بِسمِ اللهِ الرحمن الرحيم
The Two Riyal Bus
The two-riyal bus is the beat-up metal canister painted with horizontal stripes of orange and blue or red that runs up and down Tariq Madinah, all the way down to the Balad. How far it goes in the other direction beyond Hayy al-Rawda is beyond me. In fact, there are more than one of these minibuses, a lot more. I often walk from my workplace to the bus-stop near Amara al-Farisy, and catch a bus going uptown towards my residence. The vehicles are usually decrepit, but some are new. It is the driving style of the bus driver that is worthy of notice, and Allah recently gave me the opportunity to observe one driver’s style on three separate days.
I will refer to the driver as Smoky. The first time, he was driving a bus that swung far to the right, and then far to the left as he steered, its carriage tilting out of the perpendicular relationship it was presumably designed to have with the road, depending on how fast he drove and how hard he turned. He was obviously dangerous behind the wheel, but on that occasion I didn’t respond as I ought to have, by simply getting off the bus. I must have been in shock.
The second time, I climbed into a bus and saw him again at the wheel, but figured, well maybe that first time was an anomaly, and now I’m on the bus; what am I supposed to do? This second time, though, his driving was really crazy, and I got off as soon as I could.
The third time, somebody else was driving, and Smoky sat next to him, in the front passenger seat, smoking a cigarette and chatting loudly, somewhat exhibitionistically I daresay, as we made our way up Madinah Road. Somewhere near the Maghrebi Eye Clinic, without notice, while the bus was moving at normal speed, the man steering it, normally known as the bus driver, quietly rose out of his seat and exchanged places with Smoky. I felt as though I had been teleported into something like a circus act. A couple of passengers broke into unseemly smiles, which they shared, as if to wordlessly acknowledge, we are fortunate to be at the mercy of audacious drivers. Smoky then started doing something that I realized then and there would best be described as joyriding. He steered in an S-pattern back and forth across two lanes at a lively clip. I sensed reluctance in his maneuvers, however, as though he recognized that this behavior could not but appear as infantile and possibly criminal.
My thoughts turned to how this driving style could be exploited in a society where driving regulations and law enforcement might be unsystematic and haphazard. A driver could pick up passengers, collect their fares, and then frighten them with serpentine behavior on the road, impelling them to disembark at their earliest convenience, having already paid, and glad to be safely off the bus. In this way, his revenue could rise without a parallel increase in labor. He could repeat this pattern up and down his route, leaving shaken passengers in his wake.
On my third trip with Smoky, Allah’s Mercy was soon evident, however. As we swung into the service lane leading to the parking lot of a shopping center, across from a dry canal and an attractive mosque, a dully explosive rejoinder issued from his wheels, followed by the smack of flapping rubber. Smoky stopped the minibus and without addressing us got off, investigated, and returned with a common metal bolt that had punctured a tire. He then drove the vehicle a dozen yards or so across the parking-lot before the word naazil - descending – escaped my lips, still distant from my neighborhood, but in good time for me to prepare for the mid-afternoon prayer.
الحَمْدُ لِلَّه
