If there was one thing Lilly Loveless regretted with the start of her Mimboland adventure, it was the fact that in her rush to get to the airport in time, she had forgotten to bring along her yellow booklet of vaccines. As a result she was detained by a no-nonsense health official at the Sawang International Airport who forcefully administered injections which he refused to accept she had had just days before.
“How do you expect me to believe that? Show me your card!” The man blared, making her feel like a child lying in broad daylight. She would not be allowed to contaminate the land of Mimbo with yellow fever, cholera and meningitis. And she paid for the vaccines at a rate more than exorbitant in money, comfort and time. The whole exercise took nearly two hours, making her virtually the last passenger to come through from immigration to the baggage area.
The scorching heat, humidity, poor ventilation and the officials’ undisguised reluctance to be understanding compounded the stifling feeling in Lilly Loveless.
By the time she had finished oiling the thick dry lips of the two lady customs officers who had insisted on looking beneath her mom’s dirty XXL underwear, which she had packed on top precisely to deter such a meticulous item by item search for God-knows-what, Dr Wiseman Lovemore, a man not gifted in patience by any standards, had given up waiting and left the airport. So Lilly Loveless, seeing no placard with her name, succumbed to the aggressive persuasion of a determined taxi man and implored: “University of Mimbo, Puttkamerstown, s’il vous plait.”
“Yi please me time no dey,” the taxi man sought to reassure her, mimicking her whiteman-woman accent, the way a child would with its fingers to the tip of its nose singing: “Whiteman with your long nose, since ma mother born me I no ba see me whiteman …” “You go pay Mim$40,000,” he told her.
“That’s too much,” she screamed. “I look for another taxi!” Dustbin had forewarned her against the exorbitant rates of the opportunistic taxi men in Sawang.
“La distance est longue. Puttkamerstown faway. Na ara kontri,” he tried to explain.
She was adamant; the amount was just too much.
“So na how much you go pay?” he asked.
“Wait a minute,” she told him, taking out her notebook. She consulted it, then said, “Not more than Mim$10,000.” That’s the amount Dustbin had advised her not to go over.
“No, no. Dat moni small plenty. No man for here go take you to Puttkamerstown for dat amount.” The driver swore. “You pay Mim$20,000 or you take ara taxi if you see am.”
Lilly Loveless studied the pros and cons of wasting more time haggling with a second, and perhaps a third and fourth taxi man, and concluded she was better off yielding. “Let’s go,” she sighed.
“But if road long, and traffic dey, you go pay more, foseka petrol dear,” the driver insisted as she entered the car.
She pretended not to understand what he said, but was determined not to pay a cent more.
“Your safety belt is unsafe,” said Lilly Loveless, as she discovered the belt had been cut into two halves.
“Na all dat I get… No fear,” he told her.
The taxi man was far from reassuring. Once he started driving, he seemed to head straight for the potholes perforating the battered roads. In his equally battered Toyota Corolla that had no shock absorbers to cushion the tortuous ride, they trotted along as if on a hoofless horse. The front and back windshields of the car were splattered with adverts, including one which touted, “My Toyota Is Fantastic.”
More like “My Toyota is in Plastic,” Lilly Loveless thought, hardly bringing herself to appreciate the irony the way she ordinarily would. To be fair though, one could have the slickest car in the world, but with roads as rubbish as this, there’s little to do but pull, dive and stumble along. Just then, she noticed a very slick car proving the point.
Lilly Loveless was amazed by the crater size potholes made worse by pools of muddy rainwater. This was testing to the limit her philosophy of ‘wetter is better’, especially as the splashes made by the passing cars stank like sewage. Rotting refuse mountains at the corner of every street were colonised by swarms of flies, maggots and rats nonchalantly fattening themselves up. Lilly Loveless and the taxi man went through swampy neighbourhoods, where the car gathered mud and children struggled with floating household refuse and sewage, as if in a sort of fashion parade. The car, which already smelt oddly, picked up more nauseating stenches as the tires grew thicker with mincemeat of unattended waste. At one point, she thought she saw a man lying in the middle of the road, perhaps dead, but no one bothered to stop and help, her own driver included. She fumed, but conversation between them was difficult, as what the taxi man said seemed to suggest the man was catching up on sleep in preparation to lose sleep as a night watchman.
If she hadn’t done her background reading, she might have thought Sawang had been at the heart of a savage war and bombing in which chaos had mass murdered order. She knew Mimboland as the peaceful armpit of a turbulent Africa, and now she was being forced to reappraise what the books had told her by the bumpy reality of a city hardly at peace with itself. The city’s roads and refuse had been totally neglected, just as the air conditioning, toilets and other facilities at the nightmare of an airport. It was as if Mimboland had gone for decades without a government, for not even a warzone devastated by warlords and years of reckless abandon could look this miserable and disabled.
She was glad to be heading for Puttkamerstown, as she simply couldn’t stand Sawang.
Though empathetic to him, Lilly Loveless was also suspicious that the taxi man was not in a hurry to bring her to her destination. He exasperated her with his backstreet options, indirections and indecisions, but she was too scared to put her foot down. The car lurched along bumpily, yet no university was in view.
At one point, the taxi man stopped abruptly and turned to her. “Whosai you say you di go?” he asked. It was evident he either didn’t know the University, or he was simply eating up time in the hope of squeezing even more out of her.
“University of Mimbo!” she screamed and rolled her eyes, barely containing her mounting impatience. She could see he looked equally perplexed. She gathered courage and forced him to ask for directions.
“That’s far away from here, way out of the city,” a bendskin rider told them. “You’re in the wrong place, wrong direction,” the man looked questioningly at the taxi man, as if asking what he was doing with a taxi in a city he mastered so little. “Turn left, left again at the first roundabout, drive straight ahead for three hundred metres or so, make a right turn after the mango orchards, and drive on, looking out for the signposts for directions.”
Lilly Loveless took down notes, not sure her driver understood a thing. She would guide him. They thanked the Good Samaritan bendskin rider, and made a U-turn.
Lilly Loveless could see there were hundreds of motor bike riders like the one who had given them directions. They were picking up and dropping off passengers, apparently much abler to negotiate the potholes and traffic than the taxis that competed with them. She also noticed people on bicycles, some with crates of eggs mounted behind them. They seemed to ride so nonchalantly, unaware of the risk that, with one too-quick movement of the handlebars, a whole day of earnings could be smashed to the pavement in white and yellow glowing and moving globs punctuated by broken shells.
There was this lady, mounted on her bike, doubtless on her way to somewhere important, as she was not stopping for passengers. Lilly Loveless admired the strapless top she wore, made of a print fabric with leopard and tiger designs combined. Her two-toned braids matched her top. Some were gathered loosely on the back of her head while others tumbled to grace the space between her bare shoulders. Her long brown trousers were wide and her heels, braced against the pavement briefly for traffic to ease up, were high. Her handbag waited obediently over the handlebar of her bike…
There were lots of people on foot as well, furious and provocative in their busy-ness. The stench emitted by the farting gutters and refuse