I like buses. For some people, travelling by bus is a sign of poverty: a sign that your time is not valuable enough to justify a plane ticket.
For me, it is different. Without getting philosophical, it offers something you cannot find in ordinary life: an unplanned mingling of the bourgeoisie and the working class.
On a bus, you meet people whose paths would never cross yours otherwise. People who haggle over the fare and then climb aboard laughing. I keep asking myself how someone who cannot afford a ticket for the cheapest form of transport can still laugh.
Beside me are two men and a little boy. From the instruments and drum they struggle to fit into the back of the bus, I guess they are travelling musicians. The boy cannot sit still. To settle him down, his father gives him some bread and cheese. I look at him, and he looks at me. He breaks his bread and cheese in half and offers me a share. I use coronavirus as an excuse to decline. How has a child who shares his bread and cheese with a stranger been brought up?
The other man has pleaded his way into bringing his fortune-telling bird aboard.
When they talk to each other, I can barely understand their speech. We live in the same country, yet the distance between us is immense. The man greets me, and I reply.
He asks how far we have to go, and gradually a conversation begins. We talk until there is almost nothing left to learn about each other. He tells me about playing his instrument at crossroads and the hard life in Tehran. I tell him about my studies and work.
His wife has left him, and raising their child has fallen to him alone. He is only three years older than me, yet seems to have lived thirty years more. The price of that experience is a lined, sunburnt face that makes him look over fifty.
The other man says, “Let me tell your fortune.” I make a silent wish, and the canary chooses my fortune.
It says I will become rich, but the road ahead will be hard. I repeat to myself the Qur’anic words: “With hardship comes ease.”
When will I reach that ease, instead of remaining in hardship?
When will I, too, be able to laugh with nothing more than bread and cheese?
I drift into thought, then realise we have arrived. Through the window, the little boy smiles with his eyes. I find myself thinking that the only difference between his place in life and mine is circumstance…