How to Raise an Elephant

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Bathing the skin in red bush tea cleansed it and opened the pores, and if only Mma Makutsi were to try it, she might find it would help. And now, faced with this hard-nosed scepticism, she felt tempted to point out that she, Mma Ramotswe, who used a lot of red bush tea—principally internally—had very clear skin, when compared with Mma Makutsi’s. But that, she realised, would be unkind, and unkindness was never the way to convert others to a truth of any sort. You did not change anybody, she had always believed, by shouting at them or by making them feel bad about themselves. On the contrary, it was kindness and concern that changed people within, that could soften the hardest of hearts, that could turn harsh words into words of love. That had been proved time and time again, and she had seen it herself; she had seen the power of a kind word to change a scowling or suspicious countenance.

  So now she said to Mma Makutsi, “Well, Mma, you’re right—as you usually are.” Was that going too far, she wondered. Perhaps not, because Mma Makutsi smiled in response and inclined her head slightly, as if to express agreement. “Yes, you’re right, Mma. It’s important to have evidence for anything. But, even so, I was thinking that your complexion is really very nice, Mma—you have beautiful skin. I have heard many people say that.”

  Mma Makutsi’s eyes widened. “You’ve heard people say that, Mma?”

  Mma Ramotswe swallowed. She always told the truth—if at all possible—but now here she was being drawn into a lie. So she retrieved the situation by saying, “I have not exactly heard them, Mma, but I can well believe that is what they are saying.” She paused, noting the fall in Mma Makutsi’s face. “Mind you, Mma, I have heard people talk about how fashionable you are. I have heard people say that they like your clothes and your shoes. They certainly say that.”

  She did not say who it was who had said that. It was Charlie, in fact, who had been talking to Fanwell and who had been overheard by Mma Ramotswe. He had said, “That Mma Makutsi, Fanwell, I’d rate her for her clothes, you know. She has expensive gear, ever since she married that Phuti Radiphuti. That furniture store of his…I think at her wedding she was standing there, and on her right was the furniture store. And the minister said to her, ‘Do you take this furniture store?’ And she said, ‘Yes, definitely. The whole lot please.’ ” Charlie had laughed. “That’s what marriage is, Fanwell. Cattle and furniture stores. Don’t tell yourself it’s about anything else.”

  Mma Makutsi was interested. “Who was it?” she asked.

  “Oh, just somebody,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They said very nice things.”

  “I’m pleased,” said Mma Makutsi. “I do my best in that department, you know.”

  And that provided Mma Ramotswe with her opportunity. “You do, Mma—you certainly do. That is very well known. But even your very nice skin might be made even nicer if you tried a bit of red bush tea. No harm in trying, Mma. They say that you pour the red bush tea onto a cloth so that it’s soaked through. Then you put the cloth on the skin and let it lie there for a few minutes. They say that this makes good skin even better.”

  She decided that was enough. The seed had been planted, and any further mention of it might be counterproductive. So she looked at her watch and said to Mma Makutsi through the open window of her car, “No, I think I shall just cook myself a tasty meal and then sit on the verandah until it’s time to go to bed.”

  Mma Makutsi had driven off and Mma Ramotswe had lingered at her gate, watching her friend’s car disappear. There was almost an hour of light left before night fell, and she would use that time, she thought, to do a bit of work in her garden. She had put a lot of effort into her bed of beans, and the plants were doing well. Then there were her tomatoes too—they were a new venture—and a melon patch that could probably do with a bit of weeding. If she made herself a large mug of red bush tea, she could take that with her and drink it as she attended to these gardening tasks. And then, when dusk came, she could go inside, have a bath—even without bath salts—and then cook the chicken that she had bought the day before and placed in the fridge. That, served with pumpkin, would be her dinner—and she need not show too much restraint in tackling it by herself. She could have both drumsticks if she wanted them, and all the skin, which she particularly prized. Crisp chicken skin, dusted with salt—oh, that would be a very fine dish for one unworried by too much guilt over what she ate. There might come a time when she would eat less chicken skin, but that time was not yet. For the time being, she was Mma Ramotswe, a lady of traditional build, who needed the occasional evening of comfort food when nobody else was watching. And after the chicken, she might have a fat cake, dusted with sugar, to round off the meal. There was one in the fridge and it would be a terrible waste if it were to be allowed to go stale.

  The house seemed so quiet. Children were like traffic noise: they made a constant background hum. It was something you got used to, as people who live near airports get used to the sound of jets landing and taking off. There was a difference, of course, between the background noise made by boys and that made by girls. Girls made a more peaceful noise, rather like running water, in a way, while their brothers made a sort of low-level clattering noise—the sound of things being shoved about and occasionally broken. Husbands, too, made a noise, now that she came to think about it. Their noise was a sort of shuffling noise, interrupted by the occasional cough or clearing of the throat and…and here she smiled at the thought…and the sound a beer bottle makes when its cap is taken off with a bottle-opener. Yes, that was a sound that accompanied many husbands when they came home from work. And why not? They had to have something in their lives, and the occasional bottle of cold beer was a reward that many men could justifiably claim as deserved. Poor men: they spent so much of their time working and often got little thanks for it. Yet all that many men wanted was to be loved, which was what everybody wanted, really, at the end of the day. And love did not cost anything; it could be given freely and the wells from which it was drawn could be easily filled again. There was no shortage of love in the world; it was as plentiful as oxygen—and as necessary.

