They drove down the Tlokweng Road to the busy roundabout. There were hawkers at the side of the road selling rough-hewn stools and chairs, and a woman with a smoking brazier on which maize cobs were being grilled. The smell of the maize, the sharp-sweet smell that she knew so well and which spoke so much of the African roadside, wafted through the window of the tiny white van, and for a moment she was back in Mochudi, a child again, at the fireside, waiting for a cob to be passed over to her. And she saw herself all those years ago, standing away from the fire, but with the wood-smoke in her nostrils; and she was biting into the succulent maize, and thinking that this was the most perfect food that the earth had to offer. And she still thought that, all these years later, and her heart could still fill with love for that Africa that she once knew, our mother, she thought, our mother who is always with us, to provide for us, to nourish us, and then to take us, at the end, into her bosom.

They passed the roundabout and drove on to the busy set of shops that had sprung up near Kgale Hill. She did not like these shops, which were ugly and noisy, but the fact of the matter was that there were many different stores there and their selection of merchandise was better than any other collection of shops in the country. So they would put up with the crowds and the noise and see what the shops had to offer. And it would not be all window-shopping. Mma Ramotswe had long promised herself a pressure cooker, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had urged her to buy one. They could look for a pressure cooker, and even if they did not buy it today it would be interesting to see what was on offer.

The two women spent an enjoyable half hour browsing in a shop that sold kitchen equipment. There was a bewildering array of cooking utensils—knives and chopping boards and instruments with which to slice onions into all sorts of shapes.

“I have never needed anything like that to cut up onions,” Mma Ramotswe observed. “I have found that a knife is usually enough.”

Mma Makutsi agreed with her on this, but made a secret mental note of the name of the implement. When Phuti Radiphuti gave her the money to restock her kitchen—as he had promised to do—then she would undoubtedly buy one of those onion-slicers, even if Mma Ramotswe said that they were unnecessary. Mma Ramotswe was certainly a good cook, but she was not an expert on onions, and if somebody had invented an onion-slicer, then it must have been because there was a need for one.