The Laundromat/"No ID? This is Sunshine Law!" [October 27, 2006]
The aftermath of the trip to Bahir Dar included a mild case of pneumonia for Allison, a mild case of humiliation for our driver, and a mild amount of dirt and grease on my white jacket. The drive there was far from what could be called ‘smooth’ or ‘clean’. About two hours into our ten-hour trip, my jacket fell off the seat beside me for a moment. When I picked it back up from the LandCruiser floor, there were dark brown stains across the left sleeve. During the car fire later that day, grease and battery acid somehow spattered on the right sleeve. I didn’t wear the jacket again until the trip home, when the dust flying through the Muger Gorge left the front covered in yellow streaks.
The jacket is really more of a white sweater, with a zipper up the front and a high collar that zips up nearly to my chin. I’d had it for nearly five years, since before I started law school, having proudly ordered it from the American Apparel website in the dark days before Dov Charney’s sweatshop-free clothes/sexual indiscretions had opened shop in Toronto. It had managed to retain its sparkling whiteness with surprising consistency. Worried that Ethiopia would do exactly what it did to my eternally pristine jacket, I initially left it sitting in my room in Brampton as Robyn and I flew off to London. Yet within two weeks of arriving in Addis, having been subjected to the tail end of the rainy season and cool mountain nights, my brother had been called brother and the jacket was in the mail. When it arrived, Robyn and Taribba both loved it and threatened to keep it for their own exclusive use. In spite of the various hands clawing and grabbing at it, the jacket managed to stay just as clean as ever. Until, of course, the trip to Bahir Dar, after which it resembled a poorly fried banana.
Our maid Aynalew made a valiant attempt to restore its whiteness, but she could only do so much. My only relief was that at least the toxic blue soap she used to scrub our clothes hadn’t taken to the jacket as well.
I decided to take it to Sunshine Laundry, the fanciest laundry in Addis. As I walked to Sunshine, I was reminded of the last time I had used a dry cleaner, when Robyn and I were still in the Central Showa Hotel. Clothes promised to be ready in three days were ready in five or six. Shirts went missing. One shirt that my dad had made for me was eternally ruined by the infernal blue brick that marks the end for so many clothes in Ethiopia. It was sitting on a chair in my room as I left for sunshine, dark blue spots staining the collar, leaving me wondering whether I should just let the jacket be and cut my losses. Still, if I had learned one thing in Ethiopia, it was stubbornness and how to do your utmost to make a complete and utter train wreck out of the most ordinary of situations. So that Wednesday, two days after our return, I packed up my beloved jacket and headed for the Sunshine.
A SUNSHINY DAY...
Sunshine Laundry was located in the Sunshine Building, next to Sunshine Beauty and just around the corner from the new Sunshine Construction office. The laundromat itself was clean and spacious, with gleaming tiles, large automated racks and giant machines, and all the other trappings of the sort you would find in an ordinary North American dry cleaner. Unlike most other businesses in Addis, this one inspired confidence that the job requested might actually be the job that was done.
Everything went well, and the lady I gave the jacket to said I could pick it up earlier than usual, on Friday instead of Monday. I dutifully returned on Friday afternoon, on my way to a meeting at work, only to realize I had forgotten my receipt. When I walked in that afternoon, I explained the problem to a different lady. The lady with whom I’d spoken on Wednesday, was standing serving another customer. She recognized me and told the other counter-lady I was there to pick up a white jacket, dropped off on Wednesday, in the express pick up. I gave her my last name (it was an alphabetized system) and, given the scads of information supplied by the first attendant, assumed that would be the end of the matter. Clearly I hadn’t been in Ethiopia long enough to shed my naïve understandings of the bureaucracy that permeates every transaction here, from changing money at the bank to buying Kleenex from street kids to picking up your bloody jacket at the flipping laundry.
THE LAWYER & THE THIEF...
The lady listened attentively to the description of my clothing, then turned back to me.
“You don’t have receipt?”
“No, I forgot it.”
“You have ID?”
“No.”
“I cannot give to you.”
“What!?!”
“No passport?”
“Er, no.”
“No ID? No passport?”
“Uh, no, I don’t usually carry it to get laundry.”
“No ID, no receipt, I can’t give jacket to you.”
