Elsewhere, We Meet Ourselves

The manager behind the hotel counter in Lagos looked up, paused for a second, and then flashed her lovely smile. It was not the polite, transactional kind. She remembered me. I remembered her.

“Welcome, Dr. Mian. Welcome, Sir!”. There was a familiarity to it now. It had moved beyond routine.

Over the next few minutes, between check-in formalities, she told me more of her story. How she had grown into this role. How those early opportunities had come her way - one in particular resonated because the person behind it was well known to me. He also stayed at the same hotel during work trips; during one of which he had quietly opened that door for her to become the manager.

She spoke simply about how things had unfolded.

These moments had started to matter more to me over time. The repeated trips to Lagos. The same roads from the airport. The congestion curling through the Mainland, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, and Lekki. The faces shifting from familiar to expected.

And somewhere along the way, the city stopped feeling like elsewhere.

The workdays remained full. Meetings. Hospital conference rooms, corridors, ICUs, OPDs, and more. Discussions around systems, patient flow, workforce strain, dashboards, throughput. Healthcare’s language of structure and outcomes.

Most evenings, after returning to the hotel, I would put Afrobeats on almost automatically while answering emails or half-heartedly attempting to write. Burna Boy. Wizkid. Tyla. Older blending into newer sounds. I realized I was listening to it less as foreign music and more as part of the background rhythm of life there.

By Friday and Saturday nights, another Lagos would emerge to me.

Far from the hospital boardroom, dance socials unfolded outdoors on patios overlooking the lagoon. Humidity lingering in the air, softened slightly by the breeze coming off the water. Salsa bleeding into bachata, then kizomba. Fairy lights hanging loosely through dense green vegetation. Banana fronds shifting gently overhead. At moments, it felt almost faintly reminiscent of Havana maybe, given the cigars and faded elegance. Not literally. Just in fragments. Rhythm, warmth, bodies moving easily through the night.

People arrived in pairs, in groups, alone. Some extraordinary dancers. Gorgeous, really. Movement itself seemed conversational.

Sometimes I danced. Sometimes I mostly watched.

By Sundays, the atmosphere shifted indoors to the dance studio itself. Less performance. More learning, awkwardness, attention to detail, and reminders that one’s knees and lower back are no longer aligned with one’s dance ambitions.

The lead instructor would move through the room almost like a fusion Latin American-African dervish. Twirling, redirecting energy, reorganizing bodies in motion without seeming to force anything at all.

Over time, people began recognizing me there too.

A nod. A familiar greeting. Someone asking where I had been the previous week. Space quietly made for you without announcement. WhatsApp numbers exchanged.

Nothing dramatic.

That was partly why I kept returning to the same ecosystem each week. Not because I had suddenly become a salsa obsessive. That ship probably sailed decades ago. There were other things sitting quietly underneath the repetition by then. Questions I did not entirely have language for yet. Why did this rhythm feel restorative? What exactly was I seeking here? Why did parts of my life elsewhere feel increasingly over-structured?

That was also part of what unsettled me slightly about Lagos. The ease of it. The openness. The relative absence of performance around identity.

You noticed it in small things. In how conversations began. In how they ended. In what was left unsaid.

The phrase surfaced almost on its own.

It’s time for Africa.

Or perhaps, more specifically, time for Naija.

It was impossible not to think of Karachi then.

In many ways, Lagos felt oddly familiar. The traffic. The noise. The unfinished flyovers. The concrete. The energy crisis. The improvisation required simply to move through the day. Both cities are sprawling coastal giants where order and disorder coexist in an uneasy partnership.

Perhaps that familiarity should not have been surprising. Both countries remain post-colonial experiments, still working through many of the same unfinished questions.

Yet something felt different beneath the surface.

Lagos carried the vibes of a place transforming, with its sense of movement and ambition. Of people and institutions betting on what might come next. That might explain why Afromusic now travels so effortlessly across continents. In fact, it is not merely music. It feels like a by-product of a society increasingly confident enough to export culture rather than simply consume it.

Around this time, another Nigerian voice had become a regular travel companion. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, and her novel Half of a Yellow Sun accompanied flights, hotel evenings, and airport waits as my time in Lagos steadily increased. One was a globally celebrated talk. The other a work of historical fiction. Yet both offered something similar: a reminder that countries, cultures, and people become distorted when reduced to a single narrative.

Many Pakistanis still speak of Africa through inherited images: famine, conflict, coups, deprivation. Those realities have not disappeared entirely. Neither have our own. But alongside them sits another Africa too - investment, entrepreneurship, creativity, infrastructure, and a growing sense that the world is paying attention.

Watching Lagos unfold, I sometimes found myself wondering whether Karachi and Pakistan are receiving the same vote of confidence. Not as criticism. More as curiosity.

And then, almost without warning, another word from home intrudes.

Kaala. Kaali. Black.

Used casually back home. Folded into ordinary language. Sometimes jokingly, mostly cruelly, and so casually it barely registers at all. A hierarchy embedded deeply enough into us that we often stop noticing it.

And I am not outside this.

I have heard it. I have been called it. Let it pass. Absorbed it into the background noise of growing up without interrogating it closely enough.

But here, the framework feels thinner somehow. Harder to sustain honestly. The people I was encountering did not carry themselves as though they were waiting for permission to occupy space fully.

That moment at the hotel counter stays with me.

A woman doing her job. Greeting someone she recognized. Sharing a piece of her journey. Standing in her space with quiet ownership.

Between hospitals, hotel room playlists, dance patios, and recognition in a city not mine, something has shifted.

Maybe I have begun integrating into Nigeria.

Or maybe Nigeria, slowly and without announcement, has begun integrating into me.

At this point, I am not entirely sure the distinction matters.

from Rambling of an Itinerant

Acknowledgment: Originally published in the Express Tribune: What Lagos Taught Me.