Excerpt of In The Company of Cheerful Ladies by Alexander McCall Smith
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Chapter One
Honesty, Tea, and Things in the Kitchen
Mma Ramotswe was sitting alone in her favourite café, on the
edge of the shopping centre at the Gaborone end of the Tlokweng Road. It was a
Saturday, the day that she preferred above all others, a day on which one might
do as much or as little as one liked, a day to have lunch with a friend at the
President Hotel, or, as on that day, to sit by oneself and think about the
events of the week and the state of the world. This café was a good place to be,
for several reasons. Firstly, there was the view, that of a stand of eucalyptus
trees with foliage of a comforting dark green which made a sound like the sea
when the wind blew through the leaves. Or that, at least, was the sound which
Mma Ramotswe imagined the sea to make. She had never seen the ocean, which was
far away from land--locked Botswana; far away across the deserts of Namibia,
across the red sands and the dry mountains. But she could imagine it when she
listened to the eucalyptus trees in the wind and closed her eyes. Perhaps one
day she would see it, and would stand on the shore and let the waves wash over
her feet. Perhaps.
The other advantage which this café had was the fact that the tables were out on
an open verandah, and there was always something to watch. That morning, for
instance, she had seen a minor dispute between a teenage girl and her
boyfriend--an exchange of words which she did not catch but which was clear
enough in its meaning--and she had witnessed a woman scrape the side of a
neighbouring car while she tried to park. The woman had stopped, quickly
inspected the damage, and had then driven off. Mma Ramotswe had watched this
incredulously, and had half--risen to her feet to protest, but was too late: the
woman's car had by then turned the corner and disappeared and she did not even
have time to see its number--plate.
She had sat down again and poured herself another cup of tea. It was not true
that such a thing could not have happened in the old Botswana--it could--but it
was undoubtedly true that this was much more likely to happen today. There were
many selfish people about these days, people who seemed not to care if they
scraped the cars of others or bumped into people while walking on the street.
Mma Ramotswe knew that this was what happened when towns became bigger and
people became strangers to one another; she knew too that this was a consequence
of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out
greed and selfishness. But even if she knew why all this happened, it did not
make it any easier to bear. The rest of the world might become as rude as it
wished, but this was not the way of things in Botswana and she would always
defend the old Botswana way of doing things.
Life was far better, thought Mma Ramotswe, if we knew who we were. In the days
when she was a schoolgirl in Mochudi, the village in which she had been born,
everybody had known exactly who you were, and they often knew exactly who your
parents, and your parents' parents, had been. Today when she went back to
Mochudi, people would greet her as if she had barely been away; her presence
needed no explanation. And even here in Gaborone, where things had grown so
much, people still knew precisely who she was. They would know that she was
Precious Ramotswe, founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, daughter of
the late Obed Ramotswe, and now the wife (after a rather protracted engagement)
of that most gracious of mechanics, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng
Road Speedy Motors. And some of them at least would also know that she lived in
Zebra Drive, that she had a tiny white van, and that she employed one Grace
Makutsi as her assistant. And so the ramifications of relationships and ties
would spread further outwards, and the number of things that might be known
would grow. Some might know that Mma Makutsi had a brother, Richard, who was now
late; that she had achieved the previously unheard--of result of ninety--seven
per cent in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College; and that
following upon the success of the Kalahari Typing School for Men, she had
recently moved to a rather better house in Extension Two. Knowledge of this
sort--everyday, human knowledge--helped to keep society together and made it
difficult to scrape the car of another without feeling guilty about it and
without doing something to let the owner know. Not that this appeared to make
any difference to that selfish woman in the car, who had left the scrape
unreported, who clearly did not care.
Copyright © 2005 by Alexander McCall Smith
