‘For you,’ Cassim’s wife said.

The old man, still smiling, held up the small coin to show it to her. ‘Only tickey,’ he said.

Cassim pushed his wife aside. ‘It’s a present, old man.’

‘For me?’

‘For you.’

‘For what?’

‘My respect,’ Cassim said. ‘My present, for my respect for you, being an old man.’ Once started, Cassim couldn’t stop. He explained that he had an old mother in India— living in New Delhi Street, Bombay. He told him about New Delhi Street—about India—he gave a short discourse on its history.

The old man listened without interrupting. He listened patiently, because that was the way of his kind. But inwardly he thought the Indian man was sorely mad. He was talking so much the sweat was on his forehead. What was he talking about? Why didn’t he stop?

Cassim did, eventually. Somebody else came into the shop, and the young man left again—not once having moved from the bags of mealiemeal and beans.

Cassim called out to his wife, in a voice that was still a little bit brave: ‘I fixed him.’

‘God forgive us,’ his wife said.

‘What did he want?’ Cassim asked aloud. ‘Just standing there.’ His wife was talking about Durban and going back. She had been born there. She always talked about Durban when times were bad or there was trouble.

‘You know something,’ Cassim said. ‘I think he’s mad.’ He laughed. It was a brave attempt at a brave sound. That was eleven o’clock.

He came back again at eleven-thirty and this time there was nothing Cassim could do. They were alone.

His wife disappeared into the back room, where he heard her call all the children together. Then there was a series of door slams and business with keys as she retreated into the deepest room of the house. Cassim remained at the counter. He took a deep breath and waited. I can still scream, he thought. The young man came straight to the counter where Cassim stood with his eyes averted.

‘Yes?’ he asked, meaning to be calm and cool and to the point with no nonsense, young man, but his tongue had a lungful of air behind it with the result that he found himself saying yes for fully five seconds. He stopped in time to hear himself fart.

‘It’s wind you see,’ he always said. ‘A windy bowel.’ At that moment neither the thought nor the explanation occurred to him. The young man was facing him and with prayers and inward tears Cassim was waiting for the first syllable of trouble.

‘Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes…’

‘Milk.’

Cassim wanted to laugh. He almost collapsed under the hysterical desire to laugh. What sounds like milk, he thought. I’ve heard wrongly. Milk, bilk, kilk, schrilk, rilk, wilk…

‘Milk.’ A second time he said it, clear and strong and no mistakes.

Cassim looked up. ‘Milk?’

Later in the day he found he could not remember the face, not even the clothes the young man had worn, because now when he looked his eyes, frightened and blind with fear, moved so fast from feature to feature that he saw nothing.