The market runs alongside the railway tracks. There are people everywhere, dressed in cartoon-bright colours amidst a backdrop of brown dust that churns up around their feet. The government has been trying to move them all for years. To no avail. The people collect here. The day to day business of selling their wares flourishes amidst a babble of shouts and laughter. Goods have been laid out on straw mats. There are bundles of shallots, rows of smoked fish, blocks of shea butter, piles of ground indigo and hand rolled balls of palm oil soap. Whirling winds twist through the crowds, spitting dust into eyes and mouth. The air smells of chicken, sweat and the turpentine from a nearby shoe mending stall.

I push my way through the crowds, choking on clouds of pollution that belches from the passing traffic running alongside the tracks. I pass women with glossy hair extensions and painted nails, their curvaceous figures squeezed into skin-tight dresses. There’s a group of girls on the ground having beads platted into their hair. They kneel with their heads in each other’s laps as a needle is threaded roughly through each of their locks. There are men and women laughing together, still reticent in each other’s company, but flirty and tactile, so in contrast to the villages I’ve just come from, where arranged marriages are the norm and where men and women work separately, eat separately, live their lives apart. Here, in Bamako, Mali’s capital, everyone’s looking for love, or at the very least lust. Sex is everywhere, drifting through the sweat and dust.

It’s him I come across first. I catch a movement down by my feet, a scuffle, an elbow in my leg, and look down. He’s crawling across the stony ground, a young man, in his twenties, with a large wide mouth and long lashes that bring out the darkness in his eyes. On his hands he’s wearing a pair of flip-flops that he’s using to pull himself forwards, dragging his useless legs behind him. They are shrivelled stumps, one cut off below the knee the other by the ankle. His knees are thick pads of skin, like leather soles, pushing him over the grit. He looks up briefly, the white’s of his eyes gleaming. There’s a grin on his face, a grin of comradeship as, like everyone around him, he tries to fight his way through the density of the crowd. He moves on, passing me and disappearing into the traffic of moving bodies behind me.

I shuffle on passing stalls of medicine imported from India, a stack of roller-skates, a man pulling a trolley piled high with aubergines. A few yards later though there is another movement by my feet. Again I look down and this time it’s a woman on her hands and knees, her legs all twisted, her feet bound in thick grubby bandages, one shoulder hunched towards the ground. Her face is beautiful, chiselled, wide eyed with a smack of red lipstick glossing her full lips. And she’s also smiling that same conspiratorial smile, glancing up at people passing, rolling her eyes, part of the crowd despite the fact that she’s moving knee-high amidst everyone. Then like the man before her she disappears behind me.

I move on, but noticing the ground now, taking in the rubbish trodden into the earth, the grime, the muddy patches where dirty water’s been thrown from a nearby fish stall, a mound of steaming dung left from a passing mule. It’s tough ground for the hands and knees to walk on.

I come full circle, up one side of the tracks, down the other, taking in the stench, the colours, the city life. It’s only when I reach the place where I started my ambling that I see them together, the crippled man and the crippled woman, sitting on a balding patch of ground beside a group of boys playing football. He is holding her hand, his flip-flops discarded by his side, and she’s looking up, coquettish, and laughing something into his ear. He grins, boyish, confident. They look like any young couple in love. You wouldn’t know that they spend their lives knee-high to everyone else, moving on their hands and knees through the dirt and the dust.

The Odd Couple

The Prayer Wheel

Elephants