Free Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami Page A

skinny man with a bushy
moustache about my situation. He takes the letter from the police and, without a
single word, stamps it.
    Back to the coroner’s—where I barge my way to the front of the queue. I head straight
for the man who dealt with me yesterday, twice.
    He looks at me. ‘Back in line.’
    ‘Sir, I am under an enormous time constraint,’ I plead. I wave the court papers.
He remembers me.
    ‘It’s close to midday,’ he says. ‘I told you to go to the courts early. Where have
you been all morning? Sleeping in, I bet.’
    ‘Sir, please.’
    ‘Line up like everyone else! You don’t get a free pass just because you’re Australian .’
    So I line up, at the end of my nerve. And another two hours pass, just like that.
It’s not like there’s a thousand people here. It’s just a bad time of day. Midday
in Iran is a triple-threat: it’s close to the lunchbreak and the afternoon prayer and the afternoon siesta. Not strictly in that order. The man I’ve been dealing
with disappeared a good ninety minutes ago. At 2.40 pm, he returns and calls me.
He takes away my papers and promptly issues one more.
    ‘Body’s yours,’ he says.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘You can take it wherever. I would suggest you bury him here, in holy ground. But
it’s up to you.’
    I’m floored, but still confused. What am I meant to do with the body? ‘Sir, what’s
the process?’ I ask him. ‘How do I get him to Australia?’
    ‘They didn’t tell you that in court?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘If you weren’t so slack this morning, you would’ve been able to do this earlier.
In any case—go to the registrar, pay the fee, and ask to have the body transported.
To the Paradise of Reza.’
    ‘What’s the Paradise of Reza?’
    ‘It’s a cemetery.’
    ‘But I want to take him to Australia.’
    ‘Just wait! Stop interrupting! Is this how they culture you over there? It’s also
a morgue. You can keep the body there until the Department of Foreign Affairs gives
you an exit.’
    I think about this. ‘So Paradise of Reza, then I go to Foreign Affairs?’
    I keep finding new ways to disappoint this person, I can see it on his face. ‘You
need to contact your embassy. Have you done that?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘Then what have you done? You are very slack, I have to tell you. Get a letter from
your embassy to say they’re happy to accept the corpse back in Australia. Then go
to the Department of Deaths and Births and submit your papers from the morgue. They’ll
issue you a paper.’
    ‘What paper?’
    ‘To take to Foreign Affairs.’
    Right. ‘Would this be all?’
    ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘Although, then there’s the airline ticket.’ It takes me a
minute: he means for my dad. ‘But you can’t buy a ticket until you sort out all your
paperwork.’
    I thank him. He doesn’t reply. Like all the Iranian officials I’ve met, he takes
a sugar cube, dunks it in his tea and gets on with sipping it. I walk away, going
over everything I’ve yet to deal with. As I do, the man calls after me.
    ‘May he rest in peace, son.’
    ◆ ◆ ◆
    The hearse driver, a portly, kind-eyed man wearing thick glasses, tells me not to
worry, as the Paradise of Reza doesn’t close till 7 pm. I check the time: four-thirty.
We’ve been on the road a good half-hour and the cemetery is still another forty minutes
out. The driver tries to make chitchat about Australia. He asks me how much the West
hates Iran, and why. I answer in short statements but he is keen to learn more about
the ‘white folk’, and he keeps his questions coming at a steady pace.
    Reza’s Paradise is enormous. It goes on for miles and miles. The driver instructs
me to follow the ‘yellow line’; if the situation had left me with any sense of humour,
I’d mention something now about the Wizard of Oz.
    The body is unloaded and the driver goes, thanking me for all I’ve told him about
employment rates back home (though I was fuzzy on the specifics for the hearse-driver
industry,