The city keeps a second timetable
The city keeps a second timetable
This morning, the power went out just as the kettle began to argue with itself.
Not a dramatic blackout. No shouting, no immediate procession to the balcony. Just the small rearrangement of Lagos life: phone chargers unplugged, the standing fan becoming decorative, someone in the next compound calling out, “NEPA has taken it again,” with the tired intimacy of a person naming an old relative.
The timetable under the timetable Outside, the street was already fully awake. A danfo leaned into traffic with one headlamp missing. A woman balanced a tray of akara beside a gutter carrying yesterday’s rain in slow brown ribbons. Three schoolchildren crossed between cars, their uniforms too bright for the hour. Somewhere, a generator coughed itself into importance.
I sometimes think Lagos has two timetables running at once. There is the official one: the workday, the school run, the promised arrival time, the map insisting that a journey should take twenty-two minutes. Then there is the actual timetable, written in fuel levels, flooded roads, transformer moods, traffic officers’ gestures, and whether the bus conductor has decided to wait for “one more person.”
The app that knows your remaining patience In the near future, someone will build an app for this second timetable. It will not ask where you are going. It will ask: How much patience do you have left? Is your phone charged? Are you carrying something that cannot get wet? Do you have the kind of face people ask for directions?
The app will be very accurate. It will know that the road near the market is not blocked yet, but will be in eleven minutes. It will know which bus stop sits beneath the one tree that still gives proper shade. It will know when the rain is only making noise and when it has begun to enter people’s houses.
Naturally, the app will be free for the first month and then become impossible to afford.
Older technologies For now, we continue with older technologies: watching the clouds, listening for generators, asking the woman at the kiosk, and trusting the driver who says, “I know another way.”
The kettle eventually came back on. By then, I had forgotten what I wanted to make.
Some cities are planned around clocks. Lagos is planned around interruptions, and somehow, people keep finding one another inside them.