At this point, the other customer, the one the first lady had been serving, piped up. He had come in with two giant mountaineering backpacks of laundry moments before I did, and had watched the whole episode unfold.
“You don’t have your passport?”
”No," I said. "Umm, who are you?"
”No ID? None at all?”
“Er, no, I didn’t realize I needed to present my passport to get my jacket from the laundromat, especially when everyone here knows who I am and which jacket is mine.”
“No ID? No ID!?!” He threw his hands up and turned back to the counter.
I stared at his back in bewilderment before turning to the lady with whom I had originally been speaking.
“Look, like she said, it’s a white jacket, with a white zipper, like a light sweater, with a tag in the back that says American Apparel and two small brown dots on one sleeve that will never come out. My last name is Kiyani, and it’s hanging over there under K.”
The ‘K’ section of the laundry rack was sitting less than ten feet from me, and I could see my jacket shining brightly in the middle of the row of clothes. Not that it mattered to her.
“No receipt, no ID, I can’t give to you.”
“This is ridiculous! She knows me,” I said, pointing at the lady from Wednesday. “She told you exactly what jacket it was, when I brought it, and she knows who I am!”
The lady stared at me for a moment. Then, saying nothing, she turned and walked away, and began serving other customers. I stood at the counter in complete disbelief, while everyone in the store, including the mountaineering man, pretended to ignore me even as they all stared at me out of the corner of one eye.
I stood there for about five minutes, trying to catch the various eyes of the various attendants. About seven people must have walked by behind the counter, all successful to various degrees in pretending to not see me. Finally, I walked over to the other counter, and accosted a third lady. Apparently the counter-ladies had an agreement that five minutes silent treatment was enough to pacify the crazy ferenj with no receipt and no passport and no ID, because she actually smiled at me.
“Look,” I said, “this is crazy. She knows who I am, and the jacket’s right there. I don’t see why you can’t give it to me.”
“No receipt, no ID, I can’t give to you.”
“This is insane! Do you think I came to Ethiopia to steal clothes! Do you think I come here and watch and see who leaves nice jackets and then try and steal them? Is this real? Do you really think that? Besides which, she knows me and already told you it’s MY jacket.”
The third lady looked at me and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “Hey, you seem pretty goddamn crazy right now. Maybe you do stalk laundromats for nice jackets and ugly tweed pants? How the fuck do I know, and why the hell do I care?”
“You’re kidding!”
“No! This is Sunshine law!” Her fist pounded the receipt book for emphasis.
“Law? This is the law!?! You’ve got to be kidding me - ‘this is the law’! Aargh!”
Caught up in the moment, we both recoiled slightly. There was a brief pause before she spoke up again.
“You live here? You can get receipt and come back?”
I groaned, nearly defeated, but still stubborn to the end. Time to try a new tactic.
“Okay, what time do you close?”
“Today, seven o’clock.”
“Okay, I will go home and come back at seven with my passport and my ID and the receipt, but when I come back, I want to speak to the manager.”
“The manager? Now?”
My ears perked up. Was there a chance to speak to the manager now, and perhaps even leave with my jacket, teasing me from less than six feet away? I played it cool, as I’m wont to do when faced with delicate negotiations in foreign laundromats.
“Now or later, it doesn’t matter to me. As long as your manager is here, I want to speak to her or him. Is she here at seven?”
“Seven? Manager here now.”
Suddenly, she whirled and stalked to the back of the store, followed in single-file formation by the other six attendants variously hiding behind counters and racks of horrific tweed pants. The store was empty except for me. I stood in silence as their footsteps echoed down the marble floor. A door slammed shut in the background, leaving me alone with the chatter and traffic noise coming in from the street. All I could see was my white jacket, gleaming on the rack behind the counter, like a fairy princess locked in a tower. Before I could jump the counter, slay the dragon and rescue my alabaster princess, the last lady I had spoken with came back.
"HOW DO YOU GET AROUND WITH NO ID?"
During their absence, I had racked my brains for any sort of way to prove that I was who I claimed to be. I never carried any with me in Addis. A standard rule was to only carry what you need, and I had never had a need to carry ID, except for when I was going to the United Nations compound and the one time I tried to use the Addis Ababa University (AAU) law library.
