Here Tsotsi hesitated. He sat down and wiped away the sweat which had formed a thin moustache on his upper lip. It was hard going. He hadn’t done it before. What is more he didn’t know what to do, and was forced to pause and formulate each new phase of action. The next phase had to do with the bad smell and dirty rags. The clothes had to be changed. How? He would use one of his shirts. Good!

He found one in the cardboard box in which he kept a few oddments of clothing. He began to unfold the rags in which the baby was wrapped. They consisted of a torn petticoat and an old pair of blue bloomers. This time Tsotsi registered a reaction. First distaste, because the smell drifted up onto his face as an almost tangible cloud of malodorousness. Then impatience and a sweat of panic when the baby awakened by all the movement began to cry. It was a shatteringly loud noise, and it made him uncertain of his hands. Finally he was surprized. He stopped what he was doing and looked down in amazement. The baby was a boy! The tiny penis rested like a thin finger on the testicles and these together were the size of a small walnut. The navel stood out prominently as a convoluted button of flesh. Tsotsi lifted up the baby and the origin of the smell was obvious. A crusty, egg-yellow liquid stool had soaked into the rags. Crumbs of it still stuck to the small buttocks. Using a corner of the petticoat, he wiped them clean.

When that was finished he wrapped it up in his shirt and put it back in the box, and the box on the bed, where he turned his back on it. There was still a lot to be done. He now took the tin of condensed milk out of his pocket, sat down at the table and examined it. Tsotsi had been seeing that tin, or others like it, for as long as he could remember, yet now as it rested on his hand it was as meaningless, with its label and words, as a book in a language foreign to his own, which he could neither read nor write and only half spoke.

Babies needed milk. Even he realized that. When he had got back to his room early that morning with the shoebox he had tried to give it water and bread soaked in water, but it had all come drivelling out. He knew what it wanted. Milk! And if the noise it made was anything to go by, it wanted it bad. So he had gone to the shop, but so uncertain was he of himself that it had taken two hours to find the courage and the right moment to ask. When the Indian gave him condensed milk he had wanted to argue. Condensed milk! He’d been drinking condensed milk his whole damn life. But the Indian had said it was baby’s milk and had pointed at all the words on the label. Studying them now, Tsotsi found them totally without meaning—and apart from the words there was only the trademark picture of the two birds and the nest with the eggs in it which didn’t help him at all.