Just you in a car, looking out the window and seeing the great rows of palms stationed across the roundabout on a beautiful sunny afternoon, listening to Indian music your photographer has put on and ignoring the chatter of your sales manager in the back as he witters on about the write up you’ll do; about how it will help him close the sale; about how he thinks he made a good impression. Smiling because you are not interested in all that; not interested in the money, in the deal or the sale. You are smiling because you have met another one. Another educated and gentle man and you are beginning to realise that they are all like this; that they must all be like this. Just you in a car smiling insanely at the memory of the interview you have just done with a very rich man. Just you in a car smiling insanely at the memory of an interview you have just done with a very rich man indeed. Smiling because he is so rich; because you are so poor and yet he offered you only reverent courtesy. Smiling because he is so rich and yet we sat on the kerb talking and smoking, making no excuses for the inconvenience. Smiling because you can still smell his pipe smoke; smoke thick and fragrant like Shisha; thick and fragrant like hallowed English pubs; thick and fragrant like divorced American women.
Smiling too because you have just seen two beautiful bright green flags erected for no purpose other than to colour the earth, and smiling because the thought occurs to you: what a wonderful thing to do, to put up two bright green flags and to care enough that they are always new. And you know that they are new because the harsh Gulf sun has not bleached them yet; their colours still vivid as from a child’s hand.
Just you in a car, not smiling now because you remember home and the things people say, the things you used to say about these wonderful respectful people; these beautiful, friendly honourable and gentle people and you wish that there was something you could do to change the minds of your entire country; change the minds of the entire world.
But then you are snapped back to the real world by a blaring horn and an angry shout from the lips of an Arab who is not gentle, not friendly and not honourable because he tells the photographer - an Indian - to go back home to bangla land; that he not wanted in Bahrain. He swears and he is rude and it was him that nearly drove in to you.
XxX
1 Comments:
A note about Vignettes.
It would appear the definition has changed somewhat. I initially meant them to be postcards, small snippets of life over here; the transmission of a picture in words.
And that they still are, but more, they appear to have taken on elements of the ethereal, and more specifically, the musings of tranced mind whilst travelling in cars. Maybe it is because I am being transported, or because in motion one becomes less tied to a world and freed of physics, the mind will wander. Maybe it is just that with my eyes focused on the world outside, my inner eye is opened.
Maybe it is just because I am a pretentious twit.
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