The traffic jam was thick on all sides; it crawled painfully through the heavy heat pressing down on it. The sun flamed fiercely above, frying faces and boiling blood. Horns hooted insanely at each other, curses were picked and flung all over the place as voices sharpened by hot fury clashed together in the air like swords . . . Hawkers were slicing easily through the jam with deft feet, pus.h.i.+ng everything from "pure water" to cheap sungla.s.ses in people"s angry faces. Blind beggars went from window to window chanting choruses to deaf people, while dirty little urchins spread about cleaning the windscreens of clean cars.A frustrated siren stuck in the chaos wailed inconsolably, a lone mourner.
In the air-conditioned solitude of a BMW"s backseat, Teme shut her eyelids – she wasn"t looking forward to work this morning; the Executive Director sinecure was becoming too light for her to bear. She wanted to work; to do real work. But her father wouldn"t let her – he had put her in this obese penthouse office, insulated from the frenetic economic activities going on beneath, with a big salary and a big car to go with it; but she still felt small – negligible, empty, unfulfilled. She wanted something more, a challenge.
On her way to work every morning, she would watch the people pa.s.sing by on their way to their daily hustles, pus.h.i.+ng and shoving through the day"s striving and struggle, dragging their hopes along with them. . . She envied them. She saw the fulfilment and joys of labour on their faces side by side with the frustration that crinkled their brows. She envied them the sweat streaming down their dark, hard faces; she envied them the swing of determination and resilience in their gaits as they went about their grind . . .
When she opened her eyes, one of those brownish-yellow Arab children was staring straight into her with the saddest look she had ever seen. His nose and lips were pressed against the window as his eyes bore into hers, the many-fingered misery in the eyes reaching into the depths of her heart.
He felt so close it was as if he was inside the car with her, as if she could have touched him; felt his pallid grief-stricken face, ruffled his rust-coloured hair . . . He was so close she could almost smell the abject poverty on him, through the gla.s.s; so real – so near that she could see the thin yellow-green line of mucus that went from his nostril over his lips and down to his pointed chin.
His stare was empty, but the small eyes looked heavy with tiredness and an acc.u.mulation of tears unshed.
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The eyes did not leave Teme"s face.
She began to feel uncomfortable with the touch of his dirty
stare on her face.
When the car moved, he did too, with it, rubbing himself against its voluptuous body, as if trying to rub his filth off it, or rub Teme"s guilt in . . .
"Do you have any change?" she asked her driver, hesitantly.
He produced a dying N50 from his pocket.
She wound the window down a crack and held the limp note out to the waif with the tips of her index finger and thumb. He glanced up at her glossy pink fingernails and returned his eyes to her face.
She wound the window down further; the hot air blew in heavily, wafting the boy"s smell into the car, along with the stench of smoking and rotting fish from the lagoon, and the general clamour of the morning.
The putrid note was now directly under the boy"s nose; he
olubunmi familoni
took it gingerly and regarded it as he would a dead rat. He squeezed it in his small palm, and threw it back into the car. It fell on Teme"s mini-skirted lap. She looked down at the crumpled note in puzzlement.
When she looked up the boy was hiding an evil look in his hooded eyes. Suddenly, he stepped back and spat into the car. The thick saliva landed on Teme"s cheek, just missing her right eye, and began trickling down, like a tear . . .
She sat there, frozen stiff, feeling the spit crawl down her clean, smooth face. The boy kept staring at her, as he had been earlier.
Maybe it was the heat of his malicious gaze, she was not sure, but her heart suddenly melted into tears. They streamed down her face silently, slowly, trailing her make-up along.
She wasn"t sure if she was crying for him – or for herself. The boy turned his back on her black tears and moved on to the next car – "Oga, dash me . . ."