Monday morning I left the house at the regular time, around 7:40. My house is at the back of a compound beside a small potholed lane. Beyond is a strip of dirt and high mangy grass and trees, then a wide and deep sewer channel with angled cement walls, and then Ring Road, where I catch a taxi each morning. I walked across the lane and the dirt strip and crossed the sewer on the same rickety wooden span as always. That left me on the shoulder of the southbound side of Ring Road, where I waited for a break in traffic and walked to the grassy median, then across the two northbound lanes to the other shoulder.

That’s how I get to the spot where I catch a taxi. Here you say “pick a taxi” instead of “catch a taxi”. The walk takes less than two minutes in all.

Taxis have no meters and I always negotiate the price in advance. Just about every weekday I take a taxi from my house to the office, and every time I pay 20,000 cedis. You might say that the price of that taxi ride is 20,000 cedis. But every morning we play a game, me and Taxi Driver X. The opening is simple and strictly-choreographed like a good, clean box step. He pulls over to the shoulder with the passenger window rolled down and I begin.

“Good morning, sir. How?”

“Fine. You?”

“Fine, thank you. I’m going to Accra, Wato side, near Post Office.”

“Accra Post Office. Hmm.”

“I will pay twenty.”

Normally this is where the game really takes off, but Monday morning’s Taxi Driver X immediately tipped his king and emptied his pockets. “Sit down,” he said, and I did. It was as easy as taking a ripe banana from a bunch.

We set off north on Ring Road and the driver made pleasant conversation. His car was neat inside and he kept the radio turned down low. The ride was a sweet piece of hard candy twist-wrapped in purple cellophane. He made an inexplicable U-turn, but I had total confidence.

It became clear that he was taking the High St route, through Accra’s biggest construction project. A two-lane road is being widened to four. It’s due to finish eight months ago or some other time, whichever comes first. For now the westbound lane is buried under the rubble of a sewer excavation. The two uncompleted lanes are a flattened bed of cracked clay soil and silty sand. They are so busy being used a diversion for the westbound traffic that there is no time to pave them.

On a hot, dry morning like Monday’s, a heavy cloud of fine dust and exhaust drapes itself over the construction zone, too lazy to get up and go to work. We crawled along westward. Somewhere near the Supreme Court Taxi Driver X shifted into neutral and the engine died. Immediately the cars behind erupted in a honking chorus. The sweet hard candy ride became ashes in my mouth. When it refused to start again Taxi Driver X jumped out and ran to the back to begin pushing, leaving the steering wheel unattended. Realizing his mistake he called me to the back to push while he took care of steering. The well-dressed obruni pushing a car through the choking cloud attracts laughter and calls of “Pusher! Pusher!”

After a short distance Taxi Driver X took pointed the car at a driveway to a vast dirt lot on the other side of the road. The car rolled dumb and heavy through the lane of slowly-oncoming traffic like a big, misshapen pumpkin that wins no ribbons at the State Fair.

Now sweaty and in a foul mood, I prepared to pay the driver half the fare and walk the rest of the way to work. But he didn’t have any change and suggested that I try and get some from the men hanging around the tro-tros in the dirt lot. One of them made change for me and I turned back to see the driver pushing the car down a natural incline to the corner of the lot farthest from the road. He had made over a hundred yards in those three minutes and was still pushing himself and his car away from me.

When I caught up with him I asked him why he was trying to escape from his paying customer. “The car, if I leave it there they will worry me.” I guess I wasn’t really expecting a better answer; anyway it was not necessary to look any deeper into the identity of “they” or the nature of “worry”. His response was a forgettable breakfast of plain crackers. There were no bacon and eggs underneath. I gave Taxi Driver X 12,000 cedis and began the walk back to the road. He ran after me to complain. My pants were sticking to my shins. It was around 8:05.

Approaching work I found that Josephine the Breakfast Woman had not come that day. On a wooden table in the car park across the street from the office she prepares bread with margarine, Laughing Cow cheese, marmalade, or fried eggs, and delivers it to the office when it’s ready. She also makes tea, coffee, and Milo (a chocolaty hot breakfast drink from Nestle). If she’s there I buy 2,000 cedis of bread and one triangle of cheese, and if she’s not there I usually don’t eat breakfast. But I was hungry from the pushing and walking and had been looking forward to placing my order. Disappointment made my briefcase heavier and its strap dug into my shoulder as I crossed the street towards the office.

As I reached the first floor landing I saw Josephine’s daughter Rachel in her school uniform carrying a wicker basket full of polythene bags. She called me over, poked around in the basket, chose a bag, and handed it to me. “My mom couldn’t come today but she made yours.” It was the usual small microns-thin black plastic bag, its handles tied into a tiny intractable knot. Stapled to the bag was a small strip of paper ripped from a ruled sheet. There was my name, “JAKE”, written on the strip in pencil. Inside was my bread and cheese.

That bread and cheese was a good breakfast, and it was also a sponge that wiped the whole day clean as a smooth countertop. The morning’s events flew right off like dry crumbs.

At precisely noon every weekday a siren moans over Accra Central. It sounds just like my idea of an air raid alert: a low, quiet start that crescendos as it slides up to the main pitch. That pitch sits there for a few seconds, open like a cartoon mouth in the downward-U shape of the entrance to a dark tunnel, with no teeth or tongue visible. It is a hollow, vaulted, echoing sound. To me it has come to mean lunch.

George and I walked out the back entrance of the office and around to the street. The building next door is four stories high like ours. At noon on Monday its front was obscured by a clutter of rickety scaffolding. All the way up by the roof two men teetered on a precarious platform of loose boards. They leaned against the wall of the building with chisels and mallets, tink tink tink—pause—crisp woody crack of breaking pottery. They were chiseling tiles off the cement façade of the building. Once free from the façade the tiles and mortar didn’t waste any time. They got right on falling and shattering on the sidewalk below. Some rotated and toppled gracefully and others just bombed straight down without any acrobatics.

So their performances varied, but the finale was always the same: every piece of falling debris hit the sidewalk and flew apart. No kind of barrier had been erected around the scaffolding, so the general downtown public was free to participate. You could watch debris fall down and shatter from any vantage point you wished. You could stand directly underneath the scaffolding if you were feeling adventurous.

It was necessary to make some adjustments. Anybody who wanted to walk past the building and avoid the debris, for example, had to make a wide arc into oncoming traffic. The man who sells mobile phones and accessories out of a glass-paneled wooden case along the sidewalk there smartly set up shop behind a low cinderblock wall. That kept his goods out of harm’s way. Still, not many customers had come by that day. He knew they were being driven away by the threat of injury and was annoyed about the construction work, but didn’t see any good solution. He summarized his assessment with a scowl and a disapproving shake of the head: “You know these boys. They get thousand cedis and they would bring something new. Who for complain? They think they are big men.”

George and I watched a few more pieces of debris fall and then swung a wide arc into the road on the way to the lunchtime rice vendor.