The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The book begins with a bus driver counting his daily collections and remembering the wealthy passenger who gave him a rare cedi—a paper bill—as his fare. The bus driver thinks about the happiness in the cedi-giver’s expression when he handed over the bill. The driver gives the wealthy passenger a confusing assortment of coins as change, whose value was “far short of what he should have given” (3), and the passenger accepts the coins without looking at them. The bus driver holds the cedi up to his face and smells it, but he feels ashamed when he realizes that there is a passenger still on board the bus who is staring at him. After a lengthy internal dialogue, the bus driver approaches the passenger with an offer of a cigarette, but then he realizes that the man is simply sleeping with his eyes open while also drooling on the bus seat. Disgusted, the driver kicks him off the bus and spits on the passenger’s face. The nameless man walks past a “K.C.C. Receptacle for Disposal of Waste” (7) that he recalls as one of the last relics of the most recent clean-up campaign in the town.