The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

cattle’s ancestors, if he recognised some handed-down characteristic that only a cattle man would know about: a way of holding the head; unusual markings; a special shape to the hump of a Brahmin bull. These meant nothing to those who did not know cattle, but were there to be read by those who did.
    Now, as she made her way out to see Mma Potokwane, she stopped the van for a few moments to gaze at a cow that was standing under an acacia tree chewing the cud, her calf at her side. She imagined that her father was in the van beside her, and she could hear his voice as clearly as if he had been there. The cow was thin, he said, but would put on weight when the rains came and there was grass again, rather than only hardened earth; and after that her calf would grow as it should and the owner would be content. And then he said something about the place where the rain-bearing clouds came from, and she did not hear it properly because the voices of late people were hard to make out sometimes and there were many of them wanting to talk to us, and the sound became like the sound of a swarm of bees, or the chatter of birds in the high branches of a mopani tree; not like words at all, but reminders nonetheless of how we shared the world with people who were no longer with us, but were in that other Botswana that cannot be seen, to which each of us would go in due course, when our time came, as it surely would.
    She left the cow and calf; they would be there, she imagined, in exactly the same place when she came back; there was no reason for them to move, just as there was often no reason for any of us to move, if we only thought about it. We could stand under treestoo, and look about us, and think about things. Not only
could
we do that, she thought, but we
should.
It was called meditation—she knew that—but she did not consider that we needed a special word for standing under a tree and thinking. People had been doing that well before meditation was invented. There were many things, she reflected, which we had been doing as long as anybody could remember and which had suddenly been taken up by fashionable enthusiasts and given an unnecessary new name. Mma Ramotswe had been invited to a Pilates class in a local church hall; it would be of great benefit to her, she had been told. But when she had gone to the class and seen what Pilates was, she had realised that she did not need to pay fifty pula a session to do the things that she had been doing for years anyway: lifting and pushing and stretching your muscles was nothing new; she did all of these things when she worked in her garden, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni did Pilates too, when he fiddled about under cars or struggled to mend a bit of old machinery at the Orphan Farm. In his case he was doing what might be called Pilates with Cake, as Mma Potokwane unashamedly bribed him to undertake the repairs for which she would otherwise have to pay.
    Mma Ramotswe was now only minutes away from the gate that marked the entrance to the Orphan Farm. The farmlands were protected by a cattle grid that clattered in protest as she drove over it. And then there was the painted sign that said:
Please remember that children live here—drive carefully.
She had often thought that she might erect such a sign on Zebra Drive, warning drivers that people lived there and asking them to drive with consideration. But drivers would pay no attention, she feared, because they always seemed to be in such a hurry. There was no real reason to be in a hurry, when one came to think about it; important people, she had noticed, did not walk fast, but seemed to amble, and if they were not in a hurry when they had all those things to do and to worry about, then why should the rest of us imagine that we needed to be in any sort of rush?
    She drew up beside the tree under which she always parkedwhen she came to see Mma Potokwane, and sounded her horn, as she always did to notify the matron of her arrival. This