In the Time of Five Pumpkins, page 3
The list had been viewed by Mma Ramotswe on her visits to Mma Potokwane. She had commented favourably on the list of necessities, although there were other requirements that she might have added, had her friend asked for her advice. She thought, for instance, that children needed to be taught, if at all possible, to love their country. They also needed to learn to help with household chores, to be careful of snakes when walking in the long grass, and…well, the list would soon become very long once one started to think about it. Yet as it grew longer, the list’s impact seemed to diminish. All one needs is love is a proposition far more memorable than a list of twenty or thirty needs.
That Saturday, Mma Potokwane was particularly concerned with the third requirement: the need for plenty of outdoor exercise. To an extent, the children looked after that need themselves, as they were always running around, playing games that afforded them plenty of robust physical exercise. This was particularly the case with the young boys, who seemed incapable of walking and would launch themselves headlong at running pace whenever they needed to get anywhere—even a short distance. Alongside this natural expenditure of energy, there was plenty of organised activity, including enthusiastic games of football, in which more of the girls were now beginning to join.
But that Saturday was the annual sports day, when people from the local community flocked to watch the track events competed in by everyone: from the smallest children, the three- and four-year-olds, to the lanky seventeen-year-olds who were in their final few months in the home. The housefather, Mr. Kitso, ensured fair play and kept a list of the victors in each of the events. At the end of the afternoon, prizes would be awarded to winners—small trophies to mark the highest jump, the fastest one-hundred-metre sprint, the first past the post in the egg-and-spoon race.
Mma Potokwane had invited Mma Ramotswe to attend, and she had readily accepted the invitation. They stood together on the sidelines, Mma Potokwane wearing the wide-brimmed straw hat that she brought out for such occasions, and Mma Ramotswe sheltering from the sun under the large red umbrella that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had given her for her last birthday.
“The children seem very excited,” remarked Mma Ramotswe. “There is so much noise, Mma. Listen to all the squealing.”
Mma Potokwane smiled. “It’s an odd thing, Mma,” she said. “I am so used to it that I do not notice it at all. It is always there—like the sound that cicadas make in the bush. You know that sound? That screech-screech.”
“I know it,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“But I wouldn’t want the children to be silent,” Mma Potokwane went on. “That would be very strange. It is the one thing that worries me—if a child is silent. In my experience, that means that the child is sad. And as often as not, that will be because the child has had some dreadful experience.”
Mma Ramotswe agreed. It saddened her to think about it, but distressing things still happened to children. So much progress had been made in looking after children, in outlawing child labour, in protecting children from the violence of powerful adults, but nothing you did would ever be enough to banish such things entirely. There was always cruelty: it would never be possible to eradicate it altogether. There would also always be poverty. There would always be children who went to bed hungry because their parents could not garner enough food for an evening meal. And there was no wand one could wave to remove the deprivation that could stunt the lives of children, that could swell their bellies with emptiness, while their limbs would be matchstick thin. And then there were the eyes of such children—those saucer-wide eyes that looked out at the world with mute acceptance. There was no pleading, nor anger, because these things asked for energy that simply was not there.
These children, though, currently preparing for a relay race involving twenty teams, were well nourished, thanks to the efforts of Mma Potokwane and the donors she cajoled into supporting the Orphan Farm. She was a warrior, thought Mma Ramotswe; Mma Potokwane was a warrior who went out every day to do battle for these children.
They watched a group of younger children line up for a race. They were milling around and chattering while the starter tried to get them to the start line. And then a shout set them off, like a flock of twittering birds taking off from a field.
“There are some good runners there,” remarked Mma Ramotswe.
“That boy in the front is very strong,” said Mma Potokwane. “He is from Lobatse, that one. His mother is late and he was being looked after by a grandmother. She became blind, though—that macular…”
“Macular degeneration,” Mma Ramotswe supplied. “It is very common.”
“Yes,” said Mma Potokwane. “The grandmother could not see any longer. She could not cook. She could not watch over that little boy. He came to us because there was nobody else.”
The race came to an end. The boy from Lobatse threw his hands up in triumph.
“And that one?” said Mma Ramotswe, pointing to another small boy. He had tripped and fallen well short of the finish line and was gingerly examining his grazed knee.
“He’s one I worry about a bit,” said Mma Potokwane. “His housemother is keeping a good eye on him, but she says that he often cries at night.”
“Why is he here, Mma?”
“His father is in prison,” Mma Potokwane said. “He was a car thief and they caught him eventually. I have no time for car thieves but they have children, you know, and that particular car thief had eight children. Would you believe that, Mma? He had eight children by different women. He was sent to prison for six years because he had many previous convictions—all for stealing cars. They should have sent him to prison for having all those children by so many different women. And then doing nothing to help look after them, of course.”
“There are many men who do not face up to their responsibilities,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The government should publish a list of their names so that women could have nothing to do with them.”
