Conversation on the Bus

It is four o’clock and I’ve survived another Friday. I’m slumped upstairs on the double decker bus feeling sorry for myself because I have the most awful cold.

A man sits next to me. He has a kind face with brown skin and deep-set eyes. After a few minutes he says, in a heavily accented voice, “You are tired?”
“I’m not well,” I croak, smiling at him pathetically.
He says he is on his way home from school. He is learning English, has been learning English since he got here six months ago. He says that he is from Afghanistan, pausing to look at my reaction. Maybe he is worried that I’ll think he’s a terrorist.

The man says matter-of-factly that his whole life, Afghanistan has been fighting, fighting. His girlfriend is dead. He holds out his hand. “My mother, father, sister, dead,” he says, counting them off on his fingers. Only his brother remains alive, living in Pakistan.

“Do you know drug dealers?” he asks, unsure of his English. He tells me the catalyst for his move to England was when some drug dealers took over his home in Afghanistan. He pulls up his sleeve briefly to show me the white gash of a scar on his wrist.

The man says he likes England. The people are friendly. He can sit next to a woman on the bus and have a conversation and not be killed. It is stupid, he says, that a man cannot just talk to a woman in his country. He will make his life here.

It is his stop. He smiles and says genuinely “You have a nice life.” He climbs down the stairs without looking back.

I think of my own family, silently hope that they are all safe and well. Attempt for a moment to imagine living in a place like Afghanistan.

My awful cold pales into insignificance.