“Don’t stop me now...”
Mrs J was singing a well-known Queen hit in a low voice.
I sent her one of my ‘stop-that-right-now-or-else..’ looks every mother or wife knows so well. Mrs J ignored me and kept humming.
We were standing inside the grimy yard of the only garage in Salalah prepared to repair my Pajero. Spread out around us were car wrecks with years of accumulated dirt and dust, random car parts, flat tyres, empty oil canisters, and oddly enough, a child’s bike with a stabiliser wheel missing. It was like a scene from a Mad Max movie. My Pajero was far from ready, that much was obvious.
The mechanic turned his head to look at us, and my heart skipped a beat. How was this possible? Who would ever have thought that Freddie Mercury, the frontman of the rock band ‘Queen’, had a twin brother working in Salalah??? The similarities were uncanny. The protruding front teeth, the moustache, the slicked-back hair, the face – everything pointed towards the fact that we had found Freddie’s twin. This would of course explain Mrs J’s potpourri of Queen’s greatest hits; she had spotted this long before me.
“Do you really think..?” I whispered and nodded towards the mechanic, arm deep in my car engine. Mrs J quickly consulted Google and held her phone screen 2 cm from the mechanic’s face. “Do you know this guy?” she asked him. Salalah-Freddie looked for a brief moment, smiled sweetly and went back to what he was doing. Not a flicker of recognition.
“Surely they must have heard of Freddie Mercury even in Salalah”, Mrs J mumbled. She found a video clip of Freddie Mercury in concert, wearing super-tight sequined lycra and bare-chested, singing his heart out. The mechanic watched fascinated and pulled out his own phone. He quickly found a clip from his cousin’s wedding to show us in return. Men dancing and clapping their hands, all appropriately dressed. It wasn’t Queen, that’s for sure.
“Will you let it go? I hissed at Mrs J who was trying sneakily to take photos of our busy mechanic. “But this could be a goldmine”, she snapped back suddenly all paparazzi. “the right magazines will pay a fortune for this”
“It isn’t Freddie Mercury’s brother!” I insisted to end the nonsense.
Out of nowhere, a woman appeared with a tray, timidly pulling her scarf over her face when she saw us. Lunch was ready. Mechanic-Freddie was too busy to eat but gestured for us to follow her towards a peeling door half-hidden behind a stack of engine parts. The room was hardly big enough for the bed and a shelf holding up the chunky old fashioned TV. This was their home. A baby lay swaddled in an old sari next to a toddler who had climbed onto the bed to watch cartoons on TV, in a language he didn’t understand. Their lives consisted of what was in that tiny room. Plastic bags with belongings, a couple of nails from where their clothes hung, and a hotplate right outside the door, directly on the concrete floor. That was it. And yet, the mother smiled and gestured for us to take a seat on the bed next to her children. She gingerly placed the tray with dal and bread next to us and encouraged us to eat. She might have very little in life, yet, she was prepared to share what she had.
Mrs J looked at me, notably touched to the core, torn between being polite and accept a morsel of food, yet painstakingly aware that every bite would mean less for the little family.
We were both quiet in the taxi going back to our hotel; both reflecting on the unknown factors that determine just how one’s life turns out. Worshipped by thousands in sequined tights on stage, — or loved by a few, in an oil-soaked shirt, working underneath a broken car.
Perhaps the faces were the same, but the opportunities were not. You can’t always choose your path in life – but you can always choose to be kind.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
