Something for the road

It’s quiet in the bus for the first hour or so. People are pressing their phones, reading books they’d dump when the journey is over. Two women are drinking something from inside a small bottle in a black nylon bag. The driver is playing gospel music to ward off every spirit of armed robbers and bad roads and accident. I know this routine well. Everyone tries to mind their business till the books start to become boring, and the small bottles become empty, and their batteries start running low.

Then the first person speaks. It’s the guy seating behind the driver. He starts off with a sore that should have been a joke. People laugh to encourage him for the effort. They need him to keep talking. They need a conversation to start to help with their road sickness. His voice is louder and more confident when he speaks again. And he starts to tease the woman beside him about how he knows that the small bottle they were drinking from is Orijin Bitters. She fires back about how it helps her stay sharp. About how it’s just fruits, herbs and alcohol. Everyone in the bus is laughing, including the woman behind them, also sipping from a small bottle in a black nylon bag.

They go on for hours and hours about who should marry who in the bus shouting to the driver every now and then to change the music to something more hip. I just sit there, barely existing to them.

They are still talking when we see a crowd gathered around a trailer from over two hundred meters away. For the first time, everyone in the bus agrees on something. It’s definitely an accident. Nothing draws a crowd this much on a highway like tragedy. Nothing draws people everywhere like tragedy.

As we get closer, it’s a crowd of at least seventy people. At the scene, there’s a trailer and a lift-back ash-coloured Mazda car. The trailer is a little squeezed in the front. The Mazda on the other hand is lying on its back, like a flipped cockroach. The front of the car is gone –a huge chunk of chewed up metal has replaced it. I imagine the grinding of the Mazda between the truck and the road like meat between molars. It’s ugly. Worse still, there’s a man still in the Mazda.

You’d have to give it up to the people who were helping to rescue the victim. This was an accident almost in the middle of nowhere. It would probably take a death and a decent burial for an ambulance to arrive in time to save anyone.

Back to my co-passengers in the bus. As the driver drove by the scene slowly, absolving the sight as we did, everyone to the left of the bus press their faces against the windows, people behind lean on them. Everyone wants to absolve as much of the scene as possible. With the reality of the hours that lay ahead of us and the fact that we wouldn’t do much on the scene to make a difference, our driver speeds off.

Perhaps it’s the speed or the air-conditioning in the bus, but about five minutes later, my bus is back to normal. The people sipping Orijin are back to sipping. The voices are loud again and all the melancholy has disappeared.

The rest of the journey is normal too. Just people arguing over how their tribe is the best in Nigeria and how everyone else is a dumb bastard.

People begin to get down at their stops, a few arguments with the driver over poor handling of their luggage, more talk about how a woman should always respect her husband, etcetera.

All this, but not one mention again of the man lying in a hospital somewhere after being dragged out of a ruined Mazda –dead or alive, but definitely lying somewhere, with the best case scenario being that he’ll never walk again. I don’t hate or detest those people in that bus. The truth is, that is us, all of us, in our most natural human/animal state, caring very little or not even caring about what does not affect us or our interests, directly or indirectly.

Caring for someone that would never appreciate us, someone that’ll never rub the ego whose existence we all deny, someone who would never pay back, or even know us at all; that is the hardest and noblest type of care to give.