“You’ve got lovely blue eyes and nice curly blonde hair,” the man told her. He kept insisting she must come and study in Nyamandem the capital city instead, because, to his mind, no serious knowledge ever comes from the periphery, not to mention a rat hole like Puttkamerstown. “Nothing that matters happens in backyards,” he said repeatedly, licking his lips as if he had smeared them with honey. “Truth hails from the centre, falsehood from the margins,” he claimed, and with the fullness of his eyes, he protruded onto her face, “That you should know, being from the mother of all centres.” What made her slightly uncomfortable was the way he splashed his sneezes and coughs as if everyone around him wanted his showers of blessings.
On her other side, at the window, sat a thin light-skinned black woman in a colourful lacy top that exposed her midriff, tight-fitting jeans, and big gold loop earrings. Her straightened shoulder length hair with waves almost overwhelmed her small face but with stunning effect. Before takeoff, she worked frantically on her laptop. Then she spoke on her cell phone in a rapid stream alternating between languages and interspersed with “Bisous, bisous.” Later, over a meal, Lilly learned she had just completed a degree in reproductive health in Muzunguland where her mother was originally from, and was now returning home to Mimboland to take up a post to train in HIV/AIDS prevention. When Lilly asked her how she lived her ‘métissage’ the woman replied that these days, even if it doesn’t show in the skin we are all mixed somehow.
The descent to Sawang International Airport was breathtaking. The plane plunged gently through the clouds, revealing a vast and extensive sea of green in glorious synchrony with the sleeves of the Atlantic Ocean. This was the once virgin rainforest Lilly Loveless had only read about or seen in documentaries on TV. Even with the pride of its virginity gone, the balding rainforest was still a rare environmental hope in a world busy writing cheques the environment couldn’t possibly cash. The sooner more and more people understood that one can only command nature by obeying it, the better for all and sundry. Her heart flowed out to the mangroves below and to the shorelines of the beach to the east, full of colourful fishing boats and people in screaming attires. But her enthusiasm was tempered just as they approached the runway – a maze of grey shacks rose from the swamps like a nightmare. Greyer, because of the rain.
The landing was smooth.
After touchdown, the woman to her right offered Lilly Loveless a box of 250 condoms, saying “life’s too sweet and too short to waste”. Lilly Loveless broke out into a big smile and thanked her for the timely gift, having forgotten to bring some along despite repeated insistence by her reluctant mom. The woman also handed her a business card saying, “Don’t hesitate to give me a call if you need something while in Mimboland.” What a lofty mission she had! In a continent already devastated by lords of war, it made all the sense in the world to snatch what was left of life from the jaws of HIV/AIDs with laudable actions like hers.
“A few thunder clouds shouldn’t dampen your enthusiasm,” the man to her right told Lilly Loveless, giving her his card, on which he had added by hand his personal cell phone number. As they separated, he whispered to her with his eyes, “I’m waiting for you in Nyamandem. Call me.” She looked at the card which had a Nyamandem address on one side and a Muzunguland address on the other: “Honourable Epicure Bilingue”, she read with a shake of her head, as if to say “What a name!”
If there was one thing Lilly Loveless regretted with the start of her Mimboland adventure, it was the fact that in her rush to get to the airport in time, she had forgotten to bring along her yellow booklet of vaccines. As a result she was detained by a no-nonsense health official at the Sawang International Airport who forcefully administered injections which he refused to accept she had had just days before.
“How do you expect me to believe that? Show me your card!” The man blared, making her feel like a child lying in broad daylight. She would not be allowed to contaminate the land of Mimbo with yellow fever, cholera and meningitis. And she paid for the vaccines at a rate more than exorbitant in money, comfort and time. The whole exercise took nearly two hours, making her virtually the last passenger to come through from immigration to the baggage area.
The scorching heat, humidity, poor ventilation and the officials’ undisguised reluctance to be understanding compounded the stifling feeling in Lilly Loveless.
By the time she had finished oiling the thick dry lips of the two lady customs officers who had insisted on looking beneath her mom’s dirty XXL underwear, which she had packed on top precisely to deter such a meticulous item by item search for God-knows-what, Dr Wiseman Lovemore, a man not gifted in patience by any standards, had given up waiting and left the airport. So Lilly Loveless, seeing no placard with her name, succumbed to the aggressive persuasion of a determined taxi man and implored: “University of Mimbo, Puttkamerstown, s’il vous plait.”
“Yi please me time no dey,” the taxi man sought to reassure her, mimicking her whiteman-woman accent, the way a child would with its fingers to the tip of its nose singing: “Whiteman with your long nose, since ma mother born me I no ba see me whiteman …” “You go pay Mim$40,000,” he told her.
“That’s too much,” she screamed. “I look for another taxi!” Dustbin had forewarned her against the exorbitant rates of the opportunistic taxi men in Sawang.
“La distance est longue. Puttkamerstown faway. Na ara kontri,” he tried to explain.
She was adamant; the amount was just too much.
“So na how much you go pay?” he asked.
“Wait a minute,” she told him, taking out her notebook. She consulted it, then said, “Not more than Mim$10,000.” That’s the amount Dustbin had advised her not to go over.
“No, no. Dat moni small plenty. No man for here go take you to Puttkamerstown for dat amount.” The driver swore. “You pay Mim$20,000 or you take ara taxi if you see am.”
Lilly Loveless studied the pros and cons of wasting more time haggling with a second, and perhaps a third and fourth taxi man, and concluded she was better off yielding. “Let’s go,” she sighed.
“But if road long, and traffic dey, you go pay more, foseka petrol dear,” the driver insisted as she entered the car.
She pretended not to understand what he said, but was determined not to pay a cent more.
“Your safety belt is unsafe,” said Lilly Loveless, as she discovered the belt had been cut into two halves.
“Na all dat I get… No fear,” he told her.
The taxi man was far from reassuring. Once he started driving, he seemed to head straight for the potholes perforating the battered roads. In his equally battered Toyota Corolla that had no shock absorbers to cushion the tortuous ride, they trotted along as if on a hoofless horse. The front and back windshields of the car were splattered with adverts, including one which touted, “My Toyota Is Fantastic.”
More like “My Toyota is in Plastic,” Lilly Loveless thought, hardly bringing herself to appreciate the irony the way she ordinarily would. To be fair though, one could have the slickest car in the world, but with roads as rubbish as this, there’s little to do but pull, dive and stumble along. Just then, she noticed a very slick car proving the point.
Lilly Loveless was amazed by the crater size potholes made worse by pools of muddy rainwater. This was testing to the limit her philosophy of ‘wetter is better’, especially as the splashes made by the passing cars stank like sewage. Rotting refuse mountains at the corner of every street were colonised by swarms of flies, maggots and rats nonchalantly fattening themselves up. Lilly Loveless and the taxi man went through swampy neighbourhoods, where the car gathered
