The verandah of the President Hotel is not a place in which a great deal happens. This is not in any way to disparage it: it is important that there should be places where not a great deal happens because such places remind us that life is not entirely and exclusively made up of exciting or significant events. Every life needs spells of calm, every life needs expanses of time when nothing much occurs, when one may sit for several hours in the same place and gaze upon static things, upon some waxen-leafed desert plant, perhaps, or a patch of dry grass. Or a group of cattle standing under a tree for the shade, the slow, flicking movement of their tails the only indication that they are animate beasts, not rocks; or a sky across which no clouds, or perhaps only the merest wisp of white, move. Now, seated at her table on the verandah of the President Hotel, Mma Ramotswe had nothing much to look at while she waited. Down below, beyond the parapet, there were people in the square: sellers of clothes and dried herbs, carvers of wooden ornaments, sunglasses merchants, purveyors of potions to put on one’s hair. All these were there, as were their customers, but Mma Ramotswe chose not to watch this market scene; rather, she looked up at the sky and wondered what it would be like not to have a sky above one’s head—to be a prisoner, perhaps, or one who could not take the sun and had to remain indoors. She had known one such person when she was at school in Mochudi; a girl afflicted by albinism, whose pale, patchy skin, as brittle and translucent, it seemed, as the bark of what they called the paper tree, was so sensitive to the rays of the sun that she would burn painfully if she spent more than a few minutes outside. And that poor girl had been unable to go to school as she could not walk those miles from the family’s village outside Mochudi, and they could not afford the creams that could protect her skin from the sun. And the other children had stared at her on the occasions that they saw her and had whispered among themselves. Mma Ramotswe felt the shame still that she had not done anything for that girl, and now she had heard that she was late, having died giving birth to her first child, and there had been no husband. There were so many lives, she thought, that could only be led with difficulty, with pain, and because we were so bound up in our own lives, so many of these were invisible to us until suddenly we saw, and knew, and felt that sudden pang of human sympathy that comes with knowing.