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By Root 781 0

it got to him he saw it amounted to no more than a miserable metre’s progress. So he decided it was not worth the trouble of a gearshift. Save it up and add it to the next incremental move and you will have a nice ride of two metres. Besides, irritating the clutch unnecessarily can lead to… The car behind him blared its horn so loud that he fairly jumped on his seat and out of his heat-haze reverie; he looked and saw through his rearview mirror a man in great anger, his perspiring head thrust out of his yellow taxi-cab, gesticulating wildly to him to move on. Other cars and drivers were joining now in the blaring and shouting protest. He decided to ignore them all and protect the precious little space ahead of him, even if the heavens should fall! The noise increased tenfold now and began to infect some of the cars ahead which could not possibly know what the matter was but were quite gratuitously joining the horn-blowers behind. He stuck to his guns. Rather than yield he would occupy his mind by observing the surroundings… The traffic going in the opposite direction on his left was luckier, as usual, than the one he found himself trapped in. But he gauged that even if, for the sake of moving at all, one should decide to turn around and join these people speeding away from one’s destination the problem of space in which to turn would kill the proposition on the spot… There was nothing else of much interest on that side so he turned to his right and saw for the first time a street decoration of old and dirty flags and bunting lining the route. Some Ministry of Information decorators must have been at work here today putting up these filthy rags saved up and stowed away in mouse-ridden cartons in a Ministry store after last year’s May Day celebrations.

It was at this point that he caught with the tail of his eye just in time the driver behind him manoeuvring his taxi out of the line; it was now virtually level with him, albeit on the grass kerb. He cranked his ignition which, mercifully, responded to the first attempt, shifted gear and moved forward to obliterate the prize space into which his antagonist had virtually wedged himself obliquely. From then on a war of nerves ensued between the two men whenever the forward traffic yielded an inch. In all known such encounters in the past between taxi and private drivers the taxi always won, its decisive weapon the certainty that the owner-driver will sooner concede his place than risk a dent on his smooth, precious carapace. But today, for the first time in the traffic history of this land, a taxi driver had met more than his match. This crazy owner-driver adversary failed altogether to live by the norms of his kind. One look at the condition of his car might have forewarned the other; but he either did not look or looked but failed to see.

“What shall I tell Mama-John?” a middle-aged civil servant was fabled to have wept when a taxi drew an ugly gash along the entire length of the shining side of his new Volvo. Well, Ikem had no wife to fear at home and no child called John, James or any other name. So the contest was more than equal. Grimly oblivious of the car beside him riding with its two legs in the bush, Ikem pursued the red brake-lights ahead like a randy he-goat sniffing the bottom of his mate.

After fifteen minutes of dangerously close brushes the contender-driver conceded victory with a heavy curse, pulled back and returned again to second place behind the victor thanks to the cooperation of the bronze medallist who halted for him to resume his original position.

Ikem heaved a very deep sigh and then, gallant in victory, pronounced it the work of the sun. We are parboiled as farmers do their rice to ease the shelling. Thereafter we take only five minutes to cook.

That night he composed his Hymn to the Sun:

Great Carrier of Sacrifice to the Almighty: Single Eye of God! Why have you brought this on us? What hideous abomination forbidden and forbidden and forbidden again seven times have we committed or else condoned, what error that no reparation can hope to erase?