On that occasion I was on my way to meet Robyn and Semhal, who had driven into campus earlier that morning and were waiting for me at the law faculty library. Given the school’s location, driving was an infinitely preferable alternative to public transport. The university was at Siddist Kilo, so named because it was six kilometers from the city centre and hence my office. The journey required at least two minibus trips, a short walk up a steep hill, and then another walk through the maze of buildings that were scattered throughout the campus. AAU had once been an imperial palace, and the Emperor had gone to great lengths to make sure the palace (now university) grounds were both immaculate and infuriatingly immense.
After an interminable wait on one minibus, and struggling through the coterie of beggars, students, gum-wranglers and gawkers that lined the hill leading up to the university, I finally arrived at the main AAU gate. The rainy season had yet to end, and a blanket of humidity was ushering in yet another thunderstorm. Sweat dripped off my brow as I lined up to enter the grounds.
As is custom with virtually every official or semi-official building in Ethiopia (ie. university, post-office, shopping mall), everyone going into the campus was being searched. I stopped and let myself be patted down. The guard nodded his approval and then pointed at my bag. I swung it off my shoulders and towards him. As he began to open it, he began asking me who I was in perfect English:
“Do you have your student ID with you?”
“No, I don’t actually have one.”
“Are you a student here?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here to do research at the law library.”
“The law library? With which organization are you?”
“I’m a lawyer working with the Ethiopian Bar Association.”
“Ethiopian Bar Association?” He wrinkled his nose in confusion - partly because no one outside of the legal community had ever heard of the EBA and partly because my trusty Mountain Equipment Co-op backpack, with its rows of zippers, straps and cables, was a nightmare to the average Ethiopian security guard. No doubt he was more used to searches that consisted of peering inside plastic shopping bags and slapping men on the sides of their hips, as if sizing up a prize heifer up for sale at the county fair.
“Do you have your passport with you?”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“No? Do you have any ID with you?”
Feeling slightly silly at this point, I told him I had nothing on me. He stopped trying to open my bag and withdrew a step. Not a good sign, especially since I’d noticed all the other guards at the gate had been watching our exchange with growing curiousity. Suddenly I felt like an antelope carcass tossed in the middle of a pack of hyenas. The only question was which one was going to move first and slap me in the head, asking why the crazy foreigner didn’t carry any ID with him. The air was heavy with anticipation, but the first guard mercifully put me out of my misery.
“You have no ID with you? No passport or ID? Why do you have no ID? What can you do without it?” By this point he had taken a further step back and was clasping his hands in front of him, like a disciple at the altar, pleading with me to release him from the ecclesiastical conundrum in which I had placed him. I felt just as stuck as he was, because it was clear that without some persuasive argument or, alternatively, some actual identification, there was no way I was getting into the library today. After the hour-long expedition to get to the university, I would have to go back to the office empty-handed, having suffered as crushing a defeat as any since arriving in Addis.
“No ID!?! How do you get around without it?”
I gave him a quizzical look, waiting before I said anything. The circle of guards tightened, if only infinitesimally, but it was a significant step. Other students and visitors, presumably with some form of identification, were waved through as the guard’s question sat in the humid air. There were only two outcomes to what I had to say - either the pack would loosen, at least enough to let me retreat with some dignity, or the group of them would take turns cuffing me around the ears, like the scene in every Bollywood blockbuster where the inept comic foil runs into the arch-villain’s drunken gang of henchmen in the village square and is passed around the circle, the recipient of various forms of abuse before he’s sent home with his glasses cracked and his tail tucked between his legs.
The guard gave me no more time to think. Clutching at his face in what appeared to be sincere horror, he stepped closer and repeated himself. “No ID!?! How do you go around without ID?”
I took a deep breath and looked him straight in the eye. Trying to give off as much of a rich faranji air as I could, I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly. “How do I get around? With my money.”
Dead silence ensued. I swallowed my gum. A bead of sweat ran down my spine. I opened my suddenly dry mouth to try and back off from my feeble reply, only to be interrupted by a burst of staccato laughter from the guard. “With your money!” Grinning from ear to ear, the guard slapped at my bag and pretended to try to open it. Still laughing, he asked me if I had any guns. “Just books,” I said. “But no guns?” He winked conspiratorially at me, still machine-gunning the air with his laughter. “No, no guns. Just books,” I laughed back. I felt the others shrink away behind me. “Good, good!” He gave my bag one final slap, then saluted and stepped to the side to let me through.
