Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

been no
such pretensions from the twins. They had both been sent back to the Natal to
meet husbands, which they had done in the manner expected by their father. Both
sons-in-law had now been taken into the business and were proving to have good
heads for figures and a sound understanding of the importance of tight profit
margins.
    Then there was Nandira, who was sixteen at the time and a
pupil at Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, the best and most expensive school in
the country. She was bright academically, was consistently given glowing
reports from the school, and was expected to make a good marriage in the
fullness of time—probably on her twentieth birthday, which Mr Patel had
felt was precisely the right time for a girl to marry.
    The entire
family, including the sons-in-law, the grandparents, and several distant
cousins, lived in the Patel mansion near the old Botswana Defence Force Club.
There had been several houses on the plot, old colonial-style houses with wide
verandahs and fly screens, but Mr Patel had knocked them down and built his new
house from scratch. In fact, it was several houses linked together, all forming
the family compound.
    “We Indians like to live in a
compound,” Mr Patel had explained to the architect. “We like to be
able to see what’s going on in the family, you know.”
    The
architect, who was given a free rein, designed a house in which he indulged
every architectural whimsy which more demanding and less well-funded clients
had suppressed over the years. To his astonishment, Mr Patel accepted
everything, and the resulting building proved to be much to his taste. It was
furnished in what could only be called Delhi Rococo, with a great deal of gilt
in furniture and curtains, and on the walls expensive pictures of Hindu saints
and mountain deer with eyes that followed one about the room.
    When the
twins married, at an expensive ceremony in Durban to which over fifteen hundred
guests were invited, they were each given their own quarters, the house having
been considerably expanded for the purpose. The sons-in-law were also each
given a red Mercedes-Benz, with their initials on the driver’s door. This
required the Patel garage to be expanded as well, as there were now four
Mercedes-Benz cars to be housed there; Mr Patel’s, Mrs Patel’s car
(driven by a driver), and the two belonging to the sons-in law.
    An
elderly cousin had said to him at the wedding in Durban: “Look, man, we
Indians have got to be careful. You shouldn’t go flashing your money
around the place. The Africans don’t like that, you know, and when they
get the chance they’ll take it all away from us. Look at what happened in
Uganda. Listen to what some of the hotheads are saying in Zimbabwe. Imagine
what the Zulus would do to us if they had half a chance. We’ve got to be
discreet.”
    Mr Patel had shaken his head. “None of that
applies in Botswana. There’s no danger there, I’m telling you.
They’re stable people. You should see them; with all their diamonds.
Diamonds bring stability to a place, believe me.”
    The cousin
appeared to ignore him. “Africa’s like that, you see,” he
continued. “Everything’s going fine one day, just fine, and then
the next morning you wake up and discover your throat’s been cut. Just
watch out.”
    Mr Patel had taken the warning to heart, to an
extent, and had added to the height of the wall surrounding his house so that
people could not look in the windows and see the luxury. And if they continued
to drive around in their big cars, well, there were plenty of those in town and
there was no reason why they should be singled out for special attention.
     
    MMA RAMOTSWE was delighted when she received the
telephone call from Mr Patel asking her whether she could possibly call on him,
in his house, some evening in the near future. They agreed upon that very
evening, and she went home to change into a more formal dress before presenting
herself at the gates of the Patel