Weaving through the market. The rich streets. The heavy air and the scents that burn your nostrils. Everyone is here.
In one turn of a corner, a woman is roasting corn over smoldering charcoals. Beside her a woman sits on an old rusted axle and tugs at a teenager's hair. It's second nature. They engage in a chatty and mildly devilish conversation. Their eyes darting surreptitiously to the left where some men play dominoes and rest their elbows against brick walls, unwavering in their eye contact. The corners of their mouths turn up unnoticeably and their eyes twinkle.
In a shop to the right there's a barber, and outside his shop stray dogs weave and stumble between legs and machinery. Men are fixing tires. They clang heavy metal batons at the metal centers. Their shoulder blades swell and seize with muscles and sweat pours into their eyes and across their cheekbones.
Tap taps swerve, and everyone has their own beat, their own rhythm. The street is alive.
A little further down a man sells newspapers, and beside him are the queen bees. Women in their late sixties, or maybe just their mid forties, because life has been so hard. They sell fruit. They call out to you as you pass. Grabbing the cuff of a pant leg or swatting the behind of a loitering teenager, running and stumbling in between umbrellas, getting in their way, and asking for their attention. The swat is maternal. They are maternal. Everybody is their baby. Everybody is their child. They're squawking and chirping away at eachother and I step inbetween ashy and wrinkled legs. Spread wide, skirts on the pavement, bowls of snapped peas and cabbages in their hands.
'Bonswa Madame yo'
They break in their debate and chatter for a split second. White hair and squinty eyes. Delicious wrinkled cheeks and toothless smiles.
They make bold eye contact and crack huge grins. Oh, bonswa Cherie. How are you. Not too bad, right? Having a good day? Okay darling, okay, off you go, you're walking, okay, tomorrow if God wills it.
Real love. True doting. They give themselves freely and genuinely, and just like that, I walk on, and they resume their daily grind. Ever pleasant. Ever comical. Feisty grandmothers and no nonsense saleswomen.
Wheelbarrows are strewn in a line bearing freshly cut meat, once cool and plump, it now lays sweating and demoralized, dripping over the sides. Men haggle and large pieces are hacked and carved with grimy machetes.
A boy walks to the beat of the music playing from his pocketed cell phone. Individually wrapped plastic bags of salt are on his head in a bowl. He doesn't stumble. He doesn't break his stride. His steps are confident and seamless.
Shoe shiners line up amidst the mechanics and the produce. The ground thick with oil and trash. Streams of soapy water from the man washing a motorcycle just a few feet away.
And the lotteries. Watching the numbers. Placing their bets. Brightly painted walls and chance. They step out of the barber shop, they crack open sweaty beers with their teeth. They pinch the cheek of a braided-head school girl walking by, or the swaying bottom of a girlfriend demanding to know when they'll be home.
And it's hot. The sun is ruthless. And it's everywhere. Solace is seldom. I squint as I turn into the sun. The shiny metal parts of the motorcycles. The reflective mirrors on taptaps and chains strung around necks. Everything turns the sun back to me.
My skin reflects it back to them.
A single white girl. Hustled through the market. Caught up in a rhythm that isn't of my own device. Walking to a beat I didn't make.
Hearing the music that I've never heard.
And trying to stay in sync.
