The smell hits me first; garlic and diesel fumes mixing with some sweet something, maybe plantain frying somewhere in the distance. It was a Sunday. The sun had us weighed down with both palms. The ATM receipt is still in my pocket now flattened, but I can feel the rim of it against my fingers.
₦ 5,000. That's what the machine spat out after I'd slid in my last working card. The rest were blocked or maxed, or was it the other way around, can't remember. My account balance was probably some embarrassing number with too many zeros to the right of the decimal point, but I didn't check. Couldn't bring myself to.
It was crowded at International Market that day. Or it may have simply appeared thicker because I was poor. When you're pinching every naira, everybody moves in slow motion, takes up more space. I was playing the game where you pretend to be window shopping when really your head is doing calculations: ₦800 to go home, ₦1,500 for garri and ingredients to prepare a soup, ₦500 to get data so that I can keep applying for jobs online. I was left with ₦2,200 for??.. I didn't know what. I couldn't remember what I'd planned to do with the rest.
She was walking about three steps in front of me, this woman whose wrapper was tied tightly around her waist and a sack of onions was balanced on her as if it had no weight. Slipping in her slippers, creating that plastic-on-concrete sound that seems to be able to penetrate all of the noise of the market. I wasn't really paying attention to her, I was paying attention to my own feet, careful not to step in the puddle of whatever appeared to be palm oil and three-day rainwater.
That's when I saw it fall.A Brown leather purse, that had evidently been creased by too many palms and too much sunlight. It hit the ground softly that I could hear it over the danfo conductors shouting destinations and the plantain chip man negotiating with a customer for change.
I should have screamed. "Madam, your purse!" Like any normal human being would. But I stooped and picked it up, and the weight surprised me. Heavy. Far too heavy to be a pocketful of naira bills and maybe some coins.
The zipper was half-pulled already, I'm not making excuses, it just was. And when I looked in. God. The green of the dollar bills was so bright as if they'd just been taken out of the bank. There were naira notes too, crisp ones that seemed newly minted, folded neatly in halves. A GTBank card with her name: Mrs. Funmilayo something, the last name scratched off. And tucked away in the rear of it all, a voter's card so old I could barely make out her face in the little photo.
I was trembling. I don't know if it was the heat or seeing all that money, but my hands were definitely shaking.
The devil was on my shoulder, as a matter of fact, he came in, sat himself down, started rearranging the furniture in my mind. "She won't even notice," he whispered. "Observe her, she's got that onion sack on, she's distracted. Before she gets home and realizes, you'll be gone. You can buy rice, actual rice, foreign and cleaner, not that stone-filled one. You can also buy meat. You can charge your phone and actually call your sister back."
I was still there, her entire life in my hands, when she started walking towards the danfo stop. The yellow bus was already stopped, engine revving, conductor leaning out the door shouting "last two seats to Abuja." She was rushing now, trying to catch up.
My legs started to move before my head could keep pace. I walked through the crowds, past the vegetable vendor who shouted at me for bumping her stand, past the men playing draft by the giant tree, past the electronics repair shop where they had music blasting so loud that it shook my chest.
"Madam!" I called out, but she couldn't hear me over the commotion. "Madam, wait!"
She had already put one foot on the danfo step before I could catch up to her. The conductor was getting impatient,signalling 'hurry up or you'll be left behind.'
"Madam," I said, putting my hand on her elbow. "You dropped this."
She turned around, and her face. I'll never forget her face. Confusion first, then recognition, then this glance of relief and terror combined. Her hand stroked the side of her where the purse would be, patting the empty space like she was trying to make it appear.
"Jesus Christ!" she exclaimed in raw gratitude. "Jesus Christ, my friend, where did you find this?"
I told her, and she opened the purse right there, her fingers trembling as she rummaged inside. All was in place. The dollars, naira, cards. She raised her eyes to me, crying.
"This money," she declared, "this is for my brother's hospital bill. He's at LUTH, they're going to perform surgery on him tomorrow. If I had lost this." She didn't finish the sentence, but I could read it from her face. What losing that sum of money would have done.
She rummaged around in the purse and pulled out a ₦500 note, sticking it into my hand. "Take this, please. God bless you, take this."
I looked at that money. Five hundred naira. It would have been enough to get me home and maybe even fed. But this woman's brother was in a hospital bed somewhere, and she was trying to pay me for something that any decent human would have done anyway.
"No, ma," I said, gently pushing her hand away. "Keep it. Use it for your brother."
She smiled later. "What is your name?" she asked.
I told her, and she recited it back to me as though she was committing it to memory. "I will pray for you," she said. "I will pray for you every night."
The danfo driver was already very annoyed now, blowing the horn and cursing the Lagos traffic. She entered, still looking back at me through the window as the bus pulled away. I kept watching until it disappeared in the traffic flowing towards the highway.
Two weeks or maybe three later, time moves differently when you don't have a job. I'd stood in the rain getting all drenched. I'd had an interview that morning in Garki, and I'd dressed up nicely. A borrowed shirt, decent shoes, and hair tidily combed. The only thing I hadn't prepared myself for was the rain.
It came down like somebody had turned a faucet in the sky. Actual rain that seeps through your clothing in seconds and turns the roads into streams. I was waiting underneath a shopping mall overhang with around twenty individuals, all of us watching the danfos rushing by, too heavy to stop.
I was already calculating the cost of it for an Uber versus how much I had in my pocket when this SUV stopped. The kind of car that definitely does not stop for a person like me.
But it did.
The window rolled down, and I gazed at her face before I recognized who she was. The same pleasant eyes, the same smile, but now she was in the passenger seat of this nice car.
"You!" she cried, pulling her finger towards me like I was an old friend she'd been looking for. "You're the one! The one who returned my purse!"
I stood there getting dripped on, attempting to understand what she was doing. She was leaning out the window now, talking to someone in the driver's seat; her husband, maybe, or her brother. The one who had been in the hospital.
"Come on inside, my friend," she said, opening the back door. "Where are you going?"
I told her, and she giggled, not at me, but as if she were enjoying some joke. "We're going that way," she said. "Come, come in."
The car was warm and dry and had the scent of air freshener and leather. I was still dripping as I sat in the back and was met by the driver, her brother, who was in good health and in gratitude. He continued to glance at me in the rearview mirror and mutter "thank you, Eshè" in English and Yoruba.
"You know," she said, facing me, "since that day at the market, I couldn't help but think of you. I couldn't help but wonder if you were okay, if you needed something."
I didn't know what to say. I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was sitting in this cozy vehicle, dry and warm, and not out in the rain hoping against hope for a danfo that never showed up.
"God has a way," she said, reclining once more. "God has a way of bringing people back together when they are needed."
Was she right? Or was it all just good luck, good timing, the kind of coincidence that exists in a city with millions where individuals' lives cross and re-cross in ways we can know nothing about.
We didn't exchange numbers, perhaps by happenstance, and I never saw her again.
They say that karma is a circle, but I think it's more like rain. You never know when, or where you're going to be standing when it hits you.