The House of Unexpected Sisters

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mr. Polopetsi looked anxious once more. “So, he wouldn’t wear them either? Just like Phuti Radiphuti?”

  Mma Ramotswe realised that she would have to take control of the conversation. “Let’s not talk about clothes,” she said. “Mma Makutsi and I have talked enough about clothes for one day. Do you have any news for us, Mr. Polopetsi? Have you heard anything we ought to be aware of?” The request was clear enough, and it pleased Mr. Polopetsi, who suddenly perked up. He prided himself on the information that he picked up from what he described as his “sources.” These were, in fact, his senior students at the school; teenagers, being the worst gossips of all, liked to pass on what they heard from their parents. Because the school was not far from the government quarter, many of these parents were party to the sort of information that did not get into the newspapers. Little nuggets of information about who was doing what, and with whom, and what might be expected to happen as a result, were regularly imparted to Mr. Polopetsi at odd moments in the school chemistry lab. Many of these were passed on to Mma Ramotswe, not in any idle, gossipy way, but as part of what Mr. Polopetsi saw as an intelligence briefing. A private detective needed to know what was going on, and he took the view that this information was safe in Mma Ramotswe’s hands, as she would never use it for anything but good purposes. And in that respect, Mr. Polopetsi was quite right: Mma Ramotswe sometimes complained that she could not choose her clients and must, of necessity, do her best by all of them, but she had never acted in such a way as to oppress or cheat anybody; never—and she never would.

  Mr. Polopetsi took a sip of his tea. “There is something, Mma Ramotswe,” he said.

  They both waited for him to continue, but he simply took another sip of tea.

  Eventually Mma Ramotswe broke the silence. “I’m listening, Rra, but take your time. There is no rush in these things.”

  “We have all day,” said Mma Makutsi. “And tomorrow, if necessary.”

  This remark was meant humorously, but it unnerved Mr. Polopetsi. He glanced nervously at Mma Makutsi before he continued. “I do not want to take up too much of your time, Mma Ramotswe.”

  Mma Ramotswe sat back in her chair with the air of one for whom time was not of the slightest concern.

  “There is somebody I know,” began Mr. Polopetsi, “or rather, it is somebody I don’t quite know, but who is the sister of somebody I know. She is a teacher at the Gaborone Secondary School. She is meant to teach games—you know, netball and running and things like that—but she is interested in teaching chemistry too.” He paused, and then shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to let the games teachers teach chemistry. This lady is very vague on her chemical symbols. You know, Mma Ramotswe, I discovered that she thought the symbol for salt was S. Can you believe that, Mma?”

  From behind him, Mma Makutsi snorted contemptuously. “Hah! Salt is Sal. Everybody knows that.”

  Mr. Polopetsi spun round. He seemed almost distraught. “Oh, no, Mma Makutsi: whoever has told you that is very wrong. Salt is not Sal. Salt is sodium chloride. That is what you put on your food. S is sulphur.”

  Mma Makutsi looked puzzled. “You put sulphur on your food? Is that what you’re telling us, Rra?”

  Mma Ramotswe intervened. “No, he didn’t say that, Mma. You didn’t say we should put sulphur on our food, did you, Mr. Polopetsi? You said that the symbol for sulphur was S.”

  “That is quite correct,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “Sodium is Na, and salt is therefore NaCl.” He paused. “But if you go into a café and you want to ask the waiter for salt, do not say, ‘Please give me the NaCl.’ ”

  It was Mr. Polopetsi’s little joke, and he waited expectantly for their reaction.

  “That is very funny, Rra,” said Mma Makutsi. “I shall remember not to do that.”

  Mr. Polopetsi brightened. “And here’s another funny thing, Mma Makutsi,” he said. “There is a very funny poem that I learned when I was studying chemistry. I have never forgotten it. Would you like to hear it?”

  “We should like that very much,” replied Mma Ramotswe.

  Mr. Polopetsi sat upright in his chair. “My old friend,” he began, “is down below, his face we’ll see no more, for what he thought was H2O was H2SO4!”

  There was silence, at least until Mma Ramotswe made an attempt at laughter. “Poor man,” she said. And then, rather lamely, “Is your friend late?”