  She thought all this on the threshold of the kitchen, while looking at the sink and the fridge and the chopping board. You could think these big things, she told herself, while looking at very small things.

  She turned on the radio, partly to break the unnerving silence, partly to hear the news broadcast that went out at that time of day. Nothing special seemed to have happened, and even the newsreader herself sounded bored with what she had to report. The Minister of Water Affairs had visited a dam and made a speech about the government’s plans to improve the water supply in certain remote villages. “If there is more rain,” the minister was quoted as saying, “then we will have more water.” This had brought applause, the newsreader said.

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. She was glad she did not have to make speeches about nothing and be reduced to saying that more rain meant more water. Really! But then she checked herself; the minister was doing his best. It could not be an easy job to be Minister of Water Affairs in a dry country like Botswana. Governments could do many things, but the one thing they could not do was to bring rain in a parched time. Perhaps people needed reminding of this, and needed to be told where water came from. It did not come from the government…

  She opened the fridge and took out the chicken. It was wrapped in butcher’s brown paper, and tied about with string. The butcher at the supermarket meat counter was an old admirer of Mma Ramotswe’s, and always took particular care with any meat she ordered, sometimes securing her parcels with coloured ribbon that no other customer seemed to merit. She was vaguely embarrassed by this—there had never been anything between them, although she had always been aware of his appreciative glances before she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had married. Thereafter, the butcher had behaved with utter probity, and had sent no glances her way, even if he did use special ribbon for her orders and insisted on serving her himself, elbowing his assist
ants out of the way when she appeared at the counter.

  This chicken, retrieved from a special shelf in the cold room, had come with a particular recommendation from him. “This is no ordinary chicken, Mma Ramotswe,” he said. “Most of those chickens over there…” And here he gestured towards the poultry section. “Most of them come from those big chicken farms. You know the ones. They have thousands and thousands of chickens all crowded together. And then they bring the chickens up from over the border in those big refrigerated trucks. No wonder those chickens taste of nothing, Mma.”

  She had thanked him. “I’m looking forward to cooking this one, Rra.”

  “It will be very tasty,” he said. “That is one of our free-range chickens. We do not have many. They are just for special customers.”

  “You’re very kind, Rra.”

  “That chicken will have eaten a lot of different things, you see, Mma. They wander around and peck at grubs. They are always pecking.”

  “That’s good, Rra.”

  “And they get a bit of exercise that way. That makes a difference.”

  And now she took the chicken from its plate and put it on the chopping board to be jointed. She would boil the chicken, as her father’s cousin had taught her to do in Mochudi all those years ago. Had her mother lived, then it would have been she who would have taught Mma Ramotswe the right way to cook chicken in Botswana, but the cousin had done that instead, and she had been a good teacher.

  She put the pieces of chicken into a pot, saving the carcass for the making of stock. She added carrots and onions and, as a special treat, since she alone would be eating this, a generous pinch of peri-peri chilli, to give the whole thing a kick. Then, with the pot heating up on the stove, she prepared the pumpkin, cutting the thick yellow flesh into generously sized squares before immersing them in salted water for boiling. That was all that you had to do to a pumpkin, other than to put butter on it when it was soft enough. And salt and pepper, of course, just before you ate it.

  Her feast could now be left to itself for an hour and a half before it could be enjoyed. That gave her time to change out of her office clothes, prepare a mug of tea, and then go out into her garden to tackle the tasks she had planned. She turned off the radio; the newsreader was cut off mid-sentence and silence returned to the house. She went through to their bedroom, where the silence seemed even greater, almost tangible, like something hanging in the air. The evening sun, streaming through the bedroom window, made a square of butter yellow on the polished cement floor. She stood in the doorway for a few moments, taking in the familiar objects of her bedroom: the dresser with its bits and pieces—the half-empty bottle of scent that Motholeli had given her for her last birthday; the pile of three men’s handkerchiefs that she had ironed for Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and that he had forgotten to take to work with him; the picture of her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, in its frame of black Bakelite; her bedroom radio, inherited from an aunt, an old Supersonic that still worked in spite of the world’s having changed completely since its manufacture at the factory up in Bulawayo, sixty years previously. It was a miracle that the radio still received broadcasts with complete clarity—a miracle, indeed; and she thought for a moment that if there were any saints around these days—and nobody seemed to suggest there were—then they might perform modern miracles to impress the sceptical. So, a modern saint might make a radio that was dumb speak once again; or work a miracle at the supermarket fish counter…She stopped herself. It was wrong to think such thoughts, she told herself. The things that people believed were important to them, and it was wrong to make fun of them. And she believed too. She believed in God, because she wanted to believe in him and because a world without God would simply be too painful for us to bear. Without God, the wicked could do what they wanted to, and none of us would be able to do anything about it. At least if there were a God, then she and others could point to him and face up to the wicked and the selfish and warn them that they would not get away with it. She was not sure where or who God was, but she was sure that he was probably not far from Botswana. Beyond some cloud, perhaps, that kept us from seeing him; some place where there was no weeping and no separation from those we loved; where there would be none without a friend to hold their hand, or a brother or a sister; a place of sweet-smelling cattle and gentle, life-giving rain. That was her theology, and it was enough; it had sustained her this far, and it would see her out. That was all that anybody needed, surely.

