Chapter 3 (part 1): Not a Tuesday
The
sharp piercing pain in my head, which I had found so unbearable earlier, was
replaced by a dull throbbing - a pulsating shallow thud which lasted for short
periods in between lengthy pensive spells of pulsating-shallow-thud-anticipatory
normality. No part of my body felt as bruised as before, except for my right
shoulder, which still felt quite sore. But I thought that was because it had
gone dead as I had been laying awkwardly on my side.
I awoke to familiarity - a blurry
view of a filthy strip of paint in mid peel dangling from the ceiling of my
bedroom. I knew this dangling strip of peeling paint well. I had woken up to
its view every morning for longer than I cared to remember. In the early days,
I thought it made the room seem unsightly, but a long time ago, I decided to
stop thinking about doing anything with it. The way the rough triangular strip
with its lacerated edges hung languidly and began slightly curving backwards
onto itself, like a tongue hanging out of a panting mongrel’s mouth - with
layers of dust and grime settling on its inner face - made it seem organic, as
though it also was decaying alongside me. The sight of this filthy peeling
paint strip always put me in the right mood to tackle the dawning of each new
day. Its view was partially hidden behind the blades of the dusty rickety
ceiling fan, from the centre of which, also dangled a naked light bulb - the
only light fitting in the room. It seemed as though everything above me dangled
fragilely.
The ceiling fan did no fanning, and
the light was off. The faint sounds of a distant thunderous calamity filtered
into my ears, almost completely overwhelmed by the deafening roars of several
power generators operating close by. My neighbours’ generators being on and my
lights being off meant there had once again been an unscheduled and indefinite
power cut
The sheet on my bed was soaked, and
the thin filthy blanket that had lined my mattress for the last three months
was strewn carelessly on the floor beside the bed. The cotton t-shirt I wore
clung onto me as though I had just emerged from a swim with my clothes on. I
was sweating profusely and I reeked as though I had been sweating profusely for
a while. The air in the room was thick with the stench of dried sweat and
diesel fumes. I cannot remember which stench triumphed over the other. The only
window in the room; in the wall to my left, - a poorly finished aperture with
all four sides of the square opening crooked and uneven - glowed along the
entire perimeter of its frame. Even though the curtains were drawn I knew it
was around midday, as the tinted louvers were open at a slight angle, and the
sun shone high outside - penetrating into the room in thin rays, which seeped
through at all junctions: where the curtains did not fully meet the window
aperture, and in the middle - a narrow gap where the curtains had not been
tightly drawn together. Smoke particles bounced along the infiltrating light rays
in random movements. I tried tracking some of them, but could not concentrate
for long. The heat was overwhelming, but it was the humidity and thick air -
very difficult to breathe in such heat when heavily laced with diesel fumes -
which stifled my concentration. It was a late October morning, and at that time
of the year, we were meant to be experiencing the comforts of the cooler and drier
season, but there was nothing cool or dry about the weather that day.
I was extremely uncomfortable, but I
wasn’t put-off by it all. Truth be told, I like the smell of diesel fumes in
late October. I like the stifling heat which so completely traps the foul air
of the city - always laden with either the fresh stench of decaying refuse, or
petroleum fumes, or effluence, or more. I like the way your sweat staples your
clothes to your body. I like a lot of other things quite unique to this part of
the world: I like the sight of rotting filth strewn on the un-paved pavements,
right beside the ubiquitous beggars. I like the sight of malnourished children
- wearing loose fitting filthy pants and nothing more - crying their eyes out
in pain of hunger whilst sitting beside the beggars on the un-paved pavements,
with dried mucus lines running from nostril to upper lip. I like the sight of
hundreds of intertwined high-level electric and telephone cables stretching overhead
across jam-packed streets; dangling perilously low, like cobwebs encroaching
from an unkempt sky - further busying the already overactive cityscape - to tap
into one single telegraph pole, itself adorned from head to toe with hundreds
of age-old posters overlaid onto one another. I like how everything seems
broken and old, but feels so rich. Even the stench of the city is rich in it‘s
foulness. I like the sounds of frustration all around. I like the sight of
chaos. I like the stink of negligence and the general sense of capitulation. It
makes you constantly ask: “where does one start?” It makes you wonder whether
perhaps you are nothing and there is nothing you can do about your nothingness.
It is chaos and confusion in its pristine glory. You smell, see, hear and
always end up asking the same question: “Where does one start?” And then you
sit back, relax, and enjoy the turmoil when you realize that that perhaps some
see beauty in chaos and frustration.
