The beautiful, the wretched and the dead

It has been just over a month now. I remember the day I landed in Lagos, 23rd of June, 2010. It was a bright sunny day. Or maybe my memory deceives me: maybe it was not the day that was sunny; maybe it was my happy mind that projected such a happy circumstance. I cannot be sure now. The past one month has taken me through a motley array of emotions and situations that I had never felt or experienced before.

During the course of my stay here so far, I have not travelled much to other places around Lagos, except for a couple of rural areas. Neither have I made friends with an extensive number of local people. But with a sudden onslaught of loneliness, today I feel like writing. I feel like writing about the pain and pleasure I have felt. I feel like telling you about the beautiful, the wretched and the dead people I have seen here.

Lagos is rich. Lagos is poor. The schism is so evident in daily life that it I constantly feel a pang of guilt intertwined with sadness when I witness the struggling lives here every day while going to office.

Every morning when I pass the impenetrable iron gates of my rented apartment, I meet the drowsy security guards, tired after a nightlong watch. They invariably greet me with a smile in the morning, “Good morning sir, did you sleep well last night?”

Yes, their entire livelihood depends upon the condition that I sleep well at night, while they wriggle about sleepily on their wooden stools, fanning away occasionally at the robotic mosquitoes that are programmed to keep coming in waves at their prey, despite getting squished frequently.

Yet, these guards are amazing people. They are the simplest beings I have seen in Nigeria until now. No matter how disconcerting your behavior is towards them, they do not forget to smile in the most naïve, childlike manner. And if you, in turn, speak a soft, polite word to them, the exuberance they radiate would warm a cold reptilian heart. These men are willing to die trying in order to ensure that I sleep in peace; beautiful people.

As we move out into the streets, it becomes impossible to miss the poor desperate hawkers trying to sell their merchandise to the plump, well groomed passengers sitting in their comfortable luxury cars. Once a while some rich man feels like buying a cold drink or a mobile phone recharge card from them and lowers the car window. The hawkers run after the car like their life depends on whether they reach the car or not before the buyer changes his mind. It is a precarious business, especially when you are doing such business around 30 ton trucks carrying goods from the Apapa port: the ones that run night and day squishing such poor people at will if they accidentally stray into their path: just like the mosquitoes.

This brings me to the topic of accidents. I have never seen as many accidents in my lifetime in India as the number of them I have witnessed so far in Nigeria during the past one month. The ghastliest so far being the one in Ibadan expressway. Mind you, it is an expressway where speed is of the essence. I can still feel my stomach turn when I recollect the scene.

Maybe I am a little crazy that I keep trying to imagine the wretched soul that was torn to shreds under some trailer that day. I keep visualizing, trying to get into the helpless body and see through his eyes, the truck approaching with its roaring tires. I see through his eyes the terrorizing sight of the wheels bearing down upon the head and the face and I feel my skin, my flesh, my bones being crushed, limbs going limp and lifeless as I imagine life getting squeezed out of me: painful to think about and yet so instantaneous.

Of course he died and probably felt nothing. But for me, the man still alive, he left a sinking sensation that inevitably leads to a series of questions and realizations in my head.

I have often questioned, and no doubt you must have too, the purpose of life. I know it is a question that cannot yield any fruitful answers, you know, like the 5-whys of management and bullshit like that. But anyway, I still keep asking like a stubborn child who knows no reason.

Death seems to be so frequent on the streets here that I get no respite from my questions.

During occasions like these, I start getting a wee bit nostalgic and think about the ones I have loved, the ones who were near to me. I start wondering what would it be like to die here just like that, half-way across the world, away from the ones who matter most to me and those who would probably shed a tear or two and speak a few good words in my memory.

I am sure I will laugh when I read this later on, but right now, I feel like a war-bound moron who is fated to die amongst the unknown heaps of corpses, unrecognized and forgotten.

Like my mood, the weather is pretty gloomy now. Rains in Lagos are quite frequent. But it is not always like that. Sometimes, when we go out to rural markets, we face the rains in the middle of the journey. And as the roads unfold, you will see the grey sky loom over the vast, grassy, uninhabited green lands in the horizon. It seems as if it has just jumped out of a scene from an HD print movie.

Due to these picture perfect moments that I encounter during my attempts to understand how to sell International Instant Noodles to cassava and yam eating Nigerian villagers, I sometimes feel surprisingly inspired and happy. Maybe I will soon get accustomed to the life here.

Maybe I question in vain.

The uncharted life before me waits patiently and I have every intention of finding out what it holds for me in this continent. Maybe soon, as the strands of memory grow weaker, I will have nothing left to return to in India. And there would not be anyone left to shed those few tears as we fade away into separate lives.

The Journey

When I started from home, I did not know what to expect in the journey and at the end of the journey. I was overloaded with luggage and a few petty anxieties regarding international procedures and currency issues. But more than anything else, I was overwhelmed by the terrible heat of Delhi from where I was supposed to leave for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The flight from Delhi was delayed by over an hour. And when we boarded the flight, which had come over from Shanghai, I realized that our boredom from waiting for the flight was no match for that of the air hostesses who were serving us in the flight. God! They looked like they would kill us if we even asked them to get us some water.

Except for the one incident of a haughty Indian having a minor tiff with a sleepy Ethiopian, nothing much happened that can be called funny or exciting. So with nothing much to do and nothing at all to expect, we called it a night soon and were greeted in the morning by the wonderful foreign skies and fluffy clouds that lazily floated around the airplane.

The view from above was beautiful. Africa is beautiful. We could see small settlements and vast (and when I say vast I mean really vast) forest covered regions of hills and valleys. It was refreshing.

We landed at Addis Ababa hoping to catch our next flight to Lagos, Nigeria, within an hour. But then again, the second flight was delayed by an hour and a half.

Indian Stretchable Time follows us like the Vodafone dog, I thought.

But the disappointment of the holdup was soon replaced by the glee of realizing that everyone was smoking in the airport terminal.

Yay! My first smoke abroad! I look around for a friendly Ethiopian to borrow a light from and smoke the waiting time away in bliss.

When we eventually boarded the flight, I had more reason to cheer me up. We had got emergency exit seats. That meant I did not have to sit cramped up into a tiny spot for five-six hours.

When the plane took off, I took the opportunity to take a good look around at the landscape from the window. Addis Ababa would definitely be a place I want to visit sometime in future. And yeah, the air hostess was sitting right in front of me and she was kinda pretty.

I continued scrutinizing the land below for quite some time. And then voila! Down came the drinks trolley!

They were serving only beer and wine, but what the heck, something is better than nothing. I helped myself to a beer can and sat contented for the rest of the flight and even slept a little with the comfort of being able to stretch my legs, till the end of the journey.