Life and Limbs

He ran. His pair of aging slippers slipped off his feet but he ran harder. Panting. The bus was picking up speed. He looked ahead and his heart pounded harder. The traffic had suddenly eased and the road ahead was clear. If he didn’t get the money from the passenger for the two sausages of gala, he knew what that’ll mean for him. But his legs couldn’t be made to go any faster. As the space between him and the bus widened and his weak legs began to slow, he felt himself tiring. He was out of breath. Yet, he knew that there were consequences for not getting that money. It was not going to be a good night for him. Again. He could imagine what accusations would be piled on his head for another incomplete balance of the day’s sales.

He was next to tears when his eagle-eyes caught a hand emerge from the window on the side of the speeding bus and released a naira note.

The opportunity to get paid for his gala galvanised his tired limbs. The naira danced drunkenly as drafts of wind from fast pacing cars acted on the pull of gravity on the note. But he kept a keen and close eye on it while applying streetwise multitasking to avoid being knocked down by drivers in the vehicles moving along, most of whom were obviously oblivious of the young roadside vendor trying to get his pay.

“You wan die?” screamed a visibly angry driver who’d had to react quickly by braking suddenly. His sole passenger in the owner’s corner – a middle-aged corporate-looking bespectacled woman had jerked forward due to the abruptness of the brakes. She barely managed not knocking her head against the headrest of the passenger seat in front of her.

Nimbly re-adjusting her specs on the fine bridge of her nose, she could only shake her well-coiffured head as her driver drove past the small vendor still spilling expletives at the boy.

“Shush!” she reprimanded the driver wondering when he’d ever get it into his skull to control his tongue especially when driving her. As she turned around to catch another glimpse of the boy they almost hit, she couldn’t help noticing how young he appeared and noticing that absentminded look on his face.

Whatever the driver was spewing and whatever the executive lady was thinking of meant zilch to the boy. His eyes remained transfixed on the still swaying naira note. It had been blown to the other side of the road and it was in trying to follow it and claim possession of it before it falls into any other hand that he was almost upended by that rude driver.

Still keeping his eyes on the now descending naira, he squeezed himself in-between a keke Marwa and a Kia Sorento. Traffic had started building again. He was about to gain the pedestrian side of the road when he had to suddenly beat two steps backwards. A fraction of a second late and he would have been hit by an okadaman whose attention was focussed on swerving between the now stationary vehicles so that he could be far in front before the traffic eases again.

“E bi like say you don dey mad,” the okada rider who had braked suddenly said to the unattentive boy. “Dem sen you?” He queried trying to force the boy to look at him.

It was a waste of time. Seeing as the boy’s eyes were elsewhere and that the boy was looking for a way to go past okada, keke and Kia, the rider upturned his lips disapprovingly.

Navigating between the Sorento and a commercial bus, the rider rode away saying while shrugging, “Na pesin wey go kee you you dey fine! E no go bi me!”

If the boy heard, it didn’t reflect on him. But it was with relief that he realised, as soon as he could free himself from the intruding offensive okadaman, that he was only a few paces away from the naira note now and there was no another impediments between him and the now slowly descending note to where he calculated he’d need to be to claim it when it makes landfall.

Only a few steps now, he urged himself as he willed his legs to carry him further. He didn’t see the woman. She didn’t see him either. She was going to pour it in the normal place. His eyes were fixed on the floating note. With wide-eyes she looked on as she poured it and saw a young boy run headlong into the arching spray. Completely drenched. It was water used to wash pepper before grinding. It entered his eyes. It was sniffed into his nose because of his running exertions. He even managed to get some of it into his right ear, the side from which she threw the water. Unseeing, he stumbled, fell and rolled in the mud around the area where a buka regularly emptied all sorts of dirty water.

It was later when he’d been given water to refresh himself and pampered with care by sympathetic onlookers and the buka staff that one of the agberos in the area tapped him on the left shoulder. He turned around blinking. The stinging of the pepper hadn’t really pitied his eyes.

Without saying a word, the agbero handed him a N100 note (the new centenary variant) and the carton of his remaining gala. The boy recognised him as one of those who other agberos took their complaints to and who settled differences between some agberos and bus conductors or bus drivers. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, this particular agbero was feared by many a bus conductor and driver. He’d never thought of him as a kind person though he always made sure he greeted him courteously anytime he came around where he was.

“Thank you, sah,” the boy blurted, brimming with sincere gratitude.

In his pursuit of the elusive note, he’d all but forgotten where he dropped the gala carton containing the remainder of the rolls for the day. He’d have been in the hottest soup ever back home if the carton had grown wings. It wouldn’t have been a novel thing. He knew of some of his friends who had suffered that exact misfortune. That thought amplified his gratitude.

“God bless you, sah,” he added, kneeling down to show the extent of his appreciation.

“Ah,” the agbero said in a caustic grovel. “Dide, dide ma wori, so gbo,” he said in Yoruba (“Get up, get up, don’t worry").

The boy stood up in compliance still expressing thanks. But the agbero had turned and walked away. Since it was getting late, the boy decided to begin his walk home. He’d try as he did daily to sell whatever else was left as he made the trip home. He managed two more sales and did his calculations all the way to their house on the other side of town. Before he slept that night he prayed for the bus passenger, adding some extra special prayers for the agbero.

As he closed his eyes to sleep, he’d never know that the passenger didn’t really pay nor will he know that the agbero had watched the whole episode play out from start to finish and paid him for the sausage rolls from his own pocket. Nor will he realise that at 12 years of age, he shouldn’t be endangering his life on the streets of Lagos peddling gala. It was a day when the world commemorated the World Day Against Child Labour but that meant nothing to small Ade. Nor to the many boys (and to girls too who are most vulnerable to several ills that await them) across the country in his shoes.

In the morning, he’d be out there again, life and limbs on the line for the profits he brings home from gala runs.

© Moore Numental. 2015.

Photo Credit: sadiqbalogun.blogspot.com