And there were no trees on Poverty Street. The heat would comb the defenceless street unchecked (like the policemen that came after the demonstration), tearing into doors and windows, advancing from room to room, systematically seeking out and strangling to death the last traces of cool air hiding beneath chairs and behind cabinets, wringing out moisture from the anaemic plants that drooped in old plastic paint containers on window ledges. Dogs would bolt out of the doorways, their brains cooked senseless, their tongues lolling out of their mouths like pink sausages, to be run over by cars. The chickens simply folded their heads beneath their wings and died. By five o’clock, the heat, having established its mastery, would begin to lift. The dazed, prostrate street would totter to its feet, shake the dust and sweat from its pelt, and resume life where it had stopped.

Poverty Street’s real name was Morgan Street, one of the many decrepit, disease-ridden quarters that dotted the city of Lagos like ringworm on a beggar’s body. My Auntie Rachael’s restaurant, Godwill Food Centre, was at No. 20, Poverty Street (or Morgan Street – this story in a way is about how the street came to be called Poverty Street, and about the people I met in my one-year stay there, people like Joshua, Brother, Nancy, Auntie Rachael, Lomba, Hagar, and all the others who through their words and deeds touched my life and changed it irreversibly). The street consisted of a single tarred road that ran through its centre – Egunje Road – and a tributary of narrow, dirt roads that led off Egunje Road to the dark interior of the street.