  She changed into her garden clothes and returned to the kitchen to make herself some red bush tea. Then, mug of tea in hand, she went out by the back door into the garden behind the house. It was just that stage of the early evening when the rays of the sun, occluded in part by the acacia trees in her neighbour’s garden, no longer fell on her vegetable beds, which were now in shadow. The weeding of the melon patch would be a comfortable task, then, without the sun making one feel too warm.

  She knelt down beside the ripening melons and tugged at the weeds that seemed to have run riot since her last spell in the garden. They came up easily; few plants put down deep roots in the sandy soil of this part of Botswana. Trees did, of course, but for the rest, the grip of roots was confined to the brittle surface of the land. She tugged at the weeds, some of which had that sharp smell that weeds sometimes have. They made a growing pile that she would put on her compost heap at the back of the garden.

  She felt the sides of the melons, which had prospered in her garden. She thought of them as lazy plants; while other plants reached upwards towards the sky, melons did not bother, but extended themselves along the ground, finding what purchase they could in the horizontal. They did not ask for much, and could survive in just about the driest of conditions. They grew in the Kalahari, where few plants could cope with the lack of rain. And yet somehow their fruit was so moist, so full of water. Another miracle, she thought: the miracle of the melons.

  She was examining the frames up which she had trained her bean plants when she became aware that somebody was watching her. It had always puzzled her that people could be aware of the fact that they were being watched before they saw the watcher. It was an odd feeling—a prickling in the back of the neck; a slight current of electricity that told you that there were eyes upon you. And as often as not, when you looked about you, you saw them and realised that those mute senses that had alerted you had not been wrong.

  She had been bending down to look at the roots of one of the bean plants, and now she straightened up. It crossed her mind at first that perhaps Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had come back earlier than anticipated—that he had changed his plans and was not going out to Mma Potokwane’s place after all. She looked over her shoulder, half expecting to see her van parked outside the house in its normal place, but the front gate was closed and there was no sign of either her van or his truck.

  She wiped her brow, as she felt a bead of perspiration on the bridge of her nose, one of those awkward, tickly places. She looked about her.

  “Well, Mma, good evening.”

  The voice was disembodied. It was a woman’s voice, and what it said was clear enough, but she could not see where it came from. For a few moments she remained nonplussed. What should you do if you suddenly heard somebody say “Good evening” to you but you had no idea who it was or where they were. The voice could even come from the sky, and for a brief moment Mma Ramotswe looked up, before lowering her eyes again because it was absurd to imagine that anybody should address you from that quarter. Talk of heavenly voices was all very well, but they were usually figments of people’s imagination.

  But you could hardly remain silent: you had to say something. And so Mma Ramotswe, still looking about her in puzzlement, replied, as loudly as she could, “Good evening, Mma.” And then she added, “Wherever you are.”

  For a few moments there was silence. A bird flew overhead, one of the Cape doves who had taken up residence in the tree by her gate. There wa
s a brief flutter of beating wings, and then nothing—except the noise of the sky, of course, because there was a sound of the sky if you listened hard enough, a sound like wind in the trees, but softer.

  Then there came a laugh—a chuckle, really.

  “I’m sorry,” said the voice, “you cannot see me. I am being very rude. One moment.”

  On the other side of the fence that separated Mma Ramotswe’s garden from the next-door yard, the foliage of a large shrub parted and a woman appeared. She was a woman of about Mma Ramotswe’s age, of her general build, but perhaps not quite as traditional in her girth, and wearing gardening clothes—jeans and loose-fitting blouse—and a battered blue sun hat. It was her neighbour.

  “Oh, Mma!” exclaimed Mma Ramotswe. “I did not see you. I was looking everywhere and beginning to wonder whether I was hearing things.”

  The woman laughed again. “I was pruning that bush. I was on the other side, actually, when a pen fell out of my pocket. I had to go into the bush to find it.”

  “And have you found it?” Mma Ramotswe asked. “I am always losing pens. One a day, my husband says, but that is not true, I think.”

  The woman advanced towards the fence. “My name is Margaret,” she said. “I am Margaret Matlapeng.”

  Mma Ramotswe introduced herself. “I am Precious Ramotswe.”

  Mma Matlapeng smiled. “Oh, I know who you are, Mma. Everybody knows who you are. You’re that lady who has the detective agency. What do you call it? The Women’s Detective…”