“Victoria Station Miss?”
I snapped out of my clouded thoughts and quickly responded, “Yes, Victoria station”.
It was a rare sunny day in London; the entire city bustled with life. I watched families walk past laughing as I settled into my rideshare.
“When is your train?” the driver asked. I saw him smile through the rearview mirror
“4pm,” I told him. It was already 2:30 and, with the heavy traffic in central London, I was afraid I wouldn’t make it on time.
“Don’t worry Miss, I’ll get you there,” the driver responded, as if reading my mind.
“Thank you… sir.” I almost said uncle, but decided against it.
“Are you studying here?” he asked me as he drove through the Peckham suburbs.
“Yes, in Leeds – I was just visiting a friend in London.”
“Ah Leeds, lots of students there. You must have many friends.”
“Yes,” I said.
He didn’t need to know that I had made no friends and that the thought of going back to my silverfish-infested student accommodation was filling me with utter dread.
Leeds was grey. It felt like it had a monochrome filter on it permanently, as if all the colour had been sucked out of the entire city and it was sucking the colour out of me too.
“Where are you from?”
The dreaded question. Should I tell him that we’re from the same place?
This was a conversation topic I avoided a lot. It led to too many follow-up questions – they ranged from “How is your English so good?” and “Isn’t there a war going on there right now?” to “What is your father’s name?” or “Are you married?” depending on the inquirer’s background.
“Singapore,” I told the Uber uncle. It was vague. It was easy. Singapore is so multiracial that it doesn’t truly reveal anything about you; besides, I had been there for seven years. I really did see it as home.
“Singapore,” he said. “So far away”
“Yes, very far,” I agreed.
It was indeed far and I was feeling it after saying goodbye just the day before to my long-distance partner who had come to visit me from the So Very Far Singapore. We hadn’t been together for that long and I was pathetically strung – typical lesbian behaviour.
I felt a crushing weight of distance, a feeling of desolation from everything familiar to me.
“I am from Pakistan,” he said.
I already knew that.
“I work here for the last 20 years. My family is back home.”
I looked at his aged face in the rearview mirror, the wrinkles and lines on his skin. He was here alone too.
“You remind me of my daughter actually,” he said with a smile.
He sensed a familiarity in me, and I wondered if he saw my very common Arabic name on the Uber app and recognised it. I had bleached my thick black eyebrows – the thing that makes me so visibly South Asian, so I must have seemed like a big question mark.
“My daughter is a doctor now. She graduated recently,” he told me.
“Wow, what an achievement,” I said.
“Indeed,” he beamed.
I wondered when the last time he saw her was, if his daughter knew how proud her father was, or if, to her, he was just absent. He had missed all her milestones: her birthdays, her graduation. He couldn’t see her, couldn’t hug her, but he found her in a random girl running late for her train in his Uber.
“Have you had lunch?” he asked me.
“No…I haven’t.”
I realised I hadn’t fed myself since I dropped my partner off at Heathrow airport. Feeding myself always felt like a chore and the parting had left me with little-to-no appetite.
He turned around and gave me a look of surprise. “No lunch? You need to eat – you are young. If you don’t eat now you will have back pains when you are old!”
I couldn’t help but let out a laugh. His genuine concern and astonishment at my bad nutrition reminded me of my own father’s over-the-top bewilderment when I wouldn’t be hungry at the dinner table.
After a somewhat long lecture as we neared the bridge crossing over the River Thames, he said, “Here, you must eat.”
It was a plastic container full of grapes: not the regular kind, the expensive Japanese kind.
“No, no, it’s okay, I’m fine really,” I stuttered. I couldn’t accept his nice grapes. They were perfectly ripe, purple and shiny. I didn’t think I deserved them.
“No you must! You must eat!” he insisted. I reluctantly took one so he would keep his eyes on the road. He continued to lecture me about eating more fruit. I sucked on the grape while the juice dripped over my finger, burning my chewed-up cuticles.
We drove over the bridge into the fancy residentials of Pimlico. People were out and about; children played in the parks, fluttering around like bees in a flower garden. I thought about the day before, the airport goodbye, the unabashed sobbing on the train home, the messiness of a long-distance open relationship, the intensity of queer love, grapes, my back pain.
My back pain. Maybe he was right. I do need to eat better.
We continued to drive and I stared out the window. London felt so big – a sea of people. It was easy to drown in it.
The past week had been really magical. Me, my lover, and the guesthouse owner’s cat. A week of pretending we were living together in a cute Victorian-style apartment, talking about how we would divide house chores, who would cook and who would wash the dishes. I knew our time was limited, but my willing suspension of disbelief made it last forever.
I saw the Uber uncle look at his watch. He paused for a bit, and then said, “Is it… is it okay if I stop to pray? It’s prayer time and there is a mosque near here. You know, we Muslims, we pray 5 ti-”
“Yes! Yes of course, I know,” I said quickly.
Of course I knew. It was the most familiar thing in the world to me – I knew it like I knew brushing my teeth. I wanted to tell him that, but I didn’t.
He parked in front of the mosque. “I’ll be right back!”
I looked at him scurry alongside other men, his long white beard and kufi blending in with some of the other elders. He didn’t look any different than the men I saw around me back home – the men I had grown up seeing on international news channels with “terrorist” blasted across their faces in red, the men I saw at the market, the men sipping hot chai and playing carrom board on lazy Sunday afternoons.
I wished that he was sipping hot chai and playing carrom board too.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. I looked tired, maybe a little insane with no eyebrows, a black hoodie, badly cut bangs and a shiny silver septum ring. I wondered how much of his daughter was like me. Was she secretly queer too? Why did I remind him of her? She was a doctor for god’s sake – she probably had her shit together.
I suddenly felt slightly embarrassed about the way I looked. I remembered the discomfort of being around my extended family in Karachi when I had short spiky hair, my cousins whispering and giggling to each other while holding eye contact with me from across the living room.
Before the shame could cloud my mind any further, the driver returned.
“All okay?” he asked me. “Yes,” I smiled.
We finally reached Victoria Station, 13 minutes before my train. I was relieved. He got out of the car and helped me with my obnoxiously large suitcase.
“Thank you… thank you so much,” I said to him. I wanted to say more but I didn’t know what.
“Have a safe trip, and please eat more fruit,” he told me.
“Yes I will,” I replied.
I watched him drive off, his car smaller and smaller into the distance as it eventually got lost in an ocean of other cars. I headed into the station, the sweet taste of grapes still lingering in my mouth.
If you grew up Muslim, you grew up hearing stories of angels in disguise coming to help those in need. If you were lucky, you experienced it firsthand.
I was one of the lucky ones. When I was six, a girl at school threw a rock at my face. As I sat on the floor and cried, she continued to kick me. What could possibly make a little girl so angry, I still don’t understand.
Then came an angel in the shape of a boy. He pushed her away, hard enough that she got scared and ran off, and asked me if I was okay. He told me if ever needed him to just call, and I never saw him again.
Angels come in all shapes and sizes: sometimes it’s the old lady next door, a kind man on the bus, the girl who works at the convenience store, a dog, a spider, the driver; sometimes it’s you.
Cover art by the author