The lid had slipped off in the sudden impulse of her generosity. Tsotsi had found himself looking at a face that was small and black and older than anything he had ever seen in his life: it was lined and wrinkled with an age beyond years. The sound that had stopped him, and saved the woman, was the cry of a baby.

4

When he darkened the doorway, stepping out of the Saturday street and into the odorous world of Ramadoola, General Dealer, to stand quietly beside the bags of beans and mealiemeal, Cassim had had hopes of selling a few yards of one-and-eleven-penny printed calico to a woman.

‘Flowers,’ he had said. ‘Pretty flowers,’ and unrolled the bolt of gaudy material.

‘How much?’ she had asked.

‘Cheap,’ he said.

She fingered it.

‘Feel it,’ he said. ‘Pretty flowers and it’s going cheap.’ They had kept that up for half an hour. There were variations, of course. Were the colours fast? They are as fast, Mama, as two-and-sixpence. Let me see two-and-sixpence. So Cassim took that bolt down—but in the end their attention reverted to the one-and-eleven-penny a yard. Half an hour was a good sign. He had hopes. Then his doorway had darkened and the young man was there, pretending he wasn’t, standing beside the beans and the mealiemeal. Cassim looked quickly around the shop. There was himself and the woman he was serving and two other men whom his wife was serving at the other end of the shop. At that moment another woman with two children hanging onto her skirts came in. Eight people all together. That was enough.

‘Pretty flowers, Mama,’ he said, but he was looking at the young man. He didn’t see the man, he saw the type. The slim, cool types of the street corners and the dice rings. The shebeen boys. The bad eggs. He liked that expression because bad eggs really were offensive to his thin, sensitive nostrils.

‘Two yards,’ the woman said.

Cassim sighed. He had hoped for three. He measured the material out on the yardstick nailed to the counter. He wrapped it up in brown paper. She paid. He gave her her change. When he looked again the young man had gone.

‘Did you see that one?’ he called out bravely to his wife, with a nod in the direction of the bags of mealiemeal and beans.

‘God forgive us,’ she said. She was a nervous woman.

That was at half past nine. At ten o’clock he was back again, standing at the same place, pretending he wasn’t there. This time Cassim was frightened. There was only an old man in the shop buying a tickey plug of chew tobacco. He hurried around to his wife who was serving the old man. She looked at her husband with frightened eyes.

‘Give him an extra inch,’ Cassim said to her in Tamil. ‘Talk to him.’

His wife cut off an extra inch and put it on the counter beside the tickey length. The old man shook his head and smiled. ‘Tickey,’ he said. He had a donkey cart and scoured the veld for firewood which he sold in the locations. Sometimes there was no wood.