent down to Gaborone as the entry from Mochudi.

She drew her
picture on a Saturday, going out early with her sketchbook and returning some
hours later to fill in the details inside the house. It was a very good
drawing, she thought, and her teacher was enthusiastic when she showed it to
her the following Monday.

“This will win the prize for
Mochudi,” she said. “Everybody will be proud.”

The
drawing was placed carefully between two sheets of corrugated cardboard and
sent off, registered post, to the Museum. Then there was a silence for five
weeks, during which time everybody forgot about the competition. Only when the
letter came to the Principal, and he, beaming, read it out to Precious, were
they reminded.

“You have won first prize,” he said.
“You are to go to Gaborone, with your teacher and myself, and your
father, to get the prize from the Minister of Education at a special
ceremony.”

It was too much for her, and she wept, but soon
stopped, and was allowed to leave school early to run back to give the news to
her Daddy.

They travelled down with the Principal in his truck,
arriving far too early for the ceremony, and spent several hours sitting in the
Museum yard, waiting for the doors to open. But at last they did, and others
came, teachers, people from the newspapers, members of the Legislature. Then
the Minister arrived in a black car and people put down their glasses of orange
juice and swallowed the last of their sandwiches.

She saw her painting
hanging in a special place, on a room divider, and there was a small card
pinned underneath it. She went with her teacher to look at it, and she saw,
with leaping heart, her name neatly typed out underneath the picture:
PRE
CIOUS RAMOTSWE (
10
) (MOCHUDI GOVERNMENT
JUNIOR SCHOOL)
. And underneath that, also typed, the title which the
Museum itself had provided: Cattle Beside Dam.

She stood rigid,
suddenly appalled. This was not true. The picture was of goats, but they had
thought it was cattle! She was getting a prize for a cattle picture, by false
pretences.

“What is wrong?” asked her father. “You
must be very pleased. Why are you looking so sad?”

She could not
say anything. She was about to become a criminal, a perpetrator of fraud. She
could not possibly take a prize for a cattle picture when she simply did not
deserve that.

But now the Minister was standing beside her, and he was
preparing to make a speech. She looked up at him, and he smiled warmly.

“You are a very good artist,” he said. “Mochudi must be
proud of you.”

She looked at the toes of her shoes. She would
have to confess.

“It is not a picture of cattle,” she said.
“It is a picture of goats. You cannot give me a prize for a
mistake.”

The Minister frowned, and looked at the label. Then he
turned back to her and said: “They are the ones who have made a mistake.
I also think those are goats. I do not think they are cattle.”

He
cleared his throat and the Director of the Museum asked for silence.

“This excellent picture of goats,” said the Minister,
“shows how talented are our young people in this country. This young lady
will grow up to be a fine citizen and maybe a famous artist. She deserves her
prize, and I am now giving it to her.”