The air was thick with the pungent smell of exhaust fumes emanating from the hundreds of cars lining the streets, log-jammed in the gruelling traffic on the highway linking Abeokuta to Lagos. I sat in the back of my father's jeep, shielded from the gaze of the outside world due to the tinted windows, allowing me to watch without being seen. There was a cacophony of sounds made up of revving engines, honking horns, and the calls of hawkers; the distortion in the sounds had a strange soothing effect. As I was about to fall asleep my father quickly tapped me, jolting me out of my impending slumber,’ Pay attention to your surroundings, you won’t be coming back this way for a long time.’ he said. I decided to listen to him, from my experience paying attention to my surroundings has led to some of the most interesting moments in my life.
I sat up in my seat and looked out of the window, a steady stream of gas passed by my eye-line with such stealth that it looked like a predator preparing for the swift annihilation of its prey; not just a contributing factor to the destabilization of the atmosphere. As I shifted my gaze from the heavily polluted air to the road, I began to look at the people who walk these streets everyday . There was an interesting blend of both hawkers and beggars, eager to have the source of their next meal provided by one of the multitude of cars stuck in the snail-paced traffic. The words beggar and hawker are usually viewed as synonyms for each other but this could not be further from reality. Beggars are people who, as their name suggests, beg for alms from those passing by. They usually wear forlorn and weary expressions and hope for your sympathy as a means of their daily survival. On the other hand, hawkers are the antithesis of beggars; they wear determined expressions and trek fervently through the streets, actively advertising their products. Their hardened exterior masks their inner anguish; they hold the same objective as the beggars but have grown to understand that sympathy is not a prevalent emotion in the privileged sector of Nigerian society. We as a collective harbour skepticism of others intentions, we are brought up being told to not look out of the car window, to look forward and ignore those clamouring for aid. These continuous instructions instill the idea of detachment, detachment from the world outside of our privileged bubble.
Looking beyond the crowd passing between the numerous cars, I focused on the downward slope located on the right side of the road leading into an expansive dirt land. What I saw startled me. Spread across the expansive, seemingly uninhabitable dirt land were rows of shanties topped with aluminium roofs, supported by wooden boards and thick rope. These homes were tightly packed together like a tin of sardines, there was no room for manoeuvre for the residents. Puddles of rainwater that were unable to infiltrate the coarse, dense earth settled around the encampment; the intense heat had hardened the earth as well as the people living there. A man slowly trudged out of the opening in front of his shanty. He was wearing a stained, sleeveless white vest and worn jeans which had a colour reminiscent of the earth around him. His arms were as thin as twigs but seemed to harbour some latent strength, most likely born of years of tough physical labour. His arms were contrasted by his strange protruding stomach which did not match any of his other physical features. I soon realized that this was probably due to a severe protein deficiency and what he was suffering from was the disease kwashiorkor. His facial expression was one of dejection and matched his haggard physical appearance. He was not devoid of life but seemed to lack the will to live; his eyes did not hold the dimmest glimmer of hope. As I stared at him his pain began to resonate with me. I did not just sympathise but empathise with his pain, with his seeming crippling emptiness. We were both on opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum but harboured the same despairing look in our eyes. We may not have had the same reason behind it but we were both angry at the world; angry at the suffering, angry at the pain, angry at the ignorance, angry at life itself. He looked into the distance, jaw clenched and fists balled up then proceeded to slink back into his decrepit hut.
Between the narrow gaps in the jam-packed shanties were various animals; goats, dogs, horses and cows, so many cows. The animals inhabiting the area outnumbered the people and moved around with no inhibition; dogs scampering, horses trotting, cows grazing(or attempting to at least), it was a land of freedom for these creatures. Despite this seeming like an ideal reality for the animals, their pain was depicted through their appearance. Their protruding rib cages and spindly front and hind legs mirrored the appearances of the people living on the dirt land. Their freedom was the root of their physical suffering, starvation born from emancipation. The cows moved around as slowly as the traffic on the street, their bodies seeming to struggle to support the weight of their heads. Their hunger was far greater than that of the other animals, they were herbivores living on a land of infertility. Despite this, they still attempted to graze the land, as if they hoped that the appearance of bareness was simply a hallucination. Their hunt for grass on the land was similar to an attempt to look for a ray of light on a night swallowed by impenetrable darkness. They lived simply waiting to die.
As my eyes continued to wander, taking in every little detail of the large area of arid land, I saw a stream around fifty metres away from the collection of huts. Its location was strange but the abnormality gave it an extremely serene vibe; a distant land far away from the perpetual chaos. This was the case only if you were able to ignore the trash ridden bank of the stream, covered in a variety of food wrappers, beer bottles and many other miscellaneous objects. A disgusting representation of how the actions of man transform areas of beauty to landscapes of squalor. I looked away, disgusted at the sight of such beauty being tainted. My dad had hypocritically fallen asleep and the booming sound of his snoring resonated through the entire car. I tried focusing on the road ahead in an attempt to curb my frustration at seeing the trash-filled bank of the stream but I was unable to get the image out of my mind. I slowly turned my head back toward the direction of the stream, by now the traffic had picked up a bit of pace, more akin to a sprinting tortoise than the prior snail pace.
The long car ride had begun to take a toll on my legs as a numbing sensation spread through them, spreading from my thigh down to the tip of my toes. Although my body seemed to be shutting down my mind was as active as ever as we inched past the serene stream; upon closer inspection, it was an extremely murky body of water, seemingly incapable of accommodating any form of life. All that was running through my mind was a recollection of all I had seen, each moment swirling through my consciousness like a scene from a movie; it felt like an illusion and I constantly had to look back to reinforce the reality of the situation. I attempted to seek out the reason why I felt so detached from what I was seeing and after some tedious mental gymnastics came to an obvious conclusion; I was simply a viewer, observing as I remained unseen. The tinted glass gave me the ability to judge but not be judged, an overarching sense of power that I had not even realised. Viewing the world through a one-sided window allowed me to project my thoughts and opinions of what I saw without any inclination of a need for introspection.
The traffic continued to inch forward bit by bit, a mesh of high power machines chugging along, for many their final destinations had long since shifted to the periphery of their minds. As for me, home was still far, far away and I was surprisingly glad that this was the case. I had time to marinate in my thoughts and to slowly be lulled to sleep by the soothing vibrations the car made as its engine revved. I looked at my snoring father again and a smile came over my face. I was quite glad I had taken his advice as I had gained a perspective on my own shortcomings. I wound down the window slowly, allowing the scorching sun to beam down on my face and breaking the barrier created by the veil of the tinted glass.
AAOOA
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