JUST BRING IT IN LATER...
Weeks later, standing at the laundry counter, I struggled for similar inspiration while waiting for someone to come out of the back room. All I had with me was my money and my iPod, and then it came to me in a flash. I whipped the iPod out of my back pocket and scrolled through the menu until I found the Information tab. I thrust the screen in front of her and practically shouted at her. “Look! That’s my name! Asad Kiyani - that’s who I am!”
She looked at me with utter pity in her eyes and gave me a sad smile before turning away.
‘Fuck,’ I thought. ‘I’m never getting that damn thing back.’ My head sunk to the counter in defeat. But then, the first lady from Wednesday - the one who originally took the jacket, who recognized me, and who knew exactly where the jacket was - came back clutching a blue piece of paper in her hand.
Studying the paper closely and eyeing me even more closely, as if her penetrating glare would reveal the blackness in my soul that compelled me to scam other people’s dry-cleaning, she said, “Okay, your name?’
My head shot up in surprise. WTF? Was this really happening? “Asad Ghaffar Kiyani, but it only says Asad Kiyani on that,” (which was clearly her copy of my receipt - why couldn’t we have done this half-an-hour ago?).
“Phone number?”
“0911-**-**-**.”
She read the numbers to herself carefully, keeping one eye on me to make sure I wasn’t cheating by peeking over her shoulder. “Okay, sign here,” she said, pulling out a giant ledger with names, phone numbers and other assorted illegible notations scrawled throughout it. I signed my name and number, and she wrote the description of my jacket underneath it before finally handing it over to me.
“It’s okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks very clean.”
She nodded and rewrapped the plastic so that it would be easier to carry. “Just bring receipt tomorrow, okay?”
With that, she smiled brightly at me and walked away. Alone at the counter once again, I stood in complete shock. Managing to somehow pull myself together, I stumbled into the office 30 minutes late for my meeting and slightly disoriented, but fully clothed.
Today, sitting on top of a chair in the corner of my bedroom, nestled between a permanently stained shirt and a disused plastic shopping bag, is a slightly sickly looking yellow square of paper. Although the writing has faded with time, if you look closely enough you can still make out the following:
“Mr. Asad Kiyani; 0911-**-**-**; one (1) white gacket; ½ xpress; Octobr 26, 2006; For Octobr 28, 2006.”
I still don’t carry any ID with me.
The jacket is really more of a white sweater, with a zipper up the front and a high collar that zips up nearly to my chin. I’d had it for nearly five years, since before I started law school, having proudly ordered it from the American Apparel website in the dark days before Dov Charney’s sweatshop-free clothes/sexual indiscretions had opened shop in Toronto. It had managed to retain its sparkling whiteness with surprising consistency. Worried that Ethiopia would do exactly what it did to my eternally pristine jacket, I initially left it sitting in my room in Brampton as Robyn and I flew off to London. Yet within two weeks of arriving in Addis, having been subjected to the tail end of the rainy season and cool mountain nights, my brother had been called brother and the jacket was in the mail. When it arrived, Robyn and Taribba both loved it and threatened to keep it for their own exclusive use. In spite of the various hands clawing and grabbing at it, the jacket managed to stay just as clean as ever. Until, of course, the trip to Bahir Dar, after which it resembled a poorly fried banana.
Our maid Aynalew made a valiant attempt to restore its whiteness, but she could only do so much. My only relief was that at least the toxic blue soap she used to scrub our clothes hadn’t taken to the jacket as well.
I decided to take it to Sunshine Laundry, the fanciest laundry in Addis. As I walked to Sunshine, I was reminded of the last time I had used a dry cleaner, when Robyn and I were still in the Central Showa Hotel. Clothes promised to be ready in three days were ready in five or six. Shirts went missing. One shirt that my dad had made for me was eternally ruined by the infernal blue brick that marks the end for so many clothes in Ethiopia. It was sitting on a chair in my room as I left for sunshine, dark blue spots staining the collar, leaving me wondering whether I should just let the jacket be and cut my losses. Still, if I had learned one thing in Ethiopia, it was stubbornness and how to do your utmost to make a complete and utter train wreck out of the most ordinary of situations. So that Wednesday, two days after our return, I packed up my beloved jacket and headed for the Sunshine.
