The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
In the mirror, the old woman and her cart grew smaller and smaller, but the red star on one of the books inside it remained visible beneath the rain until the last moment.
The footsteps of that history still rang in my ears.
I only regretted failing to make more of that precious chance to sit and listen to her.
I turned towards Lena.
— Do you know what an opportunity we missed?
She looked at me in surprise.
— What do you mean?
— We should have gone to a café and listened to her properly.
— First, she never goes to a big café. She always tries to support the smaller ones. Second, she isn’t difficult to find at all. Wherever working people are, that’s where she is.
— Doesn’t she have a home and an address?
Lena laughed.
— Nobody has her address.
— Then let’s find her when the weather’s better, and ask about that tear too.
— I’d like that.
— So would I, said the woman in red. — But life, with all its problems, has tied my hands. I haven’t much free time.
— We’re all caught up in difficulties, Lena said, — but we mustn’t forget to live our own lives.
The woman in red looked sad.
— I have a child I’m raising with love.
— I’ve been through that too, said Lena. — But I still lived my own life.
The woman in red sighed softly.
— I didn’t think it would be this hard.
— However hard it is, you can try to think it through and find a way. But you mustn’t go without living your own life.
At that moment Coco started barking.
I looked at him. Apparently Mr Coco had decided the conversation had become too serious, and it was time for the bus’s public relations department to intervene.
The discussion turned to how tired Coco was, and our conversation about the woman in red’s life remained unfinished.
I turned into another street.
The rain had eased, but London was still wet: the kind of wet that made it seem the city was walking through an old memory rather than through rain.
Lena folded her black umbrella and set it beside her seat.
The woman in red put the book back on her knees.
Coco shook himself and splashed a few drops of water onto my trousers.
— Coco, my dear, if you’re going to give the driver a bath, at least wait until we reach our destination.
The donkey brayed from behind us.
— You keep quiet. I still don’t know why, of all the creatures in this story, you’re the driest passenger on the bus.
The woman in red laughed.
But Lena was still looking out of the window.
Then she said quietly:
— Do you know what the difference was between love in my decade and love in the one after it?
— If you mean the difference in the price of coffee, I’m fully prepared.
— No, comrade. Let me finish!
The woman in red raised her head.
— In the Iranian 1350s, for many women, even falling in love wasn’t something that happened only between themselves and their hearts. Family, reputation, the neighbourhood, social class, tradition and a thousand invisible eyes entered a relationship with them.
— But the Iranian 1360s weren’t as free as they seem from a distance, said the woman in red.
Lena turned to her.
— I didn’t say they were free. I said something had begun to change.
— So love is like London’s buses? I asked. — The route number stays the same, but the route changes?
Lena smiled.
— More or less.
— I think the more important difference was that, in the 1360s, women increasingly began to talk about themselves, said the woman in red. — About what they wanted and what they didn’t. The growth of the feminist movement played a part in that change.
— Feminist movements had been active in various countries for decades, Lena said. — Perhaps they had more room to make themselves heard then.
She paused.
— And to speak about women’s own bodies.
For a few seconds, nobody spoke.
The donkey brayed.
— Very well. It seems the bus’s conservative wing objects.
They both laughed.
Then Lena became more serious.
— The same applies to sex. It wasn’t simply a matter of sexual relationships becoming freer. That’s the simplified picture people later made of the Western sixties. A deeper question was being asked: who decides what happens to a woman’s body?
— Her family? asked the woman in red.
— Yes.
— Society?
— Yes.
— A man?
Lena paused.
— For centuries, that was the answer. But more women began to say: the woman herself.
The street opened out before us. Red lights stretched across the wet tarmac.
— But there’s a contradiction here, I said.
— What contradiction?
— Breaking a taboo doesn’t automatically make you free.
— Exactly, Lena said at once.
I glanced at her.
— At last you’ve agreed with me without an argument.
— Don’t celebrate yet. You haven’t finished your sentence.
— I mean that a society can imprison the body on one side and turn that same body into a commodity on the other. Both can take away a person’s control over their own life, just in different ways.
The woman in red thought about it for a few moments.
— So sexual freedom on its own isn’t enough?
— Not if freedom only means removing the old restrictions, Lena said. — You have to look at what has happened to power in the relationship. Does a woman really get to choose? Can she say no? Can she say yes without being humiliated? Is she independent enough, financially and socially, for the choice to be her own?
— This is where love stops being only about two people.
— You’ve brought politics onto the bus again, said the woman in red.
— I didn’t bring it. It bought a ticket and got on by itself.
The donkey brayed again.
— This one, of course, still hasn’t paid.
Lena laughed.
The woman in red closed the book.
— But there’s something I don’t understand. If we explain everything through society, economics, power and history, what happens to love itself? To that moment when you see someone and your heart trembles without calculating anything?
For the first time, Lena took a while to answer.
— It remains.
The woman in red seemed not to have expected that.
— Nobody is saying the feeling isn’t real. Of course it is. But feelings aren’t born in a vacuum. We fall in love carrying all our past: our upbringing, fears, needs, class, experiences, even the pictures of women and men society has put in our minds.
— So when two people fall in love, they aren’t the only two who turn up for the date?
— Sometimes several generations come along with them.
The woman in red laughed.
— We’ll need a large table, then.
— Now I understand why relationships cost so much.
Coco came and sat beside my feet.
I looked at him in the mirror.
— You’re lucky. You sniff, you love, you wag your tail. No 1350s, no 1360s, no theory of love.
— Are you sure? asked Lena.
— I’m never sure about Coco. He understands more than half the people I know. Fortunately, he doesn’t write articles.
The woman in red looked back at Lena.
— If you had to name just one difference between love in the 1350s and 1360s, what would you say?
Lena thought for a moment.
— In the 1350s, many women asked, ‘Am I allowed to love this person?’ In the 1360s, more women began asking, ‘What do I want from this relationship?’
— And today?
This time Lena did not answer.
I looked at her in the mirror.
— Perhaps today’s question is harder.
— What question?
The light turned red and I stopped the bus.
Outside, a man under a black umbrella was looking at his phone. A woman passed him without raising her head. Behind the café windows, people sat opposite one another, some paying more attention to their screens than to the face across the table.
— Perhaps today’s question is this: in a world where we can be in touch with hundreds of people, do we still know how to have a relationship with one?
Even the donkey did not bray this time.
The light turned green.
I set my hands on the wheel and drove on.
London passed slowly beyond the wet windows.
Perhaps love, I thought, belonged neither to the 1350s nor the 1360s nor today.
Perhaps love was that stubborn passenger who climbed aboard in every era, changed clothes and learned a different way of speaking, but always carried the same question:
How can we love another person without owning them? How can we love them without hurting them?
Both women gave me a startled look.
I couldn’t make sense of their expressions, but whatever they meant, they struck an ominous note!
At that moment, our distinguished donkey came to my rescue with a short bray from the back of the bus.
Coco pressed himself against my legs and began making a fuss for attention.
I seized my chance, forgot the two fierce looks and turned to the donkey.
— Very well. Your vote has been recorded too.
And the bus continued on its way through the rainy London evening.
There will definitely be more…
Naser Kamali
London — Homeland Estate Agents. Undated and untimed.
Translator’s notes
- The 1350s and 1360s: The speakers’ generations are dated by the Iranian solar calendar, broadly the 1970s and 1980s in the Gregorian calendar. Lena also alludes separately to the Western 1960s and debates about women’s bodily autonomy.
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