The yellow-gold stain

When the genial, gentle owner told me how to clean and look after the tawa after roasting flat bread and about the exorbitant price of cassava since the cyclone, it no longer seemed possible that the far back room of his shop, where sacks of besan flour filled the middle of the floor, would continue to stink of urine -- and nor that his assistant would know nothing at all about anything I asked him but instead keep touching the yellow-gold stain on the front of his T-shirt as he stared at my chest.