She lugged her wheeled box down the road; there was no sense in dragging the flimsy rollers along the potholed sidewalk. The congestion was evident with people everywhere even though it was not yet fully light. Yoruba language bombarded her, from most of the people who thronged the streets and from the boys yelling through the open doors of moving yellow painted buses. Afro beat music blared from loudspeakers on top of parked vehicles.
She tuned out the noise and listened to the conductors barking out route and destinations to determine which of them was going to the area she wanted. She soon found a smaller danfo bus, clambered in and plopped down on the empty space on the middle bench. She wasn‘t surprised when the conductor said there was no timetable and the vehicle would only move when full. It was the same everywhere she had travelled. Gladys settled in, expecting they wouldn‘t wait too long to fill up. Passengers thronged the park and this bus was not one of the larger models. That would have meant a longer, sweatier delay on this humid morning.
The park also served as a market and narrow shops with colorful banners lined the edges. The air was thick with body odors, dust, and strange food smells. Gladys absorbed it; amused as she watched some of the other passengers buy various items from the hard discomfort of their seats. Hawkers came up to the bus to offer underpants, watches, popcorn, sausage rolls in worn wraps, and plastic bags of water. Gladys bought the water, not troubled about its purity,
and sucked the bag dry. She tossed it out of the window as the bus wheezed and shuddered its way out into the traffic.
A mother with a child on each knee blocked her view of the road ahead. Cramped next to the woman‘s wide hips was the brawny conductor. Gladys contented herself with looking out through the smudged windows on both sides of the rickety yellow bus. It took them over an hour to hurdle the Lagos lagoon via the Third Mainland Bridge. As the sun started its ascent over the sometimes inching, sometimes stationary bus, Gladys was riveted by the sights and sounds of her new city. She marveled at the contradictory panoramas that met her gaze.
Men, women and children paddled canoes on the murky black water beneath; oblivious to the stench Gladys could smell from the top of the bridge. The large numbers of wooden houses balanced on stilts above the lagoon had rusty tin roofs wreathed in coils of smoke from open cooking fires. A sawmill further down burnt sawdust and belched up even more clouds of smog. All this mixed with the exhaust plumes from the traffic to create a dense haze that tickled her nostrils. The late January sun outlined the façade of the Lagos Island skyline that towered in the distance. The many high-rise buildings may have been a different color in an earlier life, but all she saw now were structures blackened by decades in the fog.