Steady Hands Take The Wheel

It was my market than our market. I like how some things that were mine, we now share, including friends. Baristas and neighbourhood store owners who earlier recognised me, not recognise him as well. Even the guy who checks the air in the tyres at the petrol pump.

We drive by that market, everyday now, becasue to get to any arterial place really, crossing that choked road is the only way out.

There’s a dressed up crowd that hangs around the pubs and outside the theatre. Girls with their hair in sheets below their shoulders, with outfits to match their bags, who wear pin pointy boots no matter what the season. Guys wearing those t-shirts you get, you know? the ones that have a skin coloured extension of cloth under the noraml t-shirt to give the impression that the entire arm is tattooed? Flashing 10 rupee diamond studs in their ears and caked hair on their head.

Further back, beneath the tree and the circular cemented area, next to the cigarette stalls where I go to get polo, is a different sort of crowd. The girls have backpacks and is it just me or is their hair curlier? Tied up carelessly or the tangles let loose, glinting nose pins, dangling silver earrings, wearing washed out cotton kurtas, or maybe a black band t-shirt with a matching belt. They chat placidly, smoke comfortably and laugh occasionally.

Me, I don’t dress up, am a books and chai kinda girl, sure I’d love a bar with loud music as much as the next person, but tis just not my thing...yet. I will have shots and give in and dance to Usher and wear a Penny Lane faux-fur coat with a hoodie and pub hop. Someday, those times will come for me.

What a granny, he says, but he’s not much better.

At the front of the market, near the car park, boys and girls get out of big cars, their school bags stuffed with their uniforms and they're so self conscious of their outfit; it's not fair, to make them choose that one t-shirt that represents them the most, to wear on the day their exams get over and they hangout.

And African men, lots and lots of young African men, are they sons of diplomats then or sons of housekeepers? Does it matter? Which countries are they from, I wonder as I lock eyes with every one of them, Mozambique?(Maputo, my brain automatically says) Somalia? (Mogadishu) Niger?( Niamey) Guinea Bissau or The Guinea? Mali or Mauritania or indeed Malawi? Congo or the Democratic Republic of Congo? The Gold Coast or the Ivory Coast? Zambia or Zaire, now the infamous Central African Republic. Tunisisa or Tanzania? Maybe Morocco, though I doubt it.

I’m sure I’ll have tonnes of things to say to them, if we get past the accent, that mammoth effort of a simple smile and hello. It doesn't matter that we're on the same sidewalk, because their continent travels with them. That's the size of the distance between us.

The odds that one of them has just finished reading Franny and Zooey like I have, and listed down the family tree – Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, the twins (Walt and Waker), Zachary (Zooey) and Franny in their notebooks..How high is that possibility?

We shall never know, because we can cross each other several times, but I'm just driving past, sitting passenger to steady hands on the wheel.