The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
When the laughter died away, the woman in red’s question was still there on the bus. She had asked it with a mischievous smile, but the answer was anything but simple.
‘If those meetings and experiences affected you so much, why are you still a monarchist?’
The monarchist rested his head against the back of the seat, eyes closed. Nobody was in a hurry. Even the woman in red, who usually felt obliged to do something about a silence lasting longer than three seconds, said nothing.
I looked at her in the mirror. The little dimple left by her recent laughter was still there, but her expression was serious now. Lena sat with her hands folded. The newcomer gently stroked Coco. The donkey stood by the window looking out.
At last the man opened his eyes. ‘Perhaps the problem is the question itself.’
‘My question?’ said the woman in red.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Because we tend to imagine a person must have one definite moment when they cast aside everything that came before and become somebody else.’
‘And you never had a moment like that?’ Lena asked.
‘No.’ He paused. ‘Or perhaps I did, but not the sort you have in mind.’
The woman in red almost spoke, then stopped herself.
‘Meeting Saeed affected me,’ he went on. ‘Deeply. I could no longer believe some of the things I had believed about the Shah’s opponents in quite the same way. But did I go home that night and say, “From tomorrow I shall leave my entire past behind”? No. People aren’t like that.’
‘A past is more than a set of beliefs,’ Lena said quietly.
He looked at her. ‘Exactly. A past is family. Childhood. Your parents. The house you grew up in. The people you loved. The feeling of safety you may have had. Good memories. Even things you later realise other people never had.’
‘So when you defend a period of history,’ the newcomer said, ‘might part of what you’re defending be your own life?’
He was silent for a few seconds. ‘Perhaps.’
Lena did not rush to say anything. Her silence told me the question mattered.
‘For example,’ he said, ‘when I speak of Iran in those years, I’m not speaking only of the government. I’m speaking of my own youth, my family and friends. The days when I thought I knew what my future would be: finish university, go back, find work, live my life. That Iran was more than a political system to me. It was home.’
‘But home and government aren’t the same thing,’ said the woman in red.
‘I can separate them more easily today.’
‘You couldn’t then?’
‘Not always.’
‘Many people can’t,’ said Lena.
‘Then came everything that happened afterwards. I saw things that made some of those old memories stand out more sharply. When you lose something, you sometimes remember its good parts most clearly.’
‘Even if it had bad parts too?’ asked the newcomer.
‘Yes.’
‘Like a relationship?’ the woman in red said softly.
We all looked at her. She laughed. ‘Why is everyone looking at me? It was an example!’
‘It wasn’t such a bad one,’ her sister said.
‘Was that a compliment at last?’
‘Not yet.’
The man smiled. ‘Actually, it’s a good example. A relationship may have ended, but years later you remember its happier moments more readily. That doesn’t mean there was no hurt or trouble. Memory simply doesn’t work like a ledger.’
‘Memory chooses,’ Lena said.
‘Yes.’ He turned to the woman in red. ‘Now I’ll answer your question.’
She shifted in her seat. ‘At last!’
‘I still call myself a monarchist. But if you ask whether I’m the same person who once believed the Shah’s government could not lie to its people, the answer is no.’
The bus fell quiet.
‘If you ask whether I still believe that everyone who opposed the Shah was a subversive, a terrorist or a dangerous person, the answer is no again. If you ask whether I accept that there were things I could not see back then, the answer is yes.’
‘And if I ask why you’re still a monarchist?’ said Lena.
He laughed. ‘Back to where we started!’
‘Don’t dodge it,’ said the woman in red.
‘I’m not dodging it.’ He grew more serious. ‘Changing one belief doesn’t necessarily change all the rest. I still have views about that period, about what happened afterwards and about Iran’s future that are probably different from yours.’
‘Certainly different,’ Lena said.
‘There you are,’ he replied, and we all laughed.
‘But I can accept today that my experience was not the whole reality.’
Lena lifted her head a little at that, though she said nothing.
‘Perhaps that’s the greatest thing those years taught me: you can have lived through something and still not have seen the whole truth. I saw my Iran. My politically active friend saw another. Saeed lived through another. A worker who perhaps couldn’t afford to send a child abroad had another Iran altogether. Back then I imagined my Iran was everyone’s Iran.’
‘Perhaps we all make that mistake,’ the newcomer said softly.
‘Often,’ said Lena.
I watched them in the mirror. ‘Well, well. It’s taken fifty episodes for you all to agree on a single sentence.’
‘Wait,’ said the woman in red. ‘I haven’t agreed yet.’
‘I knew it!’
The donkey brayed.
‘And there,’ I said, ‘is the bus’s official opposition.’
Laughter returned.
‘Can I ask you something?’ said the monarchist.
‘Go on.’
‘Why do you drag the donkey in whenever a discussion gets serious?’
I looked at the donkey. ‘Because he’s the only passenger who’s been here for fifty episodes without changing his position once.’
‘That’s because he hasn’t said a word!’ cried the woman in red.
‘Exactly what a successful politician does,’ I said.
‘I refuse to be held responsible for that remark,’ Lena said at once.
The newcomer laughed. Even the monarchist burst out laughing. The donkey brayed again.
‘His formal objection is now on the record,’ I said.
At the sound, Coco raised his head, studied the donkey for a moment, then laid it back on the newcomer’s lap.
