The elderly woman’s arrival in South Africa from India had caused a commotion in the Harjan household which seemed to affect everyone except her only granddaughter. It would probably have made a difference to Amina too, were it not for the fact that she was simply not there, and could not be found. She was away “working” for a few days she had said in the scrawled, barely legible note that she had left for her parents on their kitchen table, and since her family rarely knew the full nature or location of the various odd jobs that she took on from time to time, no-one could find her. This was not usually a cause for much concern to her father, who, unlike every other man of his age and background, had let his daughter do very much as she pleased since they had arrived in Springs several years ago. Amina’s mother was a meek, stunted woman, and her worry was silent, spoken only by the permanent lines between her eyebrows and on her small forehead. It was she who understood most the complications to their routine lives that her mother-in-law’s impending arrival would bring, and she went to the unusual trouble of leaving her kitchen and asking for her daughter at the café in Pretoria, about an hour’s drive from their family home in Springs.
