“The sister was a clever girl. So it was not just hard work. Some people get good results from working very hard, others from being very bright. These people do not have to work very much—they just get their good results. It’s like standing under a tree and waiting for the figs to fall into your arms.”

At first Mma Makutsi was silent. She was not sure if there was a barb in this remark. But she would let it pass anyway. “Standing under a fig tree is safe enough, Mma,” she said. “But you should never stand under a sausage tree.” The sausage tree, the moporoto in Setswana, was a sort of jacaranda that had heavy fruit like great, pendulous sausages.

“Certainly not, Mma. There are many people who are late now because of that. Those are very heavy pods, and if you get one on your head, then you are in great danger of becoming late.”

She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there; a dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do—he is finished.

“This girl,” Mma Ramotswe continued, “was always doing well. People said, That girl is going to be an important somebody one day. She will be going to Gaborone, definite.”

Mma Makutsi frowned. She could tell which way this story was going, as it was an old story in Botswana, a theme repeated time and time again. The person who does well, who excels, is asking for trouble. “People were watching?” asked Mma Makutsi.

Mma Ramotswe confirmed the worst. “They were watching, Mma. They were listening too. There are always people who are watching and listening.”

Of course there are, thought Mma Makutsi. She had gone from Bobonong to Gaborone. She knew all about envy.

“Somebody—and they did not know who it was at first—put a spell on this girl.”

There was silence. To report the casting of a spell does not mean that you believe in the efficacy of spells. But spells were used, whether or not the rest of us believed in them; and somebody was prepared to believe in them. If that somebody were the victim, then the spell had worked. It was as simple as that. And people could be frightened to death by the knowledge that there was a spell on them; it happened regularly.

“How did she know?” asked Mma Makutsi.