‘I think Coco is wiser than all of us,’ said the woman in red.
‘His case hasn’t been heard yet,’ I said. ‘Don’t rush to a verdict.’
The newcomer stroked Coco’s head. For an instant her expression changed. Only briefly, but I caught it in the mirror. There was something behind that caress. A memory, perhaps. A pain, perhaps. I did not ask. Not now. Everything had its time.
The bus rolled on. I cannot say why I suddenly looked at the passengers as I did. Not the way a driver keeps an eye on those behind him. More like someone who had only just noticed how crowded his bus had become.
There was Lena, carrying years of history, politics and migration with her, though she had told us so little of her own life. There was the woman in red, her mischievous smile, the dimple in her cheek, and the whole world she concealed behind her jokes. There was her sister, the newcomer who was no longer quite new, though we still did not know where she had spent all those years or what she had endured.
And there was the monarchist. When he boarded, to many of us he might have been only a label. He was more than that now. His beliefs had not simply changed, nor had our differences vanished. We had begun to glimpse a life behind the label: a young student; a comfortable family; money sent from Iran and then cut off; a university course left unfinished; a job he had to take; studies he returned to; a politically active friend who handed him a journal, knowing he probably would not read it; and a night in London when a smiling, moustached man named Saeed embraced him and, without knowing it, cracked an image in his mind.
Coco was there too. We did not know his story yet. At times, though, something in his behaviour suggested that those eyes had seen things none of us knew about.
And the donkey …
I looked at him standing by the window. ‘And you, sir.’
His ears twitched.
‘Don’t talk to him,’ said the woman in red. ‘He’s put up with you for fifty episodes. He’s entitled to be tired.’
‘I was thinking we’ve got a story out of everyone except the poor fellow.’
‘Perhaps he has more to say than all of us,’ Lena said.
‘I’m worried that once he starts, this hundred-page book will turn into five hundred.’
‘And then we’ll discover what he’s thought of us all this time,’ said the woman in red.
The donkey turned his head and looked straight at me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no need just yet.’
Everyone laughed. I turned my eyes back to the road. The street was wet. London was still London. Cars drove past, people walked along the pavements, lights came on one by one. Nobody outside that bus knew what was going on inside it. Nobody knew Death had once been a passenger. Nobody knew a donkey was travelling with us, or that a woman in red was ready to throw everything into confusion whenever the mood grew too solemn. Nobody knew that a monarchist and a left-wing woman could sit a few seats apart, argue and disagree, yet fall silent together when someone told a painful story.
Perhaps that was life. We need not all reach the same conclusion. Nobody had to defeat anybody else. Nobody had to step off the bus and announce, ‘From today I am a different person.’ Perhaps it was enough to arrive a little less certain than when we boarded that we alone knew the truth.
I do not know why that thought made me smile. The woman in red caught sight of me in the mirror.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘Nothing.’
‘When Khalo says “nothing”, there’s always something going on in his head.’
‘I was wondering where this bus is going.’
For a few seconds, everyone was silent. Then the newcomer said, ‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘I’m the driver, not God!’
The woman in red burst out laughing.
‘So all this time,’ Lena said, ‘we’ve been riding on a bus whose driver doesn’t know the destination?’
‘It took you fifty episodes to work that out?’
‘I’m getting off,’ said the monarchist.
‘Too late. I’ve taken your fare.’
‘I haven’t paid a fare!’
‘Then you’ve no right to get off at all.’
The woman in red doubled over laughing. The donkey brayed. Coco raised his head and looked at us in surprise. Even Lena, who usually tried to contain her laughter, could not help herself.
At the wheel, I thought it might be just as well that I did not know our exact destination. If we had known from the start where we were going, perhaps we would never have let any of these people aboard. Perhaps we would have dropped Death at the first stop, refused the donkey, left the woman in red behind for her mischief. Perhaps the monarchist would never have dared board. Perhaps Lena would have thought the journey unworthy of her time. Perhaps the newcomer would never have found her sister again, and Coco would never have settled among these seats.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. Fifty episodes had passed. Strangely, I did not feel that anything was finished. Quite the opposite. Only now did I realise how much remained unsaid. Lena had yet to tell her own story. The newcomer had not opened her suitcase of memories. Coco could not tell us what had happened to him before he came aboard. And the donkey … God alone knew what he might have to say. Even I had stories I perhaps had not yet dared tell my passengers.
‘Khalo, the light’s green,’ said the woman in red.
I looked ahead. She was right. It had turned green and I was still standing there.
‘See?’ I said. ‘The moment a man wanders into philosophy, London loses patience.’
‘Get moving, philosopher. People have places to be!’
I put the bus into gear and we moved off gently. I looked in the mirror. Everyone was still in their place. Nobody had got off. Even Death, though no longer on the bus, seemed to have left his shadow somewhere among our pasts.
I smiled. ‘Well, friends …’
‘Here he goes again!’ cried the woman in red.
‘I was only going to say: fasten your seatbelts.’
‘Why?’ asked the monarchist.
I glanced at the road. ‘Because from here on, even I don’t know who’ll climb aboard next.’
The donkey brayed. And the bus went on.
Not towards an ending.
Towards the rest of the journey.
End of Volume One
Episodes 1–50
The bus is still on the road …
Volume Two begins with Episode 51.
Naser Kamali
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