5
At eighty-one years old, the landlady looked and smelled like a beached whale. Flesh hung in folds of blubber from her belly and thighs, though not her arms, which were like bloated bags of adipose; and she was stooped over as if from the weight of all that fat. Her decaying odor pounced on the man as soon as she opened her door to him and the agent, and all through her rambling conversation about the terms of his tenancy — which somehow included her disjointed narratives about who she was (a true-born child of Isale Eko, daughter of the soil, and a blood sister to the royals of the land), and how much wiser than him she was because she had buried four stillborn children who, had they lived, would all be older than him — he kept fighting off her smell’s suffocating grip on his throat. Her wrinkly face was splotched by eczema, which she raised her hands to scratch as she talked, and the blue nightdress she wore was food-stained across the chest and browned with grime about the haunches. And yet her living environment wasn’t untidy. The paved ground of her fenced and gated yard was swept clean and kept free of cracks. The building itself — a seventies oil boom — style house with identical large apartments on two floors and a smaller upstairs apartment at the rear — was in good repair for its age. The paint job looked recent, the windowpanes were all intact, the cube-shaped cavities left in the walls by the air conditioners of previous tenants had been plastered over, and the arrangement of the external plumbing pipes and electrical wires conveyed the sense that shoddy workmen hadn’t gone unsupervised. The man admired the sturdiness of the building, he appreciated the clean surroundings, and after the agent collected the key to the vacant rear apartment from the landlady and led him there, he decided he wanted it. He had seen many shapes and sizes — and prices too — in all the months of house searching across the choked heart of Lagos, but this was the first place he saw that ticked all his boxes. Indoor bathroom, running water, detached compound, wide windows, and cross-ventilation, plus the bonus of a top-floor view, all his for just under N50,000 more than his budget.
One counterweight to his euphoria at finding a worthy house he could borrow money to afford was the rush-hour traffic he would encounter two times a day on the commute between Egbeda and Surulere. Another was the hike in his transport costs, not caused by recurrent fuel scarcity, but due to the farther distance between home and workplace. A third drawback, perhaps, for this Surulere wannabe was the strangeness of Egbeda’s market-town character. The noise, the clash of smells, the cram of all types of peddlers and all sorts of stores: Egbeda had everything Surulere didn’t want. The man wanted everything Surulere had. But since the one thing he wanted more than anything else was in Egbeda, he swatted his doubts aside, and ignored the questions plucking at his subconscious about the cheapness of the two-bedroom, about why such a first-rate property had remained empty so long that the dead gecko on the kitchen counter had almost crumbled into dust. When the agent’s selling voice declared that a bunch of people were lined up to steal his luck if he didn’t seal the deal that day, the man broke his silence, confirmed he would take the house, and followed the agent into the landlady’s ground-floor apartment to endure her putrid stench for the second of many times to come.
6
The man’s house hunting led him to Egbeda out of necessity rather than choice. First he looked in Surulere, as he worked there, but also because he had lived there long enough to grow blind to its ugly side. It helped as well that Surulere, unlike many newer districts of Lagos, was connected to the public waterworks. Power supply, too, appeared steadier in Surulere than anywhere else he had slept in the city. As for garbage collection on his street, it was provided by private contractors for anyone who paid their fees, and the stink-bomb trucks arrived every Thursday — even in the rainy season when flash floods swept away roads across the swampland of Lagos, but left his street intact because it was tarred. Public facilities still existed in Surulere, albeit in an enfeebled state, and despite its high cost of housing and its teeming rat population, the man believed the devil he knew was his best chance of finding paradise.
Thus he trudged the familiar streets after work and on Sundays, searching with a stranger’s gaze for chalked signboards announcing miniflat vacancies, or one-bedroom apartments for rent, even single rooms to let, all of which he found he couldn’t afford. Yet he kept on looking for any place that would accept his life savings of N200,000; he searched, and pleaded, and tried, and tried again. He sought out the landlords of those single rooms closest to his budget to beg that they accept six months’ rent in lieu of the customary two years up front. Weeks of trying that path only confirmed there was no hope there, especially for a citizen who was seen an outsider by the Yoruba landowners. The man changed tactics: he knocked on the gates of houses along the genteel axis of Adelabu Road, Ogunlana Drive, and Adeniran Ogunsanya Street to ask the tenants if they would consider subleasing their unused gatehouses and boy’s quarters. When this route only succeeded in proving how afraid of strangers Lagosians are, he tried again by ingratiating himself to the construction workers toiling at building sites (he bought them bags of ice-cold pure water, a bribe worth more than cash under the lash of the afternoon sun) before plying them with questions about the architect’s plan — all these efforts undertaken for information, for an early look-see, for a fighting chance of slipping his foot in the doorway before the arrival of those procurers whose business cards bore the title of housing agent.
He only gave up on Surulere after he realized that rival salesmen in a seller’s market are always members of a secret society of mutual benefit. It seemed every single one of the local brotherhood of housing agents knew him either by sight or reputation, and when these men began to ignore his phone calls or greet his appearance at their dingy offices with expressions of weary disdain, he expanded his search to nearby Mushin and Oshodi. But even in these hardscrabble districts his budget remained as much an obstacle as his ambitions. A man who couldn’t raise more than N210,000 and yet insisted on his right to amenities like kitchen plumbing, an indoor toilet, and, in the curious case of the hole-in-the-wall room he inspected on a dirt road that straddled the boundary between Oshodi and Agege, windows wide enough to escape through in case of fire. Agent after agent turned him away upon becoming convinced that he was pickier than was acceptable in a Nigerian. The few who pitied him enough to show him the slum shacks befitting his pocket were afterward outraged at his lack of appreciation. He would rather be homeless than waste his money on those rat and cockroach playgrounds in face-me-I-face-you houses, he said. Life in Lagos was dangerous enough without sleeping in those hovels that turned into gas chambers once the I-pass-my-neighbor generators came on, he told them. When one of these 10 percent — chasing agents began reproaching him about being too proud for a poor man, he riposted: “Yes, I agree, but how is that a bad thing?”