But how had it happened that he, Tsotsi, who had done so much more to so many others, had had to wait until that night before realizing something of what the other man felt? He could only guess at the answers. Groping blindly, his thoughts at times brushed the truth as when suddenly, and irrationally it seemed, he remembered Boston being sick after the job on the trains. He felt there was a connection between this new experience of his and that moment of Boston’s. But the full meaning and miracle of sharing in another man’s suffering eluded his stumbling attempts to catch it. In retrospect there was only the long, painful and silent pursuit down Main Street and how somewhere in the course of it the ceaseless magnification and focus of his interest in the cripple had found a crack and a way into the experience of his flesh. That is what it was. The experience of Morris Tshabalala’s flesh.

What is sympathy? If you had asked Tsotsi this, telling him that it was his new experience, he would have answered: like light, meaning that it revealed. Pressed further, he might have thought of darkness and lighting a candle, and holding it up to find Morris Tshabalala within the halo of its radiance. He was seeing him for the first time, in a way that he hadn’t seen him before, or with a second sort of sight, or maybe just more clearly. The subtleties did not matter. What was important was that in the light of his sympathy the cripple was revealed.

But that wasn’t all. The same light fell on the baby, and somehow on Boston too, and wasn’t that the last face of Gumboot Dhlamini there, almost where the light ended and things weren’t so clear anymore. And beyond that still, what? A sense of space, of an infinity stretching away so vast that the whole world, the crooked trees, the township streets, the crowded, wheezing rooms, might have been waiting there for a brighter, intense revelation.

After only one bite the polony fell unnoticed from his hands. Feeling as if he had drunk too much, Tsotsi lurched to his feet and around to the front of the shop. He wanted to see himself. He was sure he looked different, that he would see on his person some sign of the past few hours. A new head maybe, with other eyes and strange lips speaking different words. There were none of the mirrors that some of the big shops had in Main Street. But a little way down he caught the ghost of his reflection in the display window of a shoe store. The light of the pavement was too dim for it to be clear. When he moved up to the glass his image disappeared. He could only see it standing well back, and at that distance and dimness he recognized nothing except the shape of a man. It could be me, he thought, or Boston, or Butcher, or even the beggar if he had legs. There was a comfort in this thought.