The boy with the jacket over his arm

by Kesiniya Rengarajan (India)

I didn't expect to find Greece

Athens felt so familiar in so many ways right from the moment we got there. Both the warmth of the weather and the kind of social warmth the place had reminded me of India. The number of motorbikes on the roads, the overcrowded subway stations, and a grandfather feeding the pigeons in the city square with his grandson put a smile on my face that said, “I feel like I know this place already.” There was something else that made Athens look so familiar to me—poverty. My mom, my sister, and I squeezed ourselves into an overcrowded compartment of the subway. Two stops later I heard a scream. It came from my sister. “HEY! GIVE IT BACK!” she shouted and everyone in the compartment turned to look at her. “Your wallet! He has it!” she said to the woman standing next to her. HOLY SHIT! IT HAPPENED! “Give it back to her!” shouted my sister again. The woman gasped and checked her purse for her wallet. “It isn't here!” she said. She then turned to the boy and screamed at him in Greek that sounded something like, “Give it back you creep!” The boy did not budge and pretended to be confused and kept repeating the same word which I assume must have been “what”. The boy had a black leather jacket over his right hand. “It’s in his other hand! Under that jacket!” said my sister and the woman grabbed his jacket and tried to pull it from his hand. He refused to let go. Finally, after the woman struggled to pull his jacket, him struggling to hold on to it, my sister watching all this ferociously like a lion set to pounce on its prey while my mother tried to protect her from him, and me looking at everything and not knowing what to do, the young man finally let go. And the woman, almost crying, took her wallet from his hand and put it into her bag with relief. She thanked my sister. The following ten seconds which honestly felt like ten hours to me was filled with an awkward silence. No one knew what to do or say and the boy just stood there in embarrassment. I imagine he must have been wishing for himself to vanish. In that moment, I wished the same for him too. The train reached the next stop. He got off. We went on. We got to our stop and got out of the train. And he stood there. Apparently, he got into the compartment next to us and waited for us to get off. “You know nothing!” he said loudly to my sister while we kept walking and he kept following us. “You have mother! You have a father! You live with money! You don’t know!” he said and we kept walking pretending as if this is not happening. “I… from Afghanistan! I have nothing!” he said as he followed us. “That doesn’t mean you can steal! You have to work for your money” said my sister to him. “They give no work to me! They look at me... they say I’m young! No one have work here!” he said to her. “You can’t understand! You have mother! You have father!” he repeated and I quickly glanced at his face. His eyes. At this point we were already outside the station and up on the street and my mother asked him to stop bothering us and leave. “You have money! You don’t know! You don’t understand!” he said angrily before he disappeared into the endless crowd of the city. We stood there looking at each other's faces. “Tst! Passiert.” said my sister casually. I stood there paralysed. “But that how some people’s life is,, you know. What would they do if they have no other way to survive? And this place here... is their life. We are tourists who can afford to travel to places where people can’t afford to live half the life we live. So obviously, they know we have something that they can take from...” said our mother. My eyes filled up and I turned away. I can still hear him say, “You don’t understand.”