The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
From the third row, the woman in red asked:
— Where are we going?
I shifted my hands on the wheel and looked at the wet street ahead.
— That’s a difficult question.
— I only asked where this bus was going.
— In my life, buses have never gone to just one stop.
She leant forward a little.
— So do you know where you’re going?
— I know where I am. For now, that’s enough for a driver who died once, came back to life and hasn’t even had his licence renewed by the Department of Death.
The donkey brayed from the back seat.
— Don’t interfere. Your home address is clearer than any of ours.
Coco began to bark, as if to say, “I’m here too. Include me in the discussion.”
The bus moved slowly through the wet street. Rain settled on the windscreen and the wipers swept it aside, but a few seconds later it returned. Some things, it seemed, could not be wiped from your sight for good.
The woman in red was silent for a while. Then she raised the book in her lap a little.
— I read books about mysticism. They give me peace. I think if I keep reading them, I might find the peace I’m looking for.
I glanced at her in the mirror.
— I don’t know a great deal about mysticism. But I believe that the way a person understands the world is shaped to a large extent by the social conditions of their life. Nobody thinks outside their time and society. Poverty, war, exile, prison, love and failure all help shape how we see the world.
She ran a hand over the book’s cover.
— I’m not religious, but I believe in my own God: a God within me. I’ve found peace in mysticism too.
— If that belief brings you peace, I don’t want to take it from you. I simply look at the world from somewhere else. You go inside yourself in search of truth. I look first at the world outside: at the relationships that make people, wound them and sometimes drive them to build a refuge within themselves in order to bear living.
— Then you don’t believe in people’s inner worlds?
— Of course I do. But I don’t see the inside as separate from the outside. Our minds aren’t rooms with the doors shut. They have windows, and society comes in through them every day — sometimes bringing light, sometimes a truncheon.
She gave a faint smile.
— So you’re a materialist?
— If you mean that I begin with material reality and people’s social lives when I try to understand the world, yes. But dialectical materialism, to me, means not treating the world as fixed. Everything is in motion, contradiction and change. Neither a person nor a society stays the same as yesterday.
— And metaphysics?
— Metaphysics generally looks for an answer beyond material reality: in the spirit, the unseen, or a truth beyond the world of the senses. You find God inside yourself; I look for the roots of thought in people’s actual lives. Perhaps we come in through different doors. But both of us are looking for a way not to be crushed beneath the weight of life.
The donkey brayed from the back.
— Our friend here has yet to declare a philosophical position. Perhaps it’s waiting to see which school will supply the hay.
The woman in red laughed. For a few moments her laughter mingled with the rain, sounding a symphony of doubt inside her.
Then she looked at me again.
— Has that materialist view brought you peace in exile too?
My hands tightened on the wheel.
— Peace? It depends what you mean by peace. But it has helped me understand why, after all these years, when someone asks where we’re going, I think of the place I was driven from before I think of our destination.
To be continued.
Naser Kamali
Rainy London, in my beautiful room, alone and in my own quiet space
Undated
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