Dead Man On The Highway

I was driving to cover a court case in Germiston this morning when I spotted a dead man lying in a flowerbed next to the M2 highway.
There were a few police vans around the body but nobody had put that tinfoil stuff over it to prevent motorists from seeing his pale stomach and rigid neck.
The photographer I was with pulled the car over (cnr M2 and Refinery Road) and we went to investigate - like the curious journalists we are.
The first man I spoke to was from the Albany factory across the road. He had been called to the scene, searched through the man's pockets and found a piece of paper with telephone numbers on it. He dialled some of the numbers and reached the man's son.
As we stood chatting there, the son arrived with a work colleague and was asked to identify the body. As a uniformed cop lifted the white material that had - in the meantime - been placed over the old man, he recognized his father. It took a spit second for his head to collapse into his hands. And there we stood, caught in this surreal moment that we now shared.
A maintenance worker at the scene told us the old man - "madala" as he called him - had been wandering the scene since yesterday, searching for water. The garden worker shared his bread with him and said he had a crazed, stressed look in his eyes. He didn't know where he was going or what happened to his car. The last thing he remembers was the old man sitting by a statue. This morning, he was dead.
I tried all day to speak to the family, hoping for them to shine some light on the mystery, but got nowhere.
What a crazy town we live in.