Mma Potokwane agreed. “There are many things the government should do,” she said. “It is hard for them, of course. I’m sure that government ministers come into their office, take one look at their desks, and wonder why they stood for parliament. They will have very long lists of things they have to do.”
Mma Ramotswe laughed. “They should have somebody like Mma Makutsi in the government. She would go into those offices and say, ‘Have you done this yet? Have you done that?’ The ministers would not dare to argue with her. They would say, ‘I shall do that right away, Mma.’ ”
“If women ran countries, Mma Ramotswe,” said Mma Potokwane, a wistful note in her voice, “there would be much less trouble in the world. Women don’t like wars, for example. They don’t like to invade their neighbours, do they? Women don’t try to show other people how strong they are.”
This brought a sigh. “Oh, Mma, you are so right.”
Mma Ramotswe looked over at the boy who had tripped. “And that boy’s mother?” she asked. “You say that the father is in prison. What about the mother?”
Mma Potokwane hesitated. “I don’t like to blame people for what they are,” she said. “Often people are what they are because they have no choice, or because of what has happened to them. But I’m afraid that his mother is not much good. She is a bar lady. She picks up men in a bar down by the bus station. That’s during the week. At weekends she goes to a bar called the Go-Go Handsome Man’s Bar—you may have heard of it.”
Mma Ramotswe recalled that Charlie used to talk of it sometimes, although now that he was married she believed it was out of bounds.
“She probably had to do that just to get by,” said Mma Potokwane. “I heard that there was some man from Mahalapye who was living off her earnings. She was probably frightened of him—these poor women often are. But think of it, Mma. Think how dangerous that sort of thing is now. So many people have died. And, of course, she couldn’t look after her child. When the social welfare people found the child, he was staying with an aunt from Kanye. But she was already looking after six children under the age of six—two of them were hers, but the others were various waifs and strays—and she was at the end of her tether. Her husband is a taxi driver and he doesn’t sleep very well. Having all those young children in a two-bedroom house was not helping him. He had a bad accident when he fell asleep at the wheel and the police said that if it happened again they would take his taxi licence away from him. We took four of the children off her hands—two of them were the children of the same mother and we wanted to keep them together.”
“It sounds as if he’s better off here, Mma.”
Mma Potokwane agreed.
“May I go and speak to him, Mma?” asked Mma Ramotswe.
Mma Potokwane said that she was welcome to do that. She herself had to attend to something elsewhere, and she would leave Mma Ramotswe to speak to the boy. “He’s shy, Mma,” she said. “But he has good manners.”
Mma Ramotswe wondered where those good manners came from? From the mother who earned her living meeting men in bars? From the taxi driver’s wife? Or from somewhere else altogether—some natural reservoir of goodness, somewhere within ourselves, from which we could draw if only we were shown how? That was the curious thing about human goodness, Mma Ramotswe thought: it was there, even if everything on the outside seemed stacked against it.
* * *
—
He looked up at Mma Ramotswe, but only briefly, as his eyes returned to his bare knee, dusty with its fresh graze. Small droplets of blood made a jagged line on the skin.
Mma Ramotswe dropped to her haunches to inspect the injury. “Let me look at it,” she said. “Let Mma see.”
The boy winced as she touched the skin lightly. “It is very sore,” he said.
“I’m sure it is,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Knees are always sore when you land on them—particularly if you land on stones—which you’ve done here, I think.”
She stood up. “We can go and get a plaster put on this. We can ask Mma Potokwane. She has a big box of plasters in her office—I have seen it.”
The boy nodded. “Thank you, Mma.”
Mma Ramotswe reached down and put a hand on his shoulder. “You need to tell me your name, I think.”
“I am Thabiso.”
She clapped her hands together. “Thabiso! I know many people who are called that. They are all very big strong men. It is a good name, I think.”
The boy hesitated, and then smiled shyly. “I am going to be strong when I grow up, Mma.”
“Of course you will be,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I can tell that. But I can also tell that you will be a very polite person too. You can always tell.”
The boy looked down at the ground. He was silent.
“I’m sorry you fell over,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“I was hoping I would win,” said Thabiso. “I have never won a prize, Mma. I was hoping to win today.”
“That’s a pity,” said Mma Ramotswe.
Thabiso looked up at her. He was fiddling with the hem of his shorts. “May I go now, Mma?” he said.
“Yes, of course you may go, Thabiso. But I think you should get Mma Potokwane to wash your knee and put a plaster on it.”
“I will do that, Mma.”
He turned away. She stopped him.
“Thabiso.”
“Yes?”
“Sometimes there is more than one prize, you know.”
He frowned.
“I mean,” said Mma Ramotswe, “that there are other prizes you may not know about.”
He continued to look confused.
She reached out to take his hand. It is so small, she thought. “These are for other things, because often it’s not just the person who runs the fastest who deserves a prize. There are prizes for all sorts of other things.”
He was staring at her hand, which was covering his own.
