Mr Varachia is a charming man who wears his years with great elegance. Politely remote, he has been tempered by Africa’s stern trials and is gently resigned to life’s imperfections. Africa, like the sea and Islam, teaches wisdom and submission.

The interior of Amod & Son is plain and echoey. Again, the similarity to other stores I’ve seen in other parts of Africa is quite remarkable. The place is dimly lit, has white walls and tall shelves that hold tinned veg, tinned curry, bags of rice and mealie-meal, bicycle tyres and inner tubes. A rackety compressor cools the Coca Cola fridge. There are full gas bottles, and glassed display cabinets containing everything from padlocks to combs.

But I wanted my stories. And I got them. While Sam Malesha, his assistant of ten years, bustled about serving customers, Mr Varachia and I began to chat across the counter about the present and the past. But first I had to get the genealogy clear in my mind…

Who was Amod? Who was the son? Where does the name Varachia come from?

Mr Varachia smiled. “My grandfather was Ahmed, which in South Africa somehow became Amod. My grandfather used to call my father Amod, even though his name was really Abdul Hay Varachia.”

So…everyone was and is a Varachia? Indeed.
Details of the Varachia family’s first arrival in South Africa are lost in the mists of memory but family legend has it that the Varachia grandparents took passage from Gujarat in India, sailing bravely to distant Durban in the mid-1800s.
A quick online look at the history of Natal gives us a tantalising insight.

In August 1843, Natal become a Crown Colony, ruled from distant Cape Town by a British Governor. The economy of the new colony was fragile. Bellicose Zulus were omnipresent (the humiliating defeat of British arms by Zulu impis at Isandlwana came in 1879) and the climate was maliciously tropical.

Yes, there was a harbour, Port Natal, and some far-sighted farmers already saw the potential for growing sugar-cane in the moist heat. There were, after all, tempting precedents. The Dutch had introduced sugar-cane to Mauritius back in 1639, and by 1748, the new French governor of Mauritius had opened the first sugar factory on the island. French profits soared; but willing farm labour was scarce in Durban. Warriors don’t do digging.

Then, in 1848, an entrepreneurial Natalian sugar farmer, a Mr E.R. Rathbone, imported labourers from India to work on his farms. This experiment was a huge financial success and, by 1859, legislation was passed in London that made it possible for the Natal Colony to introduce legal indentured labourers from India. On 16 November of that year the first group of 342 labourers duly arrived in Durban from Bombay on the sailing ship Truro.

It seems likely that early Varachia ancestors were amongst them; when I asked Mr Varachia what had brought his grandparents to South Africa, he replied simply, “They came as labourers.”

Interestingly, the surname Varachia has its origins in Gujarat, a seacoast province of India. The Gujarati word ‘Varach’ means a person who is skilled or expert. Whatever the history of the Varachia’s family’s arrival in South Africa, Mr Varachia’s first recollection of his family’s life as traders in Africa centred around the home built by his grandfather years before in the thick bush on the northern side of the Magaliesberg river. This house doubled as the first Varachia trading store.

“My grandfather had six sons, all of whom became traders of one sort or another. My grandfather lived and traded there out of that house, the first Indian gentleman to settle near Hekpoort.”

Around the late 19th century, the saga of the Varachia family takes us way up to Phalaborwa in the South African lowveld, by which time intrepid grandad Varachia was bartering trade goods with the Boer farmers in return for milk, butter, meat and eggs.

It must have been a tough life for the family. Up in the pre-dawn cold to pack trade goods into their ox-wagons – rope, steel, nails, timber, spices and tobacco, in-spanning sixteen to eighteen bullocks, and setting off for the unknown.

And think of how long it took! Ox wagons travelled ploddingly, covering at most sixteen kilometres per day; and Phalaborwa was over six hundred kilometres to the north, well away from the Varachia family home in the Magaliesberg valley. Forty days and nights! It’s almost biblical.

I ask about granny Varachia. Did she go on the trek northwards?

“No,” replied Mr Varachia. “She tended the original store and kept house.”

Brave woman, I thought. Given the snakes I encounter regularly in my own camp, she must have had a busy life in the bush!

It took guts too, to venture into the African wilderness on that northern journey. Phalaborwa lies in the humid tropical lowveld of South Africa and malaria is still endemic. Bilharzia, giardia and crocs infested the rivers, the big five roamed free, and in the mid-1800s the likelihood of bumping into a cocky young elephant bull or an unfriendly local with a spear was still high.

I asked if there was any written family record of those perilous trips.

“No,” said Mr Varachia, “nothing except stories, and the stories, unfortunately, just gradually disappeared.”

