The Story of an African Farm

Once upon a time I was taking the number 19 into the city. It was a few days after the new year and a few months into a new relationship. On New Years Eve, at midnight, a pillow fight broke out and I had my first New Years Kiss tm as feathers swirled around a hundred sweaty bodies crammed into an inner city bar. In a few days time I would be spending my birthday alone in an equally humid hotel room in Ho Chi Minh city, eating lychees and crying because I wouldn't be home again for another six weeks.

On the number 19 tram, headed into the city and away from my boyfriend's house for the last time in a good while, I was reeling with excitement and trepidation and clutching a copy of Ulysses I had borrowed, optimistically, for the journey. It was hot and I must have looked melancholy because the man sitting opposite me smiled and gestured to the fat tome on my lap and asked, "A little light reading then?"

Anyway, we started talking and I explained why I was carting James Joyce around, and he got very enthusiastic and pulled a book from his backpack and started talking about how he first read it when he was travelling and how books you discover in a new place take on a special kind of resonance. It was a book I'd never heard of, The Story of an African Farm; he told me it was the first novel published by a woman in South Africa. We chatted for another five stops or so, and then he made to get off the tram. And then he doubled back and gave me his book and told be that I should give it a go if I got bored of Ulysses, and wished me luck with my travels.

I've forgotten that man's name, unfortunately, but I haven't forgotten how much less scary he made it seem to be stepping out into the unknown. I haven't read The Story of an African Farm yet, but when I touched down in Ho Chi Minh and then in Kathmandu and Delhi, it was snuggled in my backpack next to Ulysses and my notebook and a half-empty bottle of sunscreen. It's followed me to two houses since I've got back, and of all the various bits and pieces that get lost during a move, it's the one I would most regret losing. Because on hot, hopeless, no-one-loves-me kind of nights when I'm lamenting the utter indifference of the world (funnily enough, these seem to happen far less frequently since I left my teens), I look over and see it sitting flush and mysterious in a stack of books, all of which have some magical, talismanic power - books I've begun to fetishise over the years through bath-time readings and on-the-porch readings and late night re-readings and carrying-around-the-worldings. And I feel far less alone knowing that a moment of incidental compassion can be captured in a hundred yellowing pages, and transported around as a reminder of the community inherent in the book-reading world.

So thanks, Kindly Stranger. I owe you one. If I ever bump into you again on the tram, let me buy you a beer. Or give you the book that I'm reading. It's the least I can do.