Worth the Indigestion

Night is falling and I need to catch a cab.
In the humming metropolis of Taishan, China, there are no sunsets; the sky fades lazily from light to dark gray. I miss seeing the sky on fire.
I walk up to the smallest of the seven loitering taxi drivers. “You take me home? 6 yuan.”
He smirks and rubs his rotund, exposed belly, sweaty in the dwindling light. He holds up a single fist that asks for no fewer than 10.
This is our nightly bargain; I start low, he starts high, I get home for an average price. But tonight, he doesn’t budge.
I approach another. He doesn’t even remove his cigarette to mock my bartering skills: “12 yuan, pretty lady.”
All I want is to go to the pre-med dorms and wash the grime off my body with the hose hanging next to the squatty.
I am just about to cave to their demands when a 20-something man with chocolate skin—a sight I haven’t seen in weeks—appears at my side and murmurs, “Don’t worry, miss. They are always refusing me the service. Walk with me.”
Under normal circumstances, I would never agree to walk with a stranger, much less at night in a strange country. But something about his crisp orange polo and the smooth rhythm of his voice makes me trust him, at least more than the conspiring taxi men.
We walk in and out of the dusty orange mist of humidity and pollution illuminated by the tungsten street lamps.
“I’ve been here for 8 years, and I miss my Ghana. As soon as the people here find out that I’m not Kobe Bryant—and they do ask—they treat me like dirt.”
His fluid speech is such a welcome sound after all the broken, giggly English I’ve been hearing for weeks. I force myself to talk at a normal pace when I ask, “Then why have you been here for so long, Rudy?”
He remarks—his English teacher must have been British, giving his voice a beautiful, rolling cadence—that he is studying to become a “doctah.”
When he says that last word, his voice is edged with disdain and flash of his teeth against his midnight skin disappears.
“Well, what do you really want to do?”
“I,” the curve of his full lips sneaks a smile back across his face, “want to make music.”
His broken joy hangs between us, two strangers chasing dreams that aren’t theirs. When we were young, someone put his sitar and my pen aside and told us to do something safe.
And we walk, letting the orange mist pass over us like the fading heartbeats of this musician and this writer.
“Rudy, will you promise me one thing about your life?”
“Yes, miss?”
“Don’t waste it.”