By association, what Kat wasn't was just like the little brown-skinned children frolicking through the streets of some incidental railway settlement like Tati Siding, or an off-the-grid village like Kgagodi, legs clad in dust stockings whose knees had blackened from years of kneeling and wax-polishing floors, whose shins were marked with lessons from climbing trees, who played until dusk, went in for supper by a paraffin lamp and returned to play hide-and-seek amongst centipedes and owls until finally someone's mother would call the whole thing to an end.