“Live your life paying attention to detail. I think it is very important to look at the small things in life and allow oneself to contemplate over them because that is where life is actually happening. Things like attention to friends and details thereon…,” says Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series who has fashioned his protagonist just that way. “I think Mma Ramotswe is somebody who is very aware of other people. She is kind. She is the sort of person with whom people would like to sit down and have a talk…modern world is a pretty frantic world and so the idea of sitting down with someone is nice.”
McCall Smith better known for his detective books began writing for children because he won a competition where he submitted a manuscript in the section for children. He wrote 30 books in that genre thereafter. Even though he enjoyed doing them, he feels his interest in his detective agency has been more lasting. “I began by writing a really really short story with Mms Ramotswe. And then I rather liked the characters and so wrote my first novel with her and thought that would be the extent of my literary conversation with her. I agreed to a sequel and then a trilogy, a quartet and a quintet so on…Now I like my annual conversation with Mma Ramotswe…” He has written over 16 books with her as the protagonist now.
McCall Smith receives many letters where people tell him they learnt from Mma Ramotswe and that she has become a friend of theirs. “I like that,” says McCall Smith. For in a sense that is what she is to him. Says the author about the character he has created, “My advisor and censor is Mma Ramotswe, I can even say sometimes she is the spoiler of the fun…if I am about to say something uncharitable or do something that is uncharitable Mma Ramotswe’s voice comes to me and I wonder should I be doing that? What would Mma say? She upbraids me for being selfish..she is there over my shoulder…” With such close involvement with his character, what did he feel about those who played the role in the serial/movie? Replies McCall Smith, ”I never see the faces of my characters…I don’t know what Mma Ramotswe looks like other than she is traditionally built that is she is a rather large lady and smiles quite often so when they made the movie…I said of course yes when they asked me if the actress was right. The important thing was the smile and the sunny disposition…someone you would look at and say that is a nice person.”
McCall Smith is very interested in the idea of forgiving and so in his books forgiveness forms a kind of motif, repeating itself wherever the intent was not bad. “We really need to try and keep it before us. At the moment many of our societies are retributive and want to blame people for misfortunes…and therefore there are punishments. There is a curious retributive feel to things which goes hand in hand with a sort of consumerism. We are regarded as customers or clients of the world and that we are entitled to having everything satisfied and if it is not satisfied we blame people. That demotes the essential value of forgiveness. And of course in the past many societies had religious systems which stressed forgiveness…the role of religion has been marginalised and one wonders if children today are receiving this kind of advice that you must forgive people. I don’t think they are. If we don’t forgive people it is very difficult for things to go forward…we clutter our lives with all sorts of unfinished businesses…”
A trained law professor McCall Smith says it has influenced his way of writing, “It is difficult for me to pinpoint the influence but human action in various situations is what law professors concern themselves with and I think so do I as a writer…I am talking to more people now than I did as a law professor. If I can make a point without being didactic…If I can make Mma Ramotswe say she believes in forgiving and make people think about it…I would prefer that”
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