Azed S2 E11

Azed S2E11

Episode 11: Actions and Reactions

I am not superstitious, and I have little
tolerance for superstitious bunkum. As
a child, I didn’t believe in the
Cinderella story and the other fairy
tales that were popular among my
classmates and friends when I still
lived in Ibadan. By the time I was 5, I
had figured out on my own that there
was neither Santa Claus nor Father
Christmas, and I can still remember
Chike’s flabbergasted look when I told
him that the man who gave gifts at
Christmas was really the fat CRK
teacher wearing a red suit. He had
been dubious, but all his doubts had
cleared when I yanked the fake beard
and wig of the Father Christmas in the
grotto. It earned me a trashing from
Mr. Salmon, our principal, but since I
won a new ball from the bet, I didn’t
really mind.
In spite of all my scoffing at
superstitious nonsense, there was one
old wives’ tale I believed with all my
heart.
Bad things happen in threes.
As you might imagine, it would have
taken a lot for a hardboiled cynic like
me to be swayed into believing
something that springs out from a line
of thought and knowledge that is at
best pseudo-science and at worst plain
falsehood. You are right. I have
suffered my fair share of misfortune,
and as much as I have tried to explain
it away, there was always a chilling
pattern about them. It was more than
an eerie coincidence. It had been a
recurring theme of my life that when
one thing went wrong, almost
immediately, two other things followed
suit. I had often wondered if I was
being shadowed by a powerful hex
and more than once I had toyed with
the idea of going for deliverance or
taking the Lagosian expression
literally and washing my head in a
stream. Only my natural disinclination
and distrust of superstition held me
back. As I sat shivering thinking of
how to tackle the third of yet another
series of crises, I wondered if I should
have ignored my reservations and
gone ahead with my search for
deliverance.
Things had started to go wrong when
termites and black ants invaded my
room that morning, driving me out in
the early hours. Temi had traveled and
I had nowhere else to go to sleep, so I
drove to the park and wound my
windows down partway before locking
my doors and falling asleep. I woke in
the morning to find that my wallet had
been stolen while I slept, and with it
had gone all the money I had as well
as my particulars. It was too late to do
anything about it, so I borrowed 1000
Naira in small change and drove out
to work. As I sat in the rain waiting
for the police to show up, I wondered
if I hadn’t made a huge mistake by
ignoring the signs. I was worried
about how much trouble I could be in,
especially as I did not have any
documentation on me. I forced myself
to be calm. What had happened was
not my fault. If anything, it was a
freak accident caused by rain.
Lagos in the rainy season is not the
best place in the world to be. Most of
Lagos is located below sea level, and at
the best of times Lagos is a humid,
stuffy city teeming with an endless
press of human beings and vehicles in
perpetual, hurried motion. When it
rains anything more than a slight
drizzle, Lagos transforms into a vast,
smelly, malarial swamp with the level
of activity not in the least diminished.
As with most places in Nigeria, there is
a deficit of infrastructure, and so the
roads are more often than not the
scenes of huge, snarling traffic jams. It
required the mental alertness of a
surgeon and the unflinching courage
of a soldier to spot and take advantage
of the gaps in traffic which appeared
like magic from time to time. This is
tricky in the best conditions; in a
heavy downpour, it is as difficult as a
half-blind, one-handed amputee trying
to thread a needle.As was typical of Lagos, that day, the
rain started without warning. I had
only just lowered the visor to stop the
early evening sun shining into my eye
and dazzling me when deep thunder
rumbled and clouds passed across the
sun and obscured it. I groaned and
tapped my fingers in frustration
against the steering wheel. I was just
climbing onto the Third Mainland
Bridge and already, traffic was at a
standstill. I needed to drop off my fare
in Yaba and somehow make it back to
Lekki before 8pm. One of my most
loyal clients needed me to pick her up,
and I had promised her that I would
make it on time. Already it was 5pm,
and the road was blocked. The
approaching rain was not going to
make my job any easier.
The heavens opened up and the rain
came pouring down in great sheets of
water. All around me, car lights came
on and horns blared as drivers reacted
to the reduced visibility. I turned on
my lights and dialed up my senses as I
alternated moving inch by slow inch
with extended periods of being stuck.
My wipers could barely keep up with
the deluge, and I moved carefully,
peering intensely at the lights of the
car in front of me. The chattering and
giggling of my passengers barely
registered, so intently was I focused on
the car in front of me. It was only
when they went quiet that my mind
returned to the car.
I was in the next-to-outside lane, the
last of the four lanes on the bridge. I
had refused to switch lanes because it
would be easier for me to turn off into
the exit for Yaba from my position on
that lane, and because I was in a
hurry, I did not want to start cutting
across lanes as the exit came up. As I
looked into my rearview mirror in
reaction to the sudden silence behind
me, I realized I may have made the
wrong choice.
A figure was at the window. With his
long, flowing tunic and dark jacket, he
looked like any of the hawkers who
proliferate in Lagos traffic. He was
even holding a tray in his left hand,
but that did not in any way detract
from what was the snob-nose of a
pistol in his right hand pointed
straight through the wound-up window
at the occupants of the back seat. With
the water streaming down his face and
beard, he looked like an angel of death
coming to claim his next victim, and
my blood froze. He reached over,
slowly, deliberately and tapped on the
window, his meaning clear. I had the
choice of either winding down or
picking up flecks of blood and brain
from my rear seat. I had enough
experience with guns and weapons to
realize it really wasn’t much of a
choice, and so, without making any
sudden, jerky movements, I reached
over and wound down the electric
window.
He was reaching through the window
for the handbags and phones when
many things happened at once.
The brake lights of the car I was tailing
went off and it jerked forward like a
rabbit on methamphetamines. From
my position higher up the downward-
sloping road, I could see that traffic at
the intersection ahead had cleared and
cars were speeding up. The man in the
hood was still reaching into the car as
the cars in the lane beside me sped up
and closed the gaps in the traffic. A
cacophony began behind me as palms
slammed down on horns. His head had
just gotten into the car when the car
behind me pulled out to the left and
the car behind it pulled out to my
right. I saw the whiz of motion on my
left out of the corner of my eye and
instinctively lifted my foot from the
brake and cut to the right. It was at
this point that the frantic events
simultaneously sped up to warp speed
and slowed down to half speed.