Tsotsi took in the picture with one sweeping gaze. But it was at the moon that he again looked longest.

Twenty-four hours! Only one day had passed since his rest in the grove of bluegum trees. It was a thought that reduced to a tangible dimension the unexpected turning in his life. It made it possible for him to put everything in its place. He could start at the beginning and work his way through the strange sequence of events that were strung out like unmatched beads between his two midnight meetings, first with the woman and then the beggar. Looking back, it felt as if he had woken up to a day of another man’s life. There had been no precedents in his days for feeding a baby or sparing a man’s life. But now the experience of it had become his, an indelible part of his being, as he sat there on the bank of stubbled grass, under the moon, with engines grunting at his feet. It was his baby now, by the law of finders-keepers, hidden away in a ruin; it had certainly been his half-memory of the bitch, his full sympathy for the beggar.

So what now? Was it the end—had it been nothing more than a freak out-of-season storm in the dry climate of his life? Did he go back to his old pattern tomorrow and forget today, and wait in his room for Butcher and Die Aap and maybe Boston—yes, Boston, what the hell about Boston!—and together with them plan another job?

Tsotsi knew that moment that there was no turning back on that day and what had happened. He had a presentiment that it was only the beginning of something and that a lot more was to come. It wasn’t that he knew, or thought he knew, what would happen next. But that one day had left him with an awareness of the strange and sudden turnings that life could take. There might be more ahead. There was still the baby, and tomorrow it would be clamouring for his attention. (He would feed it when he got back to the township and it was light.) There was still the bitch. More than ever before he wanted to find the other pieces that went with that fragment of a memory. There was still his sympathy and the awesome discovery, the moment when the cripple had asked, ‘Why do you have to kill me?’, that it was for him, Tsotsi, to choose between life and death. What he had thought of as inevitable turned out to be wholly dependent upon him and his choice. This, more than anything else, was a thought that seemed to reach down deep and touch the hidden meaning of the past twenty-four hours.

Tsotsi had always thought about life as a straight line, as undeviating as the one he had taken earlier in the evening in following the beggar from Terminal Place, as inflexible as the railway tracks that swept past him, leaving no choice but to be carried where they went. And because Tsotsi had no memories, and had collected none, there wasn’t even the metaphorical going backward in time to something already past. There had only been the present, that one continuous moment carrying him forward without questions or regrets on his part. Now, it seemed, he was wrong. One day had shaken the whole basis of his life.