the tube and the trotro

Every morning in London I nestled in the underarm of a complete stranger. It wasn’t so much in the romantic sense as sometimes I daydreamed it would.  It was more in the commuter sense, a game of sardine tetris called the daily commute. What is so weird about it is that you are so close physically to the people around you but you never say a single word. No one interacts at all. Grey buildings, grey skies, grey trains and grey silence.

I tried starting conversations with people about the books they were reading. This was met with unappreciative turns of the heads in the other direction.

I invited the person who was homeless asking for a spare pound to sit with me and share his experience.  I was hoping to invite him to my aunt’s for dinner. He said he couldn’t because he needed to keep wondering through the train to hopefully have collected enough to survive that night. My aunt flipped when I shared my plan with her. I subsequently always pretended to talk to someone as I entered the house.

I woke the drunk guy next to me to ask him what stop he needed to get off. He told me Stratford but then got off at Bethnal Green. I tried to tell him it was the last train that night but he was already off staggering.  Someone saw this whole interchanged and commented that it was a nice thing to do.

Nice. Such a British word. And if you look closer there are nice moments on the tube. There are the kind people who stand for the elderly and pregnant. There are friends laughing in unison and you cannot help but join and giggle as well. And there you can be, on the other side of the world, and by some random alignment of the universe be on the same line in the same carriage at the same time as someone you haven’t seen for years from home.

Now in Ghana I rely on share taxis and the tro-tro, a minivan that has seen better days. These follow certain routes and cost the same as a Macca’s soft serve cone. A guy leans out the sliding door’s window announcing the route with an accompanying dance move of a hand motion. The Ghanaian equivalent of commuters hail, hop on and hop off. We again play tetris but now there are animals in baskets and random furniture contending as pieces as well. Need I not mention the roof…

In complete contrast people want to talk. They ask in Dagbani, “How is your wife?” and I answer, “I slept well.” People want to know where you are from and what you are doing. One tell you to close the door more gently like I used to try to do at my parents’ place coming home late at night. Another bemoans the trial of last year’s Ghanaian election. And there are plenty of conversations you are not privy to. One time there was loud Western music as a group of expats organised a trotro pub-crawl. It was a great night of visiting almost every nightspot in Tamale. A few tro many beers later there is that o so familiar overfamiliarity on the dancefloor.  

And sometimes there is silence. It isn’t grey but I guess sometimes it is nice.