  Mr. Polopetsi frowned. How could anybody not appreciate the poem? Was Mma Ramotswe being deliberately slow?

  “He is late because he took the wrong pills, I think,” said Mma Makutsi. “He was meant to take an H2O pill and he took an H2SO4 pill. That is why he is late.”

  Mr. Polopetsi spun round again. “No, Mma,” he said. “That is not right. H2O is water and H2SO4 is sulphuric acid. My friend drank sulphuric acid rather than water and became late. That is what happened.”

  Mma Makutsi made a sympathetic noise of the sort that people make when they hear that others are late. “I’m very sorry to hear this,” she said. “It is very sad.”

  Mr. Polopetsi stared at her. “It’s not true, Mma. It’s a poem; I told you that. It’s a very funny poem.”

  “I am glad that he is not late,” interjected Mma Ramotswe. “But returning to the person you were speaking about, the person you say you don’t really know, is this the sports teacher who doesn’t know the difference between sodium and sulphur?”

  Mr. Polopetsi shook his head. “No, it’s not her, Mma. It’s her sister.”

  Mma Ramotswe digested this information. There were odd side-roads in any conversation with Mr. Polopetsi, and all that business about chemical symbols had been one such deviation. Once you got round all those, though, and were back on track in a conversation, he could explain things clearly enough.

  “Perhaps you should tell us about this lady,” she suggested. As she spoke, she glanced out of the window. The sun was on the acacia tree outside, throwing delicate shadows from the foliage. These shadows fell on the trunk of the tree, creating patterns of darkness and light, a mottled effect. A tiny creature, a lizard or gecko, moved suddenly from one of these shadows, clinging to the bark of the tree, becoming sunlit for a few seconds before retreating into the shade. It is going about its business, she thought; this small being had matters as large and important, to it, as our own human affairs. And most of the time, of course, we did not notice such things because it was our own business that we were concerned with, and our hearts were not large enough for things that were so much smaller than we were.

  Mr. Polopetsi began. “This sister—that is, the sister of the teacher…”

  “Yes, Rra,” Mma Ramotswe encouraged. “This sister…”

  “She lives not far from here, out towards Tlokweng, but not quite so far out. Maybe a mile or two; I have not been to her house, but it is somewhere over there.” He gestured vaguely out of the window. “Her name is Charity Mompoloki. She was married to a man called Mompoloki, but he is late now. He was always smoking, you see, right from the time he was ten years old, they told me, and now he is late. Late from smoking.”

  Mma Makutsi made a disapproving noise from her desk behind Mr. Polopetsi. “If you’re smoking by the time you’re ten, then you’re not going to last very long.”

  Mr. Polopetsi nodded his head in agreement. “Your lungs are still growing then,” he said. “What chance do they have if you’re smoking? All those tars.”

  “You’re a chemist,” observed Mma Ramotswe. “You know about these things.”

  “Yes, I know about them, Mma Ramotswe, but I also know about these tobacco people who are always trying to recruit new smokers when the old ones give up—or become late. They say: now we must find new customers to buy these cigarettes of ours. How about ten-year-olds? How about young women? And so it goes on—more smokers to buy more cigarettes and then become late.”

  Mma Ramotswe did not like cigarette smoke and there was nothing here with which she was in disagreement. But she was keen to steer the c
onversation back to Charity Mompoloki.

  “This Charity,” she said. “Since she lost her husband, what does she do? Are there children?”

  “I was told there are two children,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “I do not really know these people, and so there may be more, but I was told there are twins—both boys. They are still young. Maybe five or six—something like that.”

  “It is a shame for them,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is a shame for them to lose their daddy like that.”

  Mr. Polopetsi looked down at the floor. “There are many children like that, Mma. Remember?”

  He did not have to explain further. There had been that disease and it had taken such a toll; mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts—the children had lost all these people, to such an extent that even the grandmothers, those resilient, uncomplaining women who could support the very sky on their shoulders, even they had buckled under the strain of looking after the children who were left behind.

  “At least these children have their mother,” pointed out Mma Makutsi. “There are many who do not.”

  Mma Ramotswe thought of Mma Potokwane. The children of Botswana still had Mma Potokwane, who had devoted her life to looking after orphans. “But this Charity lady,” she pressed. “What does she do for money?”

