Where Are You From?
Flash Fiction or Flash Fact? But do you want more, to misquote Oliver Twist.
I’m waiting my turn in my local baked potato shop. The owner is Pakistani - l’m using no names deliberately. Anonymity and all that. Tonight, his daughter is in charge, baking the potatoes and serving the customers.
It’s a Monday night. Everywhere else is closed. The nearby Chinese take-away is shut, they tell me Monday night is casino night. The Nepalese a couple of doors along too doesn’t trade as a new week begins. No idea where they are, perhaps at home watching telly like the rest of us.
The daughter later tells me that she also expected to be quiet and had turned off the card reader just before the current influx. It’s 8.30pm. Closing time is 9pm.
In front of me are two lads, 16 or 17 years old. One is large built, a future power lifter perhaps. The other, with braces, is slight, a runner in days to come maybe.
Both are dressed in a way that suggests they’ve come from the local sports centre (trainers and trackies), hungry and needing sustenance before their bus journey home.
They talk the way teenagers do, quietly to each other, eyes lowered self aware giggles punctuating their chatter as they wait for their potatoes - they’ve both ordered the same, chilli and chicken.
The query whether they want want the chilli on first seems to spark a degree of confusion and bemusement. Eventually they decide. One does, one doesn’t; the big lad does, his sinewy pal doesn’t. Chicken first, he decides but doesn’t seem convinced.
The question from the proprietor’s daughter seems to empower him.
‘Where are you from?’, he asks, having obviously clocked her head covering, a loose fitting Shayla. He quickly adds, ‘Are you from here?’
She replies that she was born here, her parents having come from Pakistan.
‘Where are you from?’, she fires back.
‘Born here,’ he replies, ‘my parents came here from Iraq.’
She nods. I think of the stories his parents must have while reflecting on those of my own Irish ancestry. He returns to his whispered conversation with his pal, before unexpectedly suddenly turning to me, ‘Is this your first time here?’, he asks.
‘No, and the food is good,’ I assure him, he smiles. Then, presented with their potatoes, they leave.
‘There was something innocent about that pair,’ observes the daughter when they’e gone. ‘Not like some’.
And she’s right. For a second I remember being that age, watching, wondering, questioning… trying to work out who I was and where I fitted in to a bewildering world. It must be so much more complicated today. Or maybe it isn’t.
Maybe we don’t need to overthink it at all. Just be. Be our authentic self. Always easier said than done but in time we all find our path, it’s what we do once we recognise it that counts.
A few minutes later, armed with a baked potato stuffed with cheese and egg mayonnaise I pass the lads at the bus stop. They look at me in recognition. ‘Enjoy your food, lads’, I offer in passing. They nod again and smile, ‘You too.’
The older you get, the more you realise life is made of so many such brief encounters and every one is enlightening in its own way.
Ends