With a stitch in his side, and knees all wobbly, he slowed to a jog, to a fast walk, and finally to a brisk shuffle. Not long after that, he sat down. “Mechanise,” said Ramjut Pillay. So he took out his knotted sock and began to untie it, confident that he should have enough money for a prodigious train-journey. Someone had once told him that Cape Town lay no less than a thousand miles away; exactly what this figure represented in more modern kilometres he wasn’t too sure, but it still sounded the right sort of distance to put between himself and his pursuers. “Thash an inneresting sock,” someone slurred in his ear. Ramjut Pillay shrank away when he saw who had come to share his bench in the park at the bottom end of Railway Street. Strictly speaking, it was a white man, only his face was the colour of a tomato, and a very rotten tomato at that, with its skin gone all squishy and wrinkly. Some of the red had seeped into the whites of his watery blue eyes, and his teeth, bared in a leering smile, were the yellowy orange of tomato pips.