  “She had a job,” answered Mr. Polopetsi. “It was quite a good job, Mma. I say ‘was.’ She does not have that job any more, and that is why I am talking about her now.”

  “Ow!” exclaimed Mma Makutsi. “The economy. That’s the problem. The economy. Everything is going well and people are very happy and then along comes the economy. Ow! And suddenly there are no jobs any longer and we’re back to where we started.”

  Mr. Polopetsi did not respond to this, but continued with his story. “I heard all of this from the teacher, but I think it will be true. You see, she—that is, her sister—had a good job with a firm that sells office furniture.” He turned to face Mma Makutsi. “It’s not like the place your husband has, Mma. He sells beds, doesn’t he?”

  Mma Makutsi nodded; but correction was necessary. “Not only beds, Rra, but tables and chairs—for the dining room. And all the furniture needed for the living room: sofas, single chairs, coffee tables, wardrobes for the bedroom, chests of drawers for your clothes…”

  Mma Ramotswe cut her short. “This other place, Rra—this office place—is it over near Kgale Hill?”

  Mr. Polopetsi turned round again. “Yes, it is over there, Mma. Do you know it?”

  “I have driven past it,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It’s called Office something, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Polopetsi frowned. “The Office Place, I think.”

  “That’s it,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It’s a big warehouse. I know somebody who went in there once and said it was full of filing cabinets. As far as the eye could see, there were filing cabinets.” She looked over towards Mma Makutsi, who was proud of her filing prowess. Filing, she understood, had been her strongest subject at the Botswana Secretarial College, from which Mma Makutsi had, of course, graduated with a final mark of ninety-seven per cent.

  At the mention of filing cabinets, Mma Makutsi’s glasses flashed in a beam of sunlight. “I must go there,” she muttered.

  Mr. Polopetsi continued with his tale. Charity Mompoloki had enjoyed her job selling office furniture and had been good at it. Then, quite out of the blue, she had been fired. There had been a pretext, of course: she had been rude to an important customer, who had complained and had pressed for her removal. Now she was without work and needed help.

  “To get her job back?” asked Mma Makutsi.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Polopetsi.

  Mma Ramotswe looked concerned. “But if she had been rude to a customer, Rra? Will they not argue that her dismissal was justified—even if it was far too harsh?”

  “Oh, they may argue that,” said Mr. Polopetsi, “but the point is this, Mma Ramotswe: she wasn’t rude at all.”

  “Ah,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Then that makes a big difference.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “It makes a very big difference.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment while they reflected on the case. Then Mma Ramotswe broke the silence.

  “I think, perhaps, we should have another cup of tea,” she said.

  Nobody disagreed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  YOU COULD FIND YOURSELF SHAKING YOUR HEAD SO MUCH

  SHE PICKED UP a fine piece of Botswana beef from the butcher before returning to Zebra Drive that evening. The butcher, whose own father had known her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, always gave her the best cut, just as he always managed to come up with some reminiscence of his father’s dealings with Obed. There were not many stories to tell on the subject, but he made the most of those there were, recycling them every so often with additional details to add colour. Had her father ever told her about the time they saved a cow from drowning after a particularly heavy storm? Had he ever mentioned a man called Cephas Pilane who was a bit of a gambler and who had lost a donkey in a ridiculous wager? Had he ever told her about the time the two of them—his father and hers—were chased by a bull and had to climb a thorn tree, much to their discomfort? The stories were old ones, much embroidered, but they were typical of the skein of tales that kept people together, that reminded them of who their people were and what they meant to them. You might think they were just stories about cattle and the men who owned them, but of course they were much more than that: they were stories about Botswana and what it meant to be a Motswana. And she never tired of hearing about her father—that great man, that unrivalled judge of cattle, her daddy, as she called him, and of whom she thought at some point every day, every single day, and whom she had loved with all her heart. It did not matter if the butcher told her the same things time and time again—she would never tire of hearing what he had to say.

