Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em

Part 2 of 2

The second part of the trip was a bus ride from Suleja to Bida. I was hours behind schedule. With the blown tire and the slow pace we had adopted after fixing it, we had gotten to Suleja late and I wouldn’t get to Bida until long after sunset.

At the Suleja bus park, the last bus filled up and we left.

I tried sleeping, but I was still shaken up from the accident. I brought out a book but reading was impossible. My head was pounding and I couldn’t keep my hands steady. The smoke from the engine of the bus was seeping into the bus. I couldn’t see it, but I could smell the exhaust and feel it sting my eyes. None of the other passengers seemed bothered by it. I put my head down, and rubbed my temples, going over the events of the day.

It was a bumpy ride. The Suleja-Bida road is terrible, it is so bad that there wasn’t any risk of dying in a high speed accident. That was one thing to be grateful for.
The bus lumbered on, stumbling into potholes, swinging back and forth across the road. We would stop and turn off the road to avoid a bad patch, I would look up to see why we had slowed down and my eyes would fill with tears as my face was hit with a puff of exhaust.

I was sitting in the first row, directly behind the driver and he kept a casual conversation going with the woman next to him. At some point about halfway to Bida, the woman asked the driver to stop, she wanted to pee.
The driver pulled over and the woman bolted into the bushes. The driver got out to pee as well. He crossed the road in the opposite direction.

The driver hadn’t announced the pee break to the rest of the passengers because he didn’t want to spend a lot of time waiting for everyone.
A man who had been sleeping by the door woke up as he felt the bus stop. He saw the woman run out of the passenger side front door, and he saw the driver get out too. Then the man looked back at the front of the bus to verify that it was indeed the driver crossing the road running away from the bus. It was.
The driver’s seat was empty and there was light smoke coming out of the dashboard; the same smoke that had been bothering me throughout the ride. There was also a faint smell of burning rubber.

The man shouted, “FIRE”, pushed the door of the bus open and ran out. Panic swept through the bus. I had been looking around at the other passengers, so I had seen the man raise his head drowsily and his eyes widen with fear. People were screaming and jumping out of windows. A woman carrying a baby on her back climbed over two rows, stepped on my shoulder and got out, sleek like a ninja. A large woman fell backwards in the rush and I was trapped behind (and under her) as the other passengers scrambled past her to escape.

The woman made several attempts to get up, but every time she tried, another passenger would push her down as they struggled to get out. By the third try, I had managed to extract most of my body out from underneath her, but I was now wedged in the space between my seat and the back of the driver’s seat and the woman was half-sitting on my right leg.

Everybody else made it out of the bus. Except me.
By the time the woman got off my leg, I had given up and stopped trying to move. I sat there on the floor between the seats with my leg twisted up on the chair, an indifferent broken man waiting for the inferno to engulf him.

The driver heard the noise and came back to the bus. He calmed everyone down. “Smoke from the engine? It’s normal. Completely normal. Been happening since Suleja.”

The passengers gathered around the bus were amused by their overreaction. One of them pointed inside at me, and they laughed as they climbed back into the bus.

Later, when my mind returned to me, I was thinking about this, about people who live under the constant threat of death, of explosions, of violence. It doesn’t take much for people to go from being excited about life to apathy.
With repeated exposure, those who live in these situations permanently lose hope, and those who hear about it stop being surprised.
It becomes just another day in Kano.

TT: Happy late Birthday

When I was eight, my five year old cousin did the calculations, held four fingers up to my face and said, “In four years, I will be older than you.”
Assuming in his innocence that I wouldn’t age as he overtook me.

He only made it to 24.

He never caught up.

TT: new year, old attitude

In case you haven’t noticed, there is a revolution going on. Situations like this bring up the subject of death and what counts as “acceptable sacrifice”, especially because it comes at the start of a new year.

Towards the end of any year, people pray specifically to survive the last few weeks, to see the new year.

I was at a meeting where the guy prayed for the ‘ember months. “God, please let us make it through the ‘ember months because that’s when many people die.”

I was not comforted.

What about the ‘uary months, dude?

Would it make any difference if I died in the last few days of December or early in January? Has any mother ever been comforted with the words “at least he saw the new year”?

The same people sit around apprehensively watching the final seconds of the old year tick away and go wild once the new year swings in.
If you have no real plans for the new year besides more safe living, what are you so excited about?

The thing is everybody dies in one of two ways, either unexpectedly or expectedly.

For something so certain, few of us are prepared to die unexpectedly. We seldom have our affairs in order, our secrets neatly wrapped up, dependants’ wellbeing planned for.

Fewer still are bold enough to die expectedly, to selflessly battle a long illness knowing there is no return to normal at the end of it.
What do you talk about to the people that come to see you? About your impending death, their future plans? Rarely. We talk about the now, the mediocre. We sidestep the obvious.

In the end, whether you get a lot of time or a little time, you wake up everyday and you try to do something meaningful.

*covers face with wet handkerchief and runs into tear gassed street*