A SUNSHINY DAY...
Sunshine Laundry was located in the Sunshine Building, next to Sunshine Beauty and just around the corner from the new Sunshine Construction office. The laundromat itself was clean and spacious, with gleaming tiles, large automated racks and giant machines, and all the other trappings of the sort you would find in an ordinary North American dry cleaner. Unlike most other businesses in Addis, this one inspired confidence that the job requested might actually be the job that was done.
Everything went well, and the lady I gave the jacket to said I could pick it up earlier than usual, on Friday instead of Monday. I dutifully returned on Friday afternoon, on my way to a meeting at work, only to realize I had forgotten my receipt. When I walked in that afternoon, I explained the problem to a different lady. The lady with whom I’d spoken on Wednesday, was standing serving another customer. She recognized me and told the other counter-lady I was there to pick up a white jacket, dropped off on Wednesday, in the express pick up. I gave her my last name (it was an alphabetized system) and, given the scads of information supplied by the first attendant, assumed that would be the end of the matter. Clearly I hadn’t been in Ethiopia long enough to shed my naïve understandings of the bureaucracy that permeates every transaction here, from changing money at the bank to buying Kleenex from street kids to picking up your bloody jacket at the flipping laundry.
THE LAWYER & THE THIEF...
The lady listened attentively to the description of my clothing, then turned back to me.
“You don’t have receipt?”
“No, I forgot it.”
“You have ID?”
“No.”
“I cannot give to you.”
“What!?!”
“No passport?”
“Er, no.”
“No ID? No passport?”
“Uh, no, I don’t usually carry it to get laundry.”
“No ID, no receipt, I can’t give jacket to you.”
At this point, the other customer, the one the first lady had been serving, piped up. He had come in with two giant mountaineering backpacks of laundry moments before I did, and had watched the whole episode unfold.
“You don’t have your passport?”
”No," I said. "Umm, who are you?"
”No ID? None at all?”
“Er, no, I didn’t realize I needed to present my passport to get my jacket from the laundromat, especially when everyone here knows who I am and which jacket is mine.”
“No ID? No ID!?!” He threw his hands up and turned back to the counter.
I stared at his back in bewilderment before turning to the lady with whom I had originally been speaking.
“Look, like she said, it’s a white jacket, with a white zipper, like a light sweater, with a tag in the back that says American Apparel and two small brown dots on one sleeve that will never come out. My last name is Kiyani, and it’s hanging over there under K.”
The ‘K’ section of the laundry rack was sitting less than ten feet from me, and I could see my jacket shining brightly in the middle of the row of clothes. Not that it mattered to her.
“No receipt, no ID, I can’t give to you.”
“This is ridiculous! She knows me,” I said, pointing at the lady from Wednesday. “She told you exactly what jacket it was, when I brought it, and she knows who I am!”
The lady stared at me for a moment. Then, saying nothing, she turned and walked away, and began serving other customers. I stood at the counter in complete disbelief, while everyone in the store, including the mountaineering man, pretended to ignore me even as they all stared at me out of the corner of one eye.
I stood there for about five minutes, trying to catch the various eyes of the various attendants. About seven people must have walked by behind the counter, all successful to various degrees in pretending to not see me. Finally, I walked over to the other counter, and accosted a third lady. Apparently the counter-ladies had an agreement that five minutes silent treatment was enough to pacify the crazy ferenj with no receipt and no passport and no ID, because she actually smiled at me.
“Look,” I said, “this is crazy. She knows who I am, and the jacket’s right there. I don’t see why you can’t give it to me.”
“No receipt, no ID, I can’t give to you.”
“This is insane! Do you think I came to Ethiopia to steal clothes! Do you think I come here and watch and see who leaves nice jackets and then try and steal them? Is this real? Do you really think that? Besides which, she knows me and already told you it’s MY jacket.”
The third lady looked at me and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “Hey, you seem pretty goddamn crazy right now. Maybe you do stalk laundromats for nice jackets and ugly tweed pants? How the fuck do I know, and why the hell do I care?”
“You’re kidding!”
“No! This is Sunshine law!” Her fist pounded the receipt book for emphasis.
