* * *
A black Toyota car, Ms. Tia call it a Uber, pick us up from the front of her gate.
The man driving, Michael, he nod his head and pull the collar of his shirt to his jaw when he see Ms. Tia. Then he tilt his neck to one side, and I am thinking maybe he ate small poison before leaving his house this morning because of how he is doing like a sickness is worrying him. Before he start the car, he look up in the mirror and lick his lips.
“Yo, miss,” he say, “you’re kinda hot, you know?”
I look at Ms. Tia. Is she feeling hot?
But she roll her eyes and say, “Can you please put on Wizkid or turn it to Cool FM?” because she “is not in the mood to chat today.”
“Aiight,” the man say. “No need to be rolling those brown eyes at me.”
Then he turn on the music and start to drive. We drive in traffic for a whole hour, climbing the up-road and down it, through lines and lines of cars horning every minute, until the man turn into a street that is full of million-millions of people. Michael stop his car in front of a red food shop—Frankie’s—with picture of three pink cakes and a child eating ice cream in front of it.
“Aiight, ladies,” Michael say. “This is as far as I can go.”
We climb out of the car, and with another nod, Michael drive off.
“Why was he nodding and bending his neck? Is he okay?” I ask Ms. Tia as she grab my hand and we begin to squeeze ourselves between the too many human beings in the market.
“I am sure he is fine,” Ms. Tia say, looking around. “Now, where on earth do we start from?”
I look around too, feel something dizzy.
The Balogun market is one long stretch of street, full of so many people and noise. I think that maybe God pack a whole city inside a suitcase, travel to this street, open the suitcase, and let the whole city out. Every single noise in the world must be sounding right here, right now, at the same time: I hear the peen, peen from cars, the meh of goats, “Allah hu Akbar” and “Praise the Lord” from the loudspeakers hanging from a building of a mosque and a church side by side of each other.
The bells of food sellers, their shining balls of akara and puff-puff inside a glass box on the heads of the sellers, the voices of men and women and children selling everything they are seeing to sell: pants and bras and shoes and ice cream and pure water in a bag and dried shrimps inside a roll of bread and hair wigs and everything. From where we are standing, the people look like a carpet of heads sailing on water, like tiny ants, millions of them, moving along a path.
I try to look my feet, but all I see is darkness, there is no space between me and Ms. Tia, and the person beside me, who is pressing into me, is speaking loud on his phone about a “container from China” and how it must not lost.
“Hold on tight,” I think Ms. Tia is trying to say, but a loudspeaker from above my head is swallowing her words with the noise-making announcement in Yoruba about a strong herb medicine to cure manhood problem. There are cars in the middle of the street too, the yellow-and-black taxi of Lagos state, not moving, just staying there, pressing their horn. A man is banging on the windscreen of a car, shouting at the driver to “move this thing, bastard!”
The rest of us keep going straight, slowly, pressing into people, smelling different odors from different people: women’s stale monthly bleeding, stinking sweat, strong flower perfume, incense, fried bread, siga smoke, and dirty feet. Some women are sitting under colorful umbrellas—pink, red, yellow, white—on the side of the street, shouting at the people passing to come and buy “fresh fish and coconut candy” and “one hundred percent human hair.” Others keep walking with us, their tray of things on their heads.
“Where are we going?” I shout to Ms. Tia as one man from nowhere just pull my hand out from her own and shout into my ears, “Fine girl, follow me, come and buy gold leggings, original.” I snatch my hand from him, and another man, wearing a pink singlet with holes and dark sunglasses on his face, push a small white fan to my chest. “Buy fresh breeze. Original breeze to blow away your troubles. Hundred naira for five minutes?” I shake my head no, keep holding Ms. Tia tight, my heart beating at everything and everybody.
As we pass a stall selling shoes leather and rubber and all sorts of shoes, all climbing up, up to the top of the shop, a woman with a small bowl full of bottles on her head press an ice-cold block to my cheeks and shock me with it and say, “Cold water. Very freeze, very pure.” She put up one hand, pull out a Coke from the bowl on her head, press the bottle to my chest. “Or you want Coke? We have Mirinda, 7UP. Which one?”
There are buildings to our left and right, but all the buildings are covered with things hanging from the windows: trousers and shirts and suits, gray telephone wires crossing the top of our heads from one building to the second building, tangling up with all the signboards for church and mosque and herb medicine.
Ms. Tia keeps walking, gripping my hands. “We will take a turn by the left of the fish seller’s stall,” she shout. “It’s a crazy world out here!”
It doesn’t feel like we are moving.
I feel as if the crowd is a moving machine, floating me along with the people, until we turn left and then the crowd is not as much as the first street. This road is a long stretch of people selling beads and ankara fabric, and before I can ask Ms. Tia if this is the right place to stop, a man wearing a black t-shirt with the word “PRANDA” on it smile at Ms. Tia, pull the giant red beads on his neck, and say, “Madam, we have everything you want. Which one?”
“For goodness’ sake!” Ms. Tia say, swiping a hand on her forehead. “I’m just after some fabric.”
“We have designer t-shirt too,” the man say and bend to a bowl by his feet, pick up a white t-shirt. “Very original. Brand-new.” He spread out the shirt, and Ms. Tia eye the word on it—“Guccshi”—before she shake her head no and start to walk away.
“I need authentic ankara,” she say. “That’s all I am here for.”
“But we have Channel bag inside,” he say, pulling my hand with his own hot, sweaty hands.
“Why don’t you go to Big Madam’s shop?” I say to Ms. Tia as I snatch my hand back from the man. “I have never seen anything like this in my life. Is this Lagos?”
In Ikati, the market is like a quarter of this, and everybody is quiet, and everybody is knowing each other, talking peaceful.
“It is Lagos,” Ms. Tia say with a tired laugh. “Florence’s fabrics are bloody expensive. This way.”
We jump over a stinking gutter in the road, full of black water with little frog-fishes swimming through the wet siga and tissue and newspaper inside it. We cross to the other side of the street, where there is another line of shops full of fabrics.