Living Lagos#3
Market Green.
She does not remember the first time she came here.
She does not recollect if ever she came here in the true sense of arrival, the courteous imperative of hiking into a danfo at a crowded bus-stop, managing to fix her shaken body at a window sit, or otherwise between two middle aged lovers passing on spit coated words from her back, from her front.
The rigorous patience of waiting for the sporadic bus shuffle, the radio playing- or not playing, but the colour in the bus being always a cacophonous occupancy.
She goes through this in a way that makes sure to dispel, banish from her immediate existence, and term her stay in the market as be(ing).
She didn’t come, she just is, by the stalls. Her eyes find lethargic adjustment in this space; compact in an enveloping sparseness.
Sometimes, on bad days- there always are bad days- she makes the trip short.
Straight in between the mangle caused from the roadside construction forcing marketers to squeeze into a narrow line; where wares are spilled with an organic precision, long accepted as mundane.
Say, loose, long bits of hair extension, lying abut shoe stalls, the stench from Pomo, gently settling over the rice seller’s shop.
Something close to that, at least.
After this road -remember today is a bad day- her feet would quickly find her particular butcher stand. Because there are a frenetic line of them, just as there are lines of many other sellers, most notably: the vegetable women on high stools, and bouquets of fresh greens to effectively chop on request, butchers sharpening their knives; curved, and glinting, as they attend to buyers appraising the slabs on their table, hairdressers under wide spread umbrellas playing with doll heads, fixing nails, clapping their hands in buoyant talk, but mostly tempting female marketers to their stand. When she still had her hair long, and billowy, she used to have a lot of them grabbing at her arm saying ‘Aunty con make hair now, see as your hair fine, we go help you make am fine well well'
But now, when she began to feel things in titchy folds, she had her hair to an Afro that keeps them away, not all of them though.
There are many ways to make a woman artificially beautiful in Lagos, and this she notes, is avidly understood by these hair makers.
The batter is done quickly, because on bad days, conversations are not very upbeat.
Her next stop is also to her particular vegetable woman, although she sells her Ugu bunch at the same price, the woman holds for her, a fondness of memory.
Like a dead aunt, or a kind neighbor.
At this stand, their conversation is a little longer, because they both speak Igbo, and the woman is affectionate enough to ask how she is doing.
“Kedu nke anya gi di otuwa,”
Wanting to know why her eyes rimmed red, and tired.
“Stress na oru,” she said, assuring her of her safety. Although this was one out of the few people she is close to in the market, she finds this act of friendship, somehow weird, somehow proper runs through the market, like the endless disorderly arrangement of stalls, tables, benches, and wide open umbrellas with a few stitches.
Then there is the soup array; brown furry balls of ede in wide plastic baskets or spread out on a sack, ogbono seeds poured into a weaved basket, with an improvised measuring cup made from a used tomato can, same for the egusi, there is a manual grinding machine mounted on a high stool controlled with a forceful swig of the arm, when filled with seeds.
There are cans of many other soup spices; achi; which has a myth of being an erection deterrent, as she once heard from a woman, most likely in this market.
The woman, had gone on to excitedly disclose to her listener, that the people of Anambra ,one of the major spread of eastern Nigeria, were a firm believer of this notion, and so wives feared to have it any ways close to their cooking pots.
She had thought it hilarious, because it had been a good day then, but today, it just rang slow, and thoughtful.
Also in other cans can be found ; Uziza, Uda, Ogiri, Okpeyi, Banga spices, Ehuru, pepper soup spices, and many others.
Her selection here is brief, and soon, her bag is hefty. She looks about for a spell, one of her subconscious ways of being here.
There are the provision shops, the sun high in the sky, the day mundane and indifferent, the market green with hope.
A hope, that seeps into her without permission.
It does that all the time.
This market, this space, anytime she tries to be, it draws her back to the realness of things. The everyday, of people, the struggle that will one day have good reaps, and the joy from hefty endeavors.
She mulls this over, and then smiles.
Her feet finds joy, out of the bustling space, a joy she knows not how she comes to, but she knows to come to on her bad days.
Here in market green.
Photo Credit: Nelson C.J
Photo Location: Okokomaiko, Lagos Nigeria.
