I am waiting in the depot for the bus to Meshed when an old gentleman collapses near me; he is not dead or drunk just in a bad way. Another old man waiting for a bus tries to tell me what happened, but my informant has had a tracheotomy and has to “talk” through a metal whistle-like devise installed in his throat.
We are all here: the good, the bad and the indifferent. We observe and we participate. This certainly is a depressing drama but the play always changes.
On the bus, a sturdy young soldier who speaks a little English occupies the seat beside me. He is friendly and entertaining. I have seen photographs of the handsome Shah of Iran and his beautiful wife displayed conspicuously in shop windows and on posters all over the city but the soldier tells me this is merely government propaganda. He suggests that all is not peaches and cream in Iran and the charming couple in the photos may not be as wonderful as they seem. At the lunch-stop the soldier buys me a nice meal: chicken, rice and apricots.
I am disappointed after lunch when police stop the bus and order all of us passengers to get out for a few minutes. When we get back aboard the driver tells me to sit in the front of the bus beside a skinny Turkoman who says he has been taught English by Peace Corps volunteers. He begins to sing the praises of the Shah. He says I should read the Shah’s book: “The White Revolution”. He seems to believe that everything in Iran is hunky-dory.
If I was a suspicious person I might think that an informant was setting me up so that I would make a report about the “optimistic mood of the people in Iran” to interested persons in America. This is not the first time I have been mistaken for a spy, as you know. Some governments do have heaps of money to waste on idiocy like “intelligence” as some ignoramuses call the reports from their spies
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