Three Little Gifts

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

A few weeks back, my youngest daughter had to take the cat to the vet. Our cat, although really still a kitten, managed to get out of the house the other night. She was gone for five nights and apparently had a wild old time out there, consorting with the half dozen toms who live between the farm and the mosque just behind our house. Our neighborhood -- in fact, the town in general -- happens to be overrun with cats and kittens. On almost any given day, you can see stray cats climbing out of garbage cans, nipping into alleys, racing across busy roads. All too often they don't make it across, and you can see the sad evidence of that too.

Nobody needs any more cats around here, so a trip to the vet's was definitely in order. My daughter put the cat into her carrier, went outside, and flagged down a dolmuş. It was full, so she sat in the back with the cat in her cat carrier on her lap. When it was time to get off, she dug a handful of change out of her pocket and made her way to the front of the dolmuş to pay the driver, leaving the cat in her cat carrier in the back, next to the last remaining passenger. "No!" he cried in shocked tones. "No!"

My daughter turned to see what he was protesting. He was pointing to the cat carrier and waving his hands from side to side in the universal I don't want this! gesture. Apparently, he thought he was being left a gift. "I shook my head and waved my hand," she said. "And boy, did he look relieved when we got off."

Our cat, it turned out, was one week pregnant. Narrow escapes all around.

Spilled Coins

Yesterday, I took the dolmuş home. I like to take my change out early so I can sit back and enjoy the ride, so I pulled out my wallet, but no sooner had I done this than there was the sound of metal pinging on metal and I saw a fistful of gold-and-silver one-lira coins rolling every which way. I stared at my wallet. Did it actually have a hole in it? It didn't look like it did, but I'm a klutz: I've spilled a lot of coins in my time.

There was a student sitting just across from me who had just gotten on the dolmuş himself. I pointed to the coins on the floor and then at my wallet. I frowned and he nodded. Clearly, I must have spilled the coins. The student was fiddling with his own wallet and showed no inclination to help me pick up the coins, so I bent to retrieve them, collecting a total of almost ten lira. I hadn't realized I had that much money in coins! The boy now bent to pick up coins himself, and after the last one had been retrieved, I held out my hand to him. He frowned and opened up his palm. And suddenly the penny dropped, if you'll forgive a bad pun. He had actually been the one who had spilled the coins! How embarrassing! I deposited the handful of coins into his outstretched hand, my cheeks on fire. I hoped he didn't think I was trying to fleece him of his money. What if it got around school that the American teacher was such a tightwad she would stoop to rob a poor student of his coins?

Fortunately, when I got off the dolmuş, the student smiled and winked at me. I hope he understood that it was an honest mistake. Or maybe he'd stolen the money himself and was paying his respects to a fellow thief.

Eggplants from Heaven

My colleague Leonard is from Nigeria. The other day, he and some Nigerian friends were taking the dolmuş home after a trip to the market to buy produce in bulk.

"We bought tomatoes, zucchinis, onions, and beans," said Leonard. "When we got onto the dolmuş there were a lot of other people who'd been at the market too and they also had big bags of vegetables. One man had three huge bags of eggplant. We'd seen them selling it in the market and they were very cheap, but none of us knew how to cook eggplants, so we didn't get any."

When they got to their stop, Leonard and his friends grabbed up their bags, paid the driver, and hopped off. It wasn't until they got back to their shared house that they realized they had one of the bags of eggplants.

"We rushed back to the dolmuş stand," Leonard told me, "but of course it had gone and we couldn't find the man with the eggplants. We didn't want him to think that Africans are thieves, but what could we do? And after all, it was an honest mistake."

I asked him what he did with the eggplants. "We took them back home and cooked them," he said, smiling. "We think God must have wanted us to have those eggplants. Whatever the case, we all know how to cook eggplants now."

Free Ride

On winter nights, the main road is dark. You can barely make out the white trunks of the eucalyptus trees and you only know the lemon trees are there because of the fragrance. I had to squint to read the sign on the dolmuş, but one going my direction soon rattled along and I held out my hand. Getting a dolmuş to stop is usually easy. Sometimes it's almost too easy: even when you don't want one, the driver honks and waves as you walk along the road, minding your own business. If you happen to catch his eye -- it is always a man -- the dolmuş will instantly stop with a squeal of brakes and a spray of roadside gravel. Sometimes they even do this even when you're going in the opposite direction. This is because there are more dolmuş than there are people who want to ride in them, and they tend to be eager for passengers.

This one stopped so fast it made me jump. The driver was obviously eager for passengers.

I reached for the door handle, but oddly the door was already open. Which was weird, because you usually have to heave like nobody's business to wrestle the sliding doors open. I got on, bending and twisting myself into the classic getting-on-a dolmuş crouch. Then, because I am the sort of person who cannot resist shutting doors or turning off lights behind me, I tried to shut it. Too late, I realized it was an automatic door; it was shutting on its own. And too late I saw it: the dolmuş I had gotten into was a fancy, luxurious one.

The driver was wearing what looked like a clean shirt and pressed trousers instead of the grubby sweatshirt and greasy cap the usual drivers wear. Dangling from the rear view mirror was a single tasteful strand of beads, not the gaudy jumble of dice, prayer beads, and tinsel that dominate 20% of the average dolmuş windscreen. It was also eerily quiet. Most dolmuş drivers wouldn't think of cruising along without arabica blaring from their CD players. And there were hardly any other passengers. No cackling grannies with their bulging bags of vegetables and bundles of old cloth, no headkerchief-wearing housewives gossiping, no giggling schoolgirls or intense young men with noisy mobile phones. The seats were different too; only the dark had prevented me from noticing it right away: there were no tears in the clean, new-looking fabric. I patted the cushion surreptitiously and no cloud of dust puffed up. Most worrying of all, there was no price list.

Uh oh!

No doubt about it: this was going to cost me three times the normal rate. I got on one of these fancy dolmuş last year and I vowed I'd never do it again. My lucky night.

Five minutes later, half a dozen people got on. By the time we were near my stop, a respectable number of passengers had joined us. A man in the front seat tapped the back of the driver's seat. "Oi," he said waving a note over the driver's shoulder, "Let me off here."

The driver stopped, took the man's note, and gave him a handful of change. The man got off, but before the driver could pull away, the newly departed passenger rapped the driver's window and called something out in Turkish. The driver muttered something back. Reaching into a pouch, he handed the passenger a bill. Fancy as the dolmuş was, it was still too dark for the driver to see he'd given the wrong change.

Two girls got off next. One of them handed the driver a five-lira note and got back a handful of change. Hooray! It looked I wouldn't to have to fork out triple after all! I took four lira out of my wallet and let out a sigh of relief: I'd really lucked out.

When we reached my stop, I handed the driver my four lira and waited for my half lira change. He looked at my money, frowned at me at and muttered something in Turkish. I smiled and shook my head and he fumbled in his pouch for my change, then dropped the coins into my hand. It felt like a lot of change considering, but it was too dark to see.

When I got home, I looked at the coins in my hand. Five lira.

Instead of paying triple the fare, I'd had myself a free ride. In fact, it was better than that: the driver had actually paid me one and a half lira for the privilege of riding in his fancy dolmuş. I practically skipped the rest of the way home: it really was my lucky day.