  Back at the house, she parked her tiny white van in its customary place, put the beef in the fridge, and made herself a pot of red bush tea. She would drink the tea as she walked round the garden, carrying out her usual inspection of the vegetable patch—her beans were doing well, nurtured by the run-off water from the kitchen drain. In a dry country, no water is wasted, and Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had stretched out a hose pipe that would take the water from the drain, across a stretch of dusty garden, to the raised vegetable beds towards the back of their plot. There the hose fed the water into an old oil drum that acted as reservoir and from which much smaller pipes led to the individual beds. The final stage in this engineering marvel was the trailing of cotton threads from a bucket suspended above the plants; water would run down this thread drop by drop to the foot of each plant’s stem. No water thus fell on ground where nothing grew; every drop reached exactly the tiny patch of ground where it was needed.

  Everything was in order. The beans were obediently ripening; the tomatoes were weighing down their stems; the melons, fat, lazy, and yellow, were half hidden by their leaves but would be ready any day now to be plucked, cooked, and served with gravy. In fact…She bent down and felt the largest of the melons. Then she tapped on it gently, as if to see if anybody was in. It was just right, and she now lowered herself onto her haunches and gently separated the melon from its stalk. She would cook it that evening, to go with the beef from the butcher. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s favourite meal of all was just that: good Botswana beef, fed on the sweet grass of the veld, accompanied by boiled melon from their very own soil. What could be better than that? What country, anywhere on the face of this earth, could deliver bounty as honest, as nourishing, and as delicious?

  She had done much of the cooking by the time he came home. She had also collected Motholeli from school, where she had been at her girl guide meeting, started Puso on his homework, and generally tidied up the kitchen. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was slightly later than usual, as he had been dealing with a sophisticated modern car and had none of the diagnostic equipment that particular make of car needed. Something was wrong with the car’s sou
l, he thought; a modern mechanic might put it differently, and might talk about malfunctioning sensors or a software problem of some sort, but in his view it was the car’s soul. Somewhere deep in the electronic gadgetry orchestrating the engine, there was something wrong; and just as the failure of one organ in the human body may disrupt the performance of the whole, this little glitch had thrown the whole mighty engine into disarray. It had been a frustrating experience, but he had eventually solved the problem by disconnecting and then reconnecting as many wires as he could see. One of them had a faulty contact point and had responded to this shock therapy.

  “It’s only by chance that I fixed it,” he said, lowering himself into a chair by the kitchen table. “What a fuss it was.”

  “Well, you did it,” she said. “That’s the important thing.” She leaned forward and sniffed at the stew. Mma Ramotswe believed in using your nose while cooking; too many people, she thought, relied on taste, and were always dipping a spoon into a dish to see how it was faring. In her view, that was unnecessary—and unhygienic. You could find out everything you needed to know through the sense of smell. A good stew smelled like a…well, a good stew; it would remind you of that time when the sun has just sunk over the Kalahari, when the cattle have been brought back into their kraal against a background of gentle lowing, when the moon is floating up in the sky over Botswana and the children are sitting about the fire, waiting for their dinner. It smelled like that. It smelled like the world when, early in the morning, you made your way through the bush and the birds were just beginning to greet the world and the delicate leaves of the acacia trees were opening to the warmth of the gold with which the land was painted. It smelled like that, and all you had to do was to train yourself to know when something was just right.

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was thinking of cars, though. He was thinking about the loss of soul in cars and what this meant for people like him—mechanics, who were priests of a sort. There would be no role for mechanics in the new world that was being created around them; a world in which you never fixed anything but simply replaced it with a new part. Look at what had happened to carburettors; look at what had happened to gearboxes; look at what had happened even to the lights that lit up the inside of a car when you opened the door. They used to have bulbs that you could take out and change—tiny, fragile things that came in flimsy cardboard boxes with the address of the factory printed on them—somewhere in England, or Germany, where he had heard the cattle were very well watered and were fat; and these bulbs, these little bubbles of impossibly thin glass, would fit just about any car that needed a replacement. Where were those bulbs now? They had gone, and now the lights in a car were whole units, square and chunky, that had to be specially ordered if they failed, which the manufacturers said they never would do, because they were meant to last for one hundred thousand hours, as he had seen claimed in the handbook of a car he had recently serviced. One hundred thousand hours…That sounded like a lifetime to him; it sounded like many generations of old bulbs, stretching off into the distance in a long line of little cardboard boxes.