Thursday, 09 September 2010 06:44

July 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph by Mohammed Rabah Suliman) - As my pleasant, joyous, exhausting, and long day came close to its end, fidgeting, I stood at a crossroad waiting for a cap to give me a drive back home. With off road lights, it was dark. Cars were rushing past me taking their lights away as fast as they procured them. I hadn’t waited for long when a car pulled over, and I got in.

Inside the car, the driver was a man, as it seemed to me, in his early forties; multiple sparse gray hairs on his wide plump face made him look pretty older. It happened that the woman sitting next to him, in the front seat, is his wife. Her little baby sleeping in her arms, she was spoiling the elder one, apparently at five years of age, teasing him so as to sing for her. I listened carefully to the boy as he went on singing:

“As we live, we’ll wait our returning home. We’ll never forget our right to return home” The five-year boy admiringly sang.

Only then, the driver stopped at a red traffic light.

“A traffic light!” the boy exclaimed as if he had seen something unusual.

The father replied, “So what?” he looked at his son, pecking his own boy’s cheek, possibly turning it into red. “What should we do when we see a red traffic light?”

“We stop.” The boy replied.

It amused me later to think that the boy did grasp what three of us failed to grasp: that the boy could grasp it was a traffic light shining red, the boy perhaps meant to say it was a light rather than a traffic light, and that we had moved from a darkened off-lighted area into a lighted one without our observing this.

I paid the driver as he crossed the yellow traffic light and pulled over for a new passenger to get in. While the quiet driver firmly steered his car straightforwardly, it happened that a car ahead of us, all at a sudden, started to move to the right side, without turning on the car backlights which made the driver confused trying to go far to the right so as to avoid the car ahead. The driver had to brake then when he discovered that behind the car ahead two passengers were standing alongside the road. Now the two cars had become next to each other and the two drivers facing each other.

“Do you know why is that backlight there in your car?” Our driver told the other, peacefully enough not to start a brawl.

“Go to hell, you should learn how to drive a car before you talk to others!” the other replied.

Not uttering another word, our driver moved on, looking from the edge of his wide-opened eyes. I believe he felt offended, and definitely he was very clued up with the country and its harsh rules: the driver was sure he couldn’t get his right back, and that he’d better remain quiet if he wanted to get back home safe.

He did remain quite. I got back home. And the driver got back home, offended.

Mohammed Rabah Suliman
1st July