“Law? This is the law!?! You’ve got to be kidding me - ‘this is the law’! Aargh!”
Caught up in the moment, we both recoiled slightly. There was a brief pause before she spoke up again.
“You live here? You can get receipt and come back?”
I groaned, nearly defeated, but still stubborn to the end. Time to try a new tactic.
“Okay, what time do you close?”
“Today, seven o’clock.”
“Okay, I will go home and come back at seven with my passport and my ID and the receipt, but when I come back, I want to speak to the manager.”
“The manager? Now?”
My ears perked up. Was there a chance to speak to the manager now, and perhaps even leave with my jacket, teasing me from less than six feet away? I played it cool, as I’m wont to do when faced with delicate negotiations in foreign laundromats.
“Now or later, it doesn’t matter to me. As long as your manager is here, I want to speak to her or him. Is she here at seven?”
“Seven? Manager here now.”
Suddenly, she whirled and stalked to the back of the store, followed in single-file formation by the other six attendants variously hiding behind counters and racks of horrific tweed pants. The store was empty except for me. I stood in silence as their footsteps echoed down the marble floor. A door slammed shut in the background, leaving me alone with the chatter and traffic noise coming in from the street. All I could see was my white jacket, gleaming on the rack behind the counter, like a fairy princess locked in a tower. Before I could jump the counter, slay the dragon and rescue my alabaster princess, the last lady I had spoken with came back.
"HOW DO YOU GET AROUND WITH NO ID?"
During their absence, I had racked my brains for any sort of way to prove that I was who I claimed to be. I never carried any with me in Addis. A standard rule was to only carry what you need, and I had never had a need to carry ID, except for when I was going to the United Nations compound and the one time I tried to use the Addis Ababa University (AAU) law library.
On that occasion I was on my way to meet Robyn and Semhal, who had driven into campus earlier that morning and were waiting for me at the law faculty library. Given the school’s location, driving was an infinitely preferable alternative to public transport. The university was at Siddist Kilo, so named because it was six kilometers from the city centre and hence my office. The journey required at least two minibus trips, a short walk up a steep hill, and then another walk through the maze of buildings that were scattered throughout the campus. AAU had once been an imperial palace, and the Emperor had gone to great lengths to make sure the palace (now university) grounds were both immaculate and infuriatingly immense.
After an interminable wait on one minibus, and struggling through the coterie of beggars, students, gum-wranglers and gawkers that lined the hill leading up to the university, I finally arrived at the main AAU gate. The rainy season had yet to end, and a blanket of humidity was ushering in yet another thunderstorm. Sweat dripped off my brow as I lined up to enter the grounds.
As is custom with virtually every official or semi-official building in Ethiopia (ie. university, post-office, shopping mall), everyone going into the campus was being searched. I stopped and let myself be patted down. The guard nodded his approval and then pointed at my bag. I swung it off my shoulders and towards him. As he began to open it, he began asking me who I was in perfect English:
“Do you have your student ID with you?”
“No, I don’t actually have one.”
“Are you a student here?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here to do research at the law library.”
“The law library? With which organization are you?”
“I’m a lawyer working with the Ethiopian Bar Association.”
“Ethiopian Bar Association?” He wrinkled his nose in confusion - partly because no one outside of the legal community had ever heard of the EBA and partly because my trusty Mountain Equipment Co-op backpack, with its rows of zippers, straps and cables, was a nightmare to the average Ethiopian security guard. No doubt he was more used to searches that consisted of peering inside plastic shopping bags and slapping men on the sides of their hips, as if sizing up a prize heifer up for sale at the county fair.
“Do you have your passport with you?”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“No? Do you have any ID with you?”
Feeling slightly silly at this point, I told him I had nothing on me. He stopped trying to open my bag and withdrew a step. Not a good sign, especially since I’d noticed all the other guards at the gate had been watching our exchange with growing curiousity. Suddenly I felt like an antelope carcass tossed in the middle of a pack of hyenas. The only question was which one was going to move first and slap me in the head, asking why the crazy foreigner didn’t carry any ID with him. The air was heavy with anticipation, but the first guard mercifully put me out of my misery.
