Birdsong

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie September 13, 2010

The woman, a stranger, was looking at me. In the glare of the hot
afternoon, in the swirl of motorcycles and hawkers, she was
looking down at me from the back seat of her jeep. Her stare was
too direct, not sufficiently vacant. She was not merely resting her
eyes on the car next to hers, as people often do in Lagos traffic;
she was looking at me. At first, I glanced away, but then I stared
back, at the haughty silkiness of the weave that fell to her
shoulders in loose curls, the kind of extension called Brazilian
Hair and paid for in dollars at Victoria Island hair salons; at her
fair skin, which had the plastic sheen that comes from expensive
creams; and at her hand, forefinger bejewelled, which she raised
to wave a magazine hawker away, with the ease of a person used
to waving people away. She was beautiful, or perhaps she was just
so unusual-looking, with wide-set eyes sunk deep in her face, that
“beautiful” was the easiest way of describing her. She was the kind
of woman I imagined my lover’s wife was, a woman for whom
things were done.