“Mind you,” continued Mr. Polopetsi, “mind you, I can understand why people want to find these things out. If you’ll be joining the ancestors, it’s useful to know who the ancestors are before you meet them.”

Mma Ramotswe stared at him in surprise. Mr. Polopetsi was a modern man, who had been a pharmacy assistant. He knew about chemicals and the like, and here he was talking about the ancestors. Usually if educated people believed in such things they were discreet about it. It was not fashionable to go on about the ancestors in public.

She decided to ask him directly. “Do you think that it’s true, Rra? Do you think that the ancestors are up there, waiting for us?”

Mr. Polopetsi looked into his mug. Mma Ramotswe watched him and suppressed an irreverent thought. It was as if he was searching for ancestors there, in his mug of bush tea.

“The ancestors,” he began portentously. “The ancestors…”

She waited for him to continue, but he was silent, as if defeated by the sheer weight of the topic, or of the ancestors, perhaps.

“I think that they are with us,” she said. “They are all around us. What they have done. Their voices. The memories they have left us. All of that is there.”

He looked up sharply, with the air of one to whom a major discovery is announced, an annunciation. “That is a very good way of putting it,” he said. “That is very good, Mma. Yes, indeed. That is how I shall think of it in the future.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled modestly. She was not sure if she had said anything very significant; in fact, she felt that what she had said did not really address the question of whether the ancestors were there or not, in the sense that being there meant actual existence. She had not answered that question directly; in fact, she had not answered it at all. But if what she had said to Mr. Polopetsi was at all helpful, then she was pleased with that.

“But getting back to this Mma Sebina and her problems,” she said. “She thinks that she was looked after by a lady who was not her mother. Now that lady is late and she says that there are no relatives she knows of on that side. That is very unusual, of course, as everybody has relatives. But apparently that lady and her husband had none, or none that they ever mentioned.”

“So now she is alone?”

“It looks like it.”

For a few moments they were both silent as they contemplated Mma Sebina’s situation. In a country like Botswana, it was almost inconceivable to be completely alone, to have no family. What would it be like to have nobody? Such loneliness was hard to imagine.