“You have no ID with you? No passport or ID? Why do you have no ID? What can you do without it?” By this point he had taken a further step back and was clasping his hands in front of him, like a disciple at the altar, pleading with me to release him from the ecclesiastical conundrum in which I had placed him. I felt just as stuck as he was, because it was clear that without some persuasive argument or, alternatively, some actual identification, there was no way I was getting into the library today. After the hour-long expedition to get to the university, I would have to go back to the office empty-handed, having suffered as crushing a defeat as any since arriving in Addis.
“No ID!?! How do you get around without it?”
I gave him a quizzical look, waiting before I said anything. The circle of guards tightened, if only infinitesimally, but it was a significant step. Other students and visitors, presumably with some form of identification, were waved through as the guard’s question sat in the humid air. There were only two outcomes to what I had to say - either the pack would loosen, at least enough to let me retreat with some dignity, or the group of them would take turns cuffing me around the ears, like the scene in every Bollywood blockbuster where the inept comic foil runs into the arch-villain’s drunken gang of henchmen in the village square and is passed around the circle, the recipient of various forms of abuse before he’s sent home with his glasses cracked and his tail tucked between his legs.
The guard gave me no more time to think. Clutching at his face in what appeared to be sincere horror, he stepped closer and repeated himself. “No ID!?! How do you go around without ID?”
I took a deep breath and looked him straight in the eye. Trying to give off as much of a rich faranji air as I could, I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly. “How do I get around? With my money.”
Dead silence ensued. I swallowed my gum. A bead of sweat ran down my spine. I opened my suddenly dry mouth to try and back off from my feeble reply, only to be interrupted by a burst of staccato laughter from the guard. “With your money!” Grinning from ear to ear, the guard slapped at my bag and pretended to try to open it. Still laughing, he asked me if I had any guns. “Just books,” I said. “But no guns?” He winked conspiratorially at me, still machine-gunning the air with his laughter. “No, no guns. Just books,” I laughed back. I felt the others shrink away behind me. “Good, good!” He gave my bag one final slap, then saluted and stepped to the side to let me through.
JUST BRING IT IN LATER...
Weeks later, standing at the laundry counter, I struggled for similar inspiration while waiting for someone to come out of the back room. All I had with me was my money and my iPod, and then it came to me in a flash. I whipped the iPod out of my back pocket and scrolled through the menu until I found the Information tab. I thrust the screen in front of her and practically shouted at her. “Look! That’s my name! Asad Kiyani - that’s who I am!”
She looked at me with utter pity in her eyes and gave me a sad smile before turning away.
‘Fuck,’ I thought. ‘I’m never getting that damn thing back.’ My head sunk to the counter in defeat. But then, the first lady from Wednesday - the one who originally took the jacket, who recognized me, and who knew exactly where the jacket was - came back clutching a blue piece of paper in her hand.
Studying the paper closely and eyeing me even more closely, as if her penetrating glare would reveal the blackness in my soul that compelled me to scam other people’s dry-cleaning, she said, “Okay, your name?’
My head shot up in surprise. WTF? Was this really happening? “Asad Ghaffar Kiyani, but it only says Asad Kiyani on that,” (which was clearly her copy of my receipt - why couldn’t we have done this half-an-hour ago?).
“Phone number?”
“0911-**-**-**.”
She read the numbers to herself carefully, keeping one eye on me to make sure I wasn’t cheating by peeking over her shoulder. “Okay, sign here,” she said, pulling out a giant ledger with names, phone numbers and other assorted illegible notations scrawled throughout it. I signed my name and number, and she wrote the description of my jacket underneath it before finally handing it over to me.
“It’s okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks very clean.”
She nodded and rewrapped the plastic so that it would be easier to carry. “Just bring receipt tomorrow, okay?”
With that, she smiled brightly at me and walked away. Alone at the counter once again, I stood in complete shock. Managing to somehow pull myself together, I stumbled into the office 30 minutes late for my meeting and slightly disoriented, but fully clothed.
Today, sitting on top of a chair in the corner of my bedroom, nestled between a permanently stained shirt and a disused plastic shopping bag, is a slightly sickly looking yellow square of paper. Although the writing has faded with time, if you look closely enough you can still make out the following:
“Mr. Asad Kiyani; 0911-**-**-**; one (1) white gacket; ½ xpress; Octobr 26, 2006; For Octobr 28, 2006.”
I still don’t carry any ID with me.