“For being brave. There are prizes for that. For not crying when you graze your knee—sometimes there are prizes for that. For being polite. I have heard of prizes being given for that. For helping. There are all sorts of prizes.” She paused. “Would you like to win a prize, Thabiso?”
For a few moments he was silent. Then he said, “I would like that very much, Mma.”
She reached into the pocket of her blouse and took out a folded fifty-pula note. It was not a large sum, but to a child, particularly this child, it would be a great deal.
She slipped it into his hand. “That is a prize for you, Thabiso. It could be for a lot of things, perhaps, but I think we shall say it is for being brave.”
He stared at the money. She wanted to hug him, but she was afraid he might be embarrassed, as small boys can be by such things.
He thanked her. “I am very happy, Mma. I am very happy that I have a prize.”
“Good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Now you should go off to get Mma Potokwane to put a plaster on your knee.”
She watched him run off. She looked up at the sky. There were so many people, she thought, who deserved a fifty-pula prize, not only for their bravery, but for their patience, their devotion to duty, their doing what they had to do without complaint. The problem was that it would be impossible to give everybody the prizes they deserved. You could make a start, though, with a small prize for a small boy who had faced difficulties in his young life, but who was trying his best. It was a start, and the late Obed Ramotswe, her father, whom she loved so much, always said there were some things you could start even if you knew you might not be able to finish them. He was right about so much, and he was right about this. There was no disgrace in having to give up on something if you had no alternative—what mattered was that you had bothered to try.
* * *
—
After the sports ended, Mma Potokwane invited Mma Ramotswe to join her for a cup of tea in her office.
“The housemothers will be feeding the children now,” she said as they made their way back from the playing field. “They work up such an appetite when they run around.”
“Energy,” mused Mma Ramotswe. “Where does it come from, Mma Potokwane? Even the smallest children have all that energy in them. It always amazes me.”
Mma Potokwane smiled. “It is something called metabolism, Mma. Our bodies convert the food we eat into energy for the muscles. That is how it works.” She paused. A dove sitting on an acacia branch was watching them, looking down with its tiny black eyes, its head moving with the jerkiness that is a feature of the movement of birds.
Mma Ramotswe considered this explanation. “But if you or I eat something,” she said, “do we get the same amount of energy as one of the children will get from the same thing? If I eat a piece of cake, for instance, I don’t start to run around as they do if they have a piece of cake of the same size.” She paused. “It doesn’t seem to work that way.”
It was as if Mma Potokwane had addressed that question many times before. Her answer was delivered immediately, and she spoke with the air of one backed by science. “When I was training as a nurse, Mma, all those years ago, we were taught about how people’s systems work in different ways. We burn food up inside us at a different rate when we are young. Then, when we are older, we store more of the energy as fat, I’m sorry to say, Mma.” She looked at Mma Ramotswe apologetically. “I am not just thinking of traditionally built people like us, Mma. I am thinking of other people too. Everybody has some fat somewhere or other. Some people have it inside them. They are full of fat, Mma, in the inner spaces.”
Mma Ramotswe closed her eyes. She did not like to think of such things, and she rather regretted raising the topic with Mma Potokwane. She made an effort to divert the discussion. “It is rather warm today, don’t you think, Mma? And we have been out in the sun rather a long time.”
But Mma Potokwane was not to be distracted from science. “Then there are people who store their fat on the outside,” she continued. “Not outside their skins, of course—that would be very strange—but just under the skin. These are well-padded people. They can sit comfortably for many hours because they have substantial rears, Mma Ramotswe. I do not mean to be rude, but we all know such people. We can always tell who they are when they are walking in front of us.”
“Cake,” said Mma Ramotswe. “When I mentioned cake, I wasn’t talking about your cake in particular, but now that I come to think of it, I can just see a piece of your very delicious cake, Mma—in my mind’s eye, of course. There is nobody who makes fruit cake like you do, Mma Potokwane. You are the expert in that department, without any doubt at all. That is well known, I think.”
Mma Potokwane was not averse to compliments, and now she thanked her friend for her kindness. “I have always been glad that you enjoy my cake,” she said. “Sometimes I offer it to people and they shake their heads and say, ‘No.’ I cannot understand such people.”
Mma Ramotswe sighed. “There are some people who do not know what they are missing—not just when it comes to your fruit cake, Mma, but in a whole lot of other ways. People who have never seen Botswana, for example. Those people do not know what they are missing.”
Mma Potokwane agreed. “It is very sad that there are so many people who do not know about Botswana. When these people die, I think, they may wake up in heaven and think, Oh, I am in Botswana.”
Mma Ramotswe laughed. “Maybe, Mma. Maybe.”
They were nearing the office, and now Mma Ramotswe said, “Isn’t it odd, Mma Potokwane, how watching other people doing physical things makes you hungry. You don’t have to be doing anything very much yourself, and yet your stomach thinks you have been very busy.”