On my bed, chocked by the stench of
diesel and sweat, I desperately needed to be away from the room. So I tried
ignoring the noisy power generators and concentrating on the distant uproar,
and gradually, the blare of the generators began fading into the background, as
the sounds of Côte d'or noir became more perceptible, until I could hear it all
as though I was right in their midst - shouting, horning and wailing as well
beside them. Only then, when in my head the monotonous roar of the machines had
almost become completely inaudible – dampened by the sounds of confusion which
I willed myself amidst - did I remember what it is was that kept me in Côte
d'or noir.
The sound of several hundred horns
roaring angrily at each other at Geride bus-stop - at the entrance to Agboju Estate - did not
overwhelm every other sound from the “bus-stop”. The screams, the laughter, the
cries and the quarrels were all still audible in the background; audible
beneath the relentless horning from all the vehicles protesting their self-engineered
incarcerations.
Now, having grown up in less
effervescent surroundings, my image of bus-stops had previously been of small
shelters, perhaps capable of shielding ten or so crammed huddlers (if they are
trim enough) from the elements, located on roads where the act of pulling over
to allow passengers board and alight is not likely to cause mass fatalities.
This “bus-stop” however, is simply a stretch on a busy seventy-mile an hour motorway,
where public transport commercial bus drivers started choosing to stop. It is a
mile or so long stretch of chaotic motionlessness on a motorway called
Queensway Road which runs through Geride. They call it a motorway, but
in truth, it is more like a dirt track pockmarked with scabby patches of tarmac
and splattered with occasional white lines marking nothing in particular. Truth
be told, I’ve seen smoother surfaces in lunar photos. Once upon a time, it was
a fully tarmaced motorway, equipped with hard-shoulders, sign posts, and
streetlights et-al, but over the years, the officials placed in charge of
maintaining motorways have desperately needed those sixth homes in Switzerland,
and so it’s likely a motorway service budget or twenty-two may have been
redirected to The Alps.
Geride
bus-stop, what a place! A random stretch along the motorway which, decades ago,
the public transport drivers, or Gbandiers as they are commonly known,
decided would be the perfect location to start picking up and dropping
passengers, regardless of whether or not they spotted the phantom bus shelters
lurking on the absent hard shoulders, or sulking beneath the missing motorway
exit signs.
As picking that particular site
seems to have been an impromptu decision, there are no formal bus shelters on
the busy seventy mile per hour motorway. For this same reason, there are no
lay-by’s or parking bays on the motorway either - there have never been. No
bus-stop facilities at all. It makes you think maybe the middle of the motorway
was never meant to be a bus-stop. What there has always been is dirt and dots
of degenerating tarmac, and nobody quite understands why it is on this select
mile of tarmac dotted dirt (no different from any other mile of tarmac dotted
dirt on the motorway) that hundreds of these Gbandiers - who are quite
partial to the odd narcotic or two for breakfast - pull-up sharply in their
mobile abattoirs (regardless of whether or not those right behind them are
driving at just slightly under or over the seventy miles an hour average) and
instruct their ticket inspectors, or conductors as they are locally
known, to get out and begin touting for business by screaming their proposed
destinations at the top of their voices whilst traipsing unperturbedly
in-front-of the screeching and swerving cars behind them.
Not surprisingly, when driving
behind a public transport vehicle, a Gbandi, it takes concentration of
hellish intensity to avoid certain death. I’ve been there before: one second
you’re driving along, minding your business and wondering where the next pay packet
is coming from, and the next, you’re trying to avoid a collision with a
particular lunatic on your right, who thinks it’s worth everyone’s while to
acutely cut into your lane at ninety miles an hour, and you’re only going so
fast because there is another lunatic who is following two inches behind you
also travelling at ninety miles an hour, and will not overtake you, but will
happily run into the back of you if you go any slower than ninety miles an
hour, and you cannot trespass into the right hand lane to let the lunatic
behind you get past, because that lane has just been taken-up by yet another
lunatic, who is intent on cutting you off just like his predecessor did, and
wandering into the left hand lane isn’t an option because the central reservation
(a three foot high by four foot wide continuous reinforced concrete barrier)
occupies said spot in its full uninterrupted glory, and to accelerate away from
all the madness is to tempt fate, as the Gbandier is right in front of
you, dead keen on continuing to play his game called can you guess when I’m
going to slam on my brakes and decelerate from ninety to zero miles per hour in
record speed whilst throwing my passengers in your lane ? with
you. Really, it’s much harder work than it was ever meant to be.