Mr Varachia’s father Abdul Hay inherited the Magaliesberg business when grandad Varachia – known as Amod – passed on, and built the present store, now run by Aziz, grandson of the original ‘Amod’. The young grandson learned the ins and outs of trading from his father and mother, who both worked in the store. The tiny pinkish house that stands alongside the present Amod & Son was originally a trading store too, open only at weekends.

It’s a story of a long tradition of family ownership, courage and grit. Mr Varachia’s father, I’m told, “Was working here in the store for maybe thirty years before I took over. And I have been running the place for ten, twelve years now, maybe fourteen.”

What, I ask, was it like to trade in the bushveld near remote Hekpoort in the old days?

In the old days, Mr Varachia says, farming was different in the Magaliesberg valley. “There was a lot of maize farmed, even wheat. In those days, he says, “We had feed in stock – you know, cattle feed, horse feed, like a proper farm shop, but that has now died down because our poor farmers here are struggling. It’s become very expensive for them to farm now, labour costs have soared. They don’t get enough money out their farming. So most of them have given up farming.”

I ask him about social interaction; and he tells me that in the old days the farmers often came to the store, had a coffee and talked about their farms, how business was going and the problems they faced.

The Afrikaans farmers were different in the old days, he remembers. They were more godly people then, more religious. They respected us, and we respected them, we had a good relationship with them, he said. We were all struggling, we struggled together, and we actually kept the poor farmers toiling on their farms. They were farming to feed their nation, so we opened books, you know, books of credit for them, in the understanding they should pay only when they had a good harvest.

And yet, I said, that was at the height of apartheid when you couldn’t go into the local cafe with them – but you could lend them money to keep them going. Seems unfair.

There was no such thing as apartheid between us, says Mr Varachia. They accepted us, and we accepted them.
And, because of their Islamic faith, which forbids usury, the Varachias didn’t charge the farmers interest. The Varachia family and other Muslims around Hekpoort were of enormous help to the local farmers. They gave credit and loans or even donated animal feed for nothing in the hard times.

And what about the future, I say. I see for sale signs here. Why is that? Have you not got a son to pass the business on to?

In fact, Mr Varachia has two sons, Abdullahi and Imran, but they’re not interested in living the life their parents lived. Nor do the Varachia’s daughters, Anisa and Aysha, want to face the trials that go with rural living in present-day South Africa. The children have moved on – to Johannesburg and America.

Mr Varachia smiles sadly. “Things have changed,” he says. “There’s a lot of crime out here every day now. Not a day passes but somebody’s bulls are stolen, somebody’s fence has been cut, somebody’s house is broken into. So it’s no more a place to be, you will be unsafe around here. You know, before – it was nice, it was safe, no crime. But nowadays, to live here is no more a pleasure.”

Mr Varachia has already started to scale down, buying less, stocking less. Which explains the many empty shelves I see around me.

His face is resigned as he says to me. “I can’t carry on. Somehow, you got to shut down. My wife Rashida feels the same. She told me, ‘I think we better sell up here.’ He nods. “It’s time to move on.”

And when you finally close up here, where will you and your wife go?

He ponders. “I don’t know where we’ll go, maybe to my daughters, maybe to Johannesburg.” He shrugs.

We shake hands – me, Mr Varachia and his assistant Sam – and I leave him and his echoing shop behind, climb into my 4X4 and reverse out. But before I drive back to my camp I stop and look once more at the little trading store. Images crowd my mind as I ponder the arc of the lives that will end here, soon, beside a red dirt road in the heat.

Ox wagons toiling through steep passes to the far north in the 19th century; the danger and the courage of the Gujarati traders; stoical grandma, minding the store in the middle of the inhospitable bush; the constant struggle for survival, the generosity of spirit that drove the Varachias to support desperate local farmers through drought and poverty; the dangers the first family members faced crossing the capricious Indian ocean on the three-masted barque Truro.

At the height of the shop’s success, Amod & Son was probably much like those I remember with such happiness from my childhood in Zambia and Zimbabwe; bustling, colourful, full of fascinating smells, noisy, part of the local community, a meeting place that stocked every necessity for rural living, everything from Zambuk to blue Dietz lanterns to Lifebuoy soap.

But I also realised that Amod & Son, standing there in fierce heat beneath its dusty palm, was more than a trading store. It was a monument to decades of courage and a testament to gentle kindness; the epitome of a whole family’s hopes.

Almost gone now. One day the relentless bush will reclaim the building, and people passing by will say, “Wasn’t there a trading store there in the old days?”

Then they’ll shrug and drive on.

Thanks to David Lambkin for adding his novelist’s touch to the story.