Puso was too young to be involved in getting his sister home. He could manage the wheelchair, but he had a tendency to be unreliable. He could not be counted upon to come to Motholeli’s classroom at the right time, and it was also quite possible that he would lose interest halfway through and run after a lizard or something else that attracted his attention. He was a dreamy boy, moody even, and it was sometimes rather difficult to make out what he was thinking about.

“He thinks differently,” observed Mma Ramotswe, not saying, out of delicacy, that the obvious reason for this—in her mind, and in the mind of most, no doubt—was that Puso had in his veins a fair measure of bushman blood. People were funny about that. Some were unkind to such people, but in Mma Ramotswe’s opinion there was no need for this. There should be room in our hearts for all the people of this country, she said, and those people are our brothers and sisters too. This is their place as much as it is ours. That seemed clear to her, and she had no time for those who had raised an eyebrow when she and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had taken on these children from the orphan farm. There were some households where this would not have happened, on the grounds that they were not of pure Tswana blood, but not that house on Zebra Drive.