It doesn’t help that Gbandis -
almost as a requirement - are vehicles which ought not to be vehicling at all.
I am yet to come across a single Gbandi which has seen less years than
it’s driver. Relics from times long gone - times of colonial demise and general
optimism - their contribution to every scenario I’ve ever stumbled upon is to
spread disharmony and angst. The most common sight on any D’ornoirian motorway
(besides the bribe taking policemen; hawkers sun-bathing on your bonnet; robbers
on your boot orchestrating your demise; beggars beneath your car devising some
deviousness; and malnourished infants in underwear sitting on pavements and staring
into space) is a packed-up Gbandi,
with a driver beneath the bonnet industriously bashing something with a rock,
reconnecting some things with bits of string, and disconnecting other things
with his teeth, and a pleading conductor on his knees trying to pacify twenty
or so (now-stranded-in-the-middle-of-a motorway) livid passengers at the same
time.
All Gbandis look the same.
They are black and yellow striped (the official state colours) bashed-up three-seater
transit vans, with the original upholstery gutted out to make way for the
thriftier and more compact commuter seats - metal park benches. You’ll be hard
pressed to come across one which is not packed to explosion, as on average, a
conservative Gbandier will only cram his vehicle with twenty five souls.
Bearing scars of a motoring lifetime of misadventure, and plastered with
stickers displaying exalting messages dedicated to the deities which have kept
them on their wheels for that long, they truly are mobile coffins.
GOD IS ETERNAL, MY CAMBELT IS NOT. MIND YOUR DISTANCE!
GOD IS GREAT, MY DRIVING MIGHT NOT BE. CHECK YOUR SPEED, and
MY PLACE IN HEAVEN IS SECURE. MY BREAKPADS ARE NOT. MIND YOUR
DISTANCE! are but a few of the sticker messages I
remember pondering over, wondering: “perhaps that’s all these vehicles need to
keep them going - not sane drivers; or decent roads; or rust free engine parts,
no, just God.”
To be fair, the failure of these
vehicles to act as agreeable vehicles has as much to do with the age of the
machines as it has to do with the brain rot of their drivers. Any fifty year
old vehicle can only be so reliable, and well… Gbandiers are what they
are. It truly is a lethal marriage. You tend to find that when you stumble
across a fifty year old vehicle, which for the last twenty years has been
operated by a mad man who really ought not to be allowed to care for anything
less robust than a thoroughly robust rock, the accelerator pedal might be where
the clutch pedal ought to be; the clutch pedal might be where the brake pedal
ought to be; it is likely the space where the brake pedal ought to be is
occupied by a bible with hard imprinted footprints on its cover; and the
handbrake lever would have undoubtedly been completely done away with, replaced
by a bottle of special homebrew.
All Gbandiers are the same. I
am not typically a name caller, but sometimes, it‘s good to tell it as it is.
They are all frenzied lunatics. I could don my sympathetic cap and try to put a
case forward for lunatic taxonomy - you know: “Now you see, there are mad men,
and there are mad men. And maybe they are not that mad,”
but that would be a waste of time - they spread themselves out quite evenly
along lunacy’s vast spectrum, ranging from slightly
without it to absolutely nothing to
declare. I have observed them in action for a decade, and even though it
may be argued that the job instills madness, the more sensible case to put
forward might be that inherent madness is the job’s top requirement. Only a mad
man would see what Gbandi driving entails and decide it is a worthwhile
profession to pursue. It’s not just some job one takes on out of desperation -
you would turn to begging if that was the case: There’s more money involved in
begging; there’s more esteem to begging; there are fewer personal insults aimed
your way; less hours to work; not as many blows, kicks and slaps to absorb, and
less globs of spit to evade - there’s just no comparison. You don’t take up
Gbandi driving because of some thrill seeking desire burning deep within your
carefree soul either. If you seek that kind of deadly misadventure on a daily
basis, you would choose a career sweeping the roads the Gbandiers operate
on. They are mad men, simple as that. Think about it, what kind of person looks
at a thirty year old transit van, fits it out with metal park benches, and then
decides he is going to make a living ferrying people about in it for the next
twenty years, but not before blindly shuffling the operational foot pedals
about? What kind of person trusts his welfare to a machine that old and undermined?
