At the Iranian consulate, I stood chatting to a businessman waiting to collect his passport. I asked if he had been waiting long, and he replied, “about 20 minutes.” There was no sign of anybody behind the glass wall of the counter. The reason for this I had noticed as I came in from the already hot morning: all of the consular staff were out on the pavement, looking at a washing machine that was being thrown away out from the next door building.
But after half an hour or so, the staff reappeared and went to work again.
I handed over the two completed forms and two photographs, and said, “Today, everything will be right, Inshallah.” The little man replied with a smile. “Yes, Inshallah,” he said. He shuffled his pile of papers around, then handed over the passport at last. The visas were only two-week transit visas, but I didn’t complain, but thanked him for all of his help, and left the building.
On busy High Street Kensington, I swapped our wad of Scottish money for Sterling, then caught the tube to Marble Arch and waited for Linda. We spent a hot hour walking up Edgeware Road, looking in vain for a shop selling chadors, and finally ended up in Paddington. We took a bus to Notting Hill with the intention of walking down to Portobello Road, but decided it was too hot, took another bus to Earls Court, where we booked our one-way flights to Tehran.
At Covent Gardens, we browsed in the YHA shop, then walked down to the Embankment Gardens to cool off for a while, before walking back up to Haymarket for a bus home.
Later on, in the early evening, I set off to go over to Regent’s Park to see the mosque. The traffic was heavy, crossing Vauxhall Bridge and up through Westminster. I changed buses at Trafalgar Square, then again at Oxford Circus. Upstairs in the bus, I had a good view of all the people, homeward bound and irritable after another hot, sultry day. A few spots of rain fell from the featureless grey sky, but far from being a cooling shower it merely seemed that the sky was sweating. It was a short walk from the bus stop to the mosque, its gold-plated dome nestled amongst the swathes of foliage above which its rather unattractive minaret rose.
I walked around the mosque’s perimeter but didn’t enter, finding myself eventually in the park itself, where crowds of Muslims of all nationalities were enjoying the warm evening. Children played while groups of adults sat and talked over picnics or sitting on park benches. It was an altogether eastern-feeling place, and one could easily imagine that I was in some Arabian country instead of central London.
I walked down through the park whose grass had been burned off by the summer heat and was now a dead brown colour, past further groups of Muslims, many of whom were women, fully covered by chador and unwilling to make eye contact.
At Baker Street, light in my head but dead on my feet, I caught a bus back down to Haymarket, then home. The city seemed caught in a certain ennui, almost inert in the heat beneath a white sky, yet no thunder or storm brought relief that night.
CurseOfTheTraveller 