THEY LOOKED ON AS SHE DIED … BECAUSE SHE WAS NOT THEIRS

Pupils were fixed, dilated, and unresponsive to light, pulse and cardiac activity were absent,…we certified this unknown adult female to be clinically dead at 2243 hours on December 09, 2016.

With those short sentences, and a few others to the same effect, I effectively completed my short summary of my acquaintance with the girl who had been brought to the Clinic, lifeless, a hapless victim of an accident that happened on the road but could not really be called a road traffic accident.

***

The road was not a busy road. It was the road outside her own house. She had been sitting on a kerb facing the driveway in front of her house, and backing the road. She had been sitting there, several feet away from the Clinic, and sharing an evening gossip with a friend. She had plans for that evening. As the sun fell in the sky, her spirits must have risen in anticipation. For that evening was the evening of her long anticipated first date – and that was the gossip she had been sharing with a friend.

On the road behind her, a man had just gotten behind the wheel of the car he drove for his boss. After eight months being on the streets hunting for a job, any job, he had finally secured one as a driver just the previous day. This evening, he had brought his boss here to this quiet hamlet; his boss usually came here for an evening drink before going home to his family. But the driver didn’t know that. Today was his first day at work as a driver. His first day at work in eight months. He was finally going to get paid in 29 days. Get paid so his two children could finally get dinner in his own house rather than pretend to be visiting with the landlord’s children at dinner time.

He was thinking about the 29 days between the day and his payday as he got into the car to turn it around to face the exit. He saw the two ladies seated on the kerb. They sat with their backs to him, oblivious of his world, his suddenly happy world into which the sun unexpectedly shone the previous day at 4pm when someone called his phone number, told him he had been selected for one of the jobs he had interviewed for, and asked him when he would like to start. The ladies on the kerb did not matter. What mattered was that his children were finally going to get something to eat. What mattered was that he was a man again. He could finally plan on getting his wife that phone he had always wanted her to have. That mattered. The two ladies seated on the kerb, with their backs to him as he tried to maneuver the car into position, did not matter.

Till they did.

The shoe on his right foot somehow got trapped on the throttle as he tried to apply the brakes inches from the gutter that separated the front of his SUV from the kerb on which the ladies sat. And from that point, life went south. Again.

As he tried in vain to readjust his foot in order to disentangle the shoe, he effectively floored the throttle. The engine roared and the tires squealed as the car shot forward, flew over the small gutter, and swept off one of the girls even as the right side of the car knocked the other girl into the gutter.

Horror-struck, and frantically pushing at every control his hands and legs could reach, the driver saw the girl the car had picked up fly off the bonnet of the car and get impaled on the sharp end of a stick which was jutting out of the ground and a few feet into the air.

Finally, the car stopped.

As he stepped out and ran to the girl who was lying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood, the driver could make out the small group of onlookers which was quickly swelling into a crowd. Hope that help was coming swelled in his heart.

But help was not coming. They said the girl was a Calabar girl. She was a known food vendor in that community. The man was clearly a Kogi man. The scars on his face told his ethnicity more eloquently than words ever could. Neither was Yoruba. And so, when some of the boys who had gathered stepped forward to try to help, their mothers and other women screamed at them in their native Yoruba to stay back – that the girl was Omo Ibo and the man was a ne’er-do-well drunkard. They were to stay back and watch. They were to be onlookers.

The man was going berserk. He ran from her head to her feet and back. He carried her off the pole on which she was impaled and the new gush of blood told him he had just made a mistake. He dropped her and shouted again and again for someone in the crowd of onlookers to step forward and help him.

But they were a crowd of onlookers. They looked on. He was not Yoruba. She sef was Calabar. So they waited for God to come down and help them. And while waiting, they looked on. 

The driver ran to the one in the gutter. She apparently was not very hurt. She was sitting up and looking around for her companion. He ran back to the one he had hit. The blood kept pouring. He glanced at the onlookers again. They were doing their job of looking on. With due diligence. A few were loudly praying to God for the miracle of life, while they waited for God to come down from His throne on high to give help to the bleeding woman, the crying man.

One man stepped forward and as the driver turned to face him, a flicker of hope warmed the chill of his heart. Perhaps help was at hand. That flicker went with the wind as he saw the man go to his now mangled vehicle and set about deflating all four tires. That was not help. That was hate. That was not the answer to the cries from his breaking heart. There was no answer to the cries from his breaking heart.

He turned back to the bleeding girl. Kneeling at her side, taking her left hand in both his hands, he cried like a baby, his gasps of grief in time with her gradually increasing gasps for air.

Finally, someone decided that not being Yoruba wasn’t a compelling enough reason to stand idly by as another human died. He stepped forward and got the driver to get a hold of himself. And the two of them carried the girl, whose evening had started so brightly, to the Clinic where I was to examine her and thereafter to write those dark lines that made her fate official.

***

I examined her companion thereafter. She was the lucky one, emerging almost unscathed. She it was who eventually told me of the crowd’s reaction. It was from her account I learnt that my chances of getting help when I am in trouble depend very heavily on two factors: what part of the country I come from and what part of the country I happen to be in when I need help.