A self-saboteur? No. A mad man! What kind of person looks at a three lane
seventy mile an hour motorway and thinks the middle lane is an ideal spot to
start offloading and picking up passengers? What kind of person smokes pawpaw
leaves for breakfast, drinks homebrew for lunch, and then foregoes dinner
because he is on a diet? Only a madman, no question about it.
As Queensway is a public motorway,
the private drivers might assume they are entitled to enjoy every inch of its
stretch as much as the Gbandi drivers, but they would be gravely
mistaken, because all motorway bus-stops are very much owned and governed by
the Gbandi drivers and their bus conductors, who are there only to a)
argue on behalf of the lunatic captains of their ships, b) collect fares on
behalf of the lunatic captains of their ships, and c) sustain beatings on
behalf of the lunatic captains of their ships. And so, as Geride bus-stop
- which is not dissimilar to any other “bus stop” in Ogredhad in terms
of how it came to be a bus-stop, and the way it functions as a bus-stop - is
under the governance of professional lunatics, there is little wonder how all
manner of nonsense prevails under their stewardship. Where Gbandi’s stop,
gridlock prevails - irate private commuters find themselves stranded amongst
the chaos of the haphazardly parked public transport busses. Where stranded
private commuters congregate, hawkers, thieves, policemen, stray livestock, and
beggars find themselves an audience to: sell to, steal from, extort, constitute
an utter nuisance, and scrounge off respectively. The result as you can imagine
is pandemonium; a frustration themed jamboree in a breakers yard: Policemen
scaling the rusty bonnets of decrepit vehicles in pursuit of commercial
motorcycle riders escaping from the extortionate policemen, leaving thieves
free to waylay stranded commuters and hawkers indiscriminately, whilst the
beggars and stray livestock fight tooth, nail and hoof beneath the stranded
private vehicles - on the tarmac dotted dirt - over fallen pieces of fruit and
loose change.
It’s unbelievable: At 6:59am, the
motorway is clear - traffic is moving smoothly. Then a moment later, the sun emerges
from behind a cloud and everyone’s brain instantly gets fried: A Gbandi
screeches to a halt and starts offloading passengers, and then another does the
same, and then another also follows suit, and soon, they are all there. The bus
conductors high on secondary pawpaw leaf smoke begin staggering around the
spaces in-between the awkwardly jumbled vehicles and screaming their
destinations at the top of their voices to attract newly offloaded passengers;
the newly offloaded passengers take to meandering in-between vehicles as well,
listening out for the bus-conductor’s calls and jumping on new busses. Then the
private drivers slam on their brakes, contort their faces into horrified
squints - unable to believe the sight of all the chaos in front of them - and
start pressing their horns in frustration as though they expected things to be
different from the day before. And then the hawkers arrive and are in no hurry
to get out of anyone’s way as their modus-operandi involves slowing down
traffic so there are numerous punters to sell to. And soon, the bus stop, which
only minutes ago was a motorway, transforms into a vibrant market.
You have to wonder about some of us
private drivers as well. Sharing roads with professional lunatics could be sympathetically
seen as our necessary cross to bear if it was not such a shallow burden-pool to
wallow in. There are people around the world who have started revolutions after
enduring much less, but yet, we suffer the madness as though it is the only
way; as though not a single one of us has seen where busses really ought to
stop, or what motorways are really supposed to look like on television. You
have to ask questions about anybody who chooses to tolerate this ilk of idiocy,
and not only returns for more on a daily basis, but also decides the best way
to get out of the mess is to sit in the same squalor, and horn oneself into a
deafness induced stupor. Horning for freedom. Horning at mad men high on pawpaw
leaves and homebrew as though they are going to look round, apologise
profusely for the chaos they’ve caused, and move their chaos wagons out of the
way, so that we - the irate teeth-gnashing horners - can get through quickly
and safely; horning at creatures with a total imperviousness to the insult –
creatures who by every single act of their toil fan the flames of others
frustration; horning and screaming; ignoring the very nature of lunacy –
failing to realise that mad-men live in a universe of one. Horning at penniless
hawkers with absolutely nothing to their names except the trays of commodities
they shove through open car windows without any invitation, as thought
they - perhaps after being peppered by a
particularly tooty blast from a horn - are suddenly going to realise they are
constituting a right nuisance and clear off. Horning at thieves who are there
to steal a horn or two, and at policemen who the thieves pay a commission to
for turning a blind eye as a horn or two is stolen.
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