As I sit on the bus on my way home from work, praying to the Gods of the universe that they will liberate me from the awaiting religion assignment that I have yet to finish and submit, my prayers are answered. I’m sitting in the back of the buss, 167 to Älvsjö and I suddenly hear someone yelling. An old man with grey hair looking rather frightened, quite similar to a mouse, jumps on the bus and quickly makes his way in. A few seconds later a man in a jacket with a fur hood and trackies comes running past the window where I am sitting and enters the bus. “Lilla fitta! Jag ska slå dig! Kom tillbaka, din jävla fitta!”
These extremely unexpected words come out of the angry man, who looks like he’s been possessed by an evil spirit. The person he is addressing is the old man that just got on the bus. The second the man with the fur hood enters the bus, the old man quickly backs away and looks terrified. The angry man then continues to blurt out various demeaning words and threatens to beat the old man. Seeing as he is is yelling, there is no need for me to eavesdrop to hear the angry man tell the bus driver the reason for his behaviour.
“Han tafsade på min son!” He yells across the buss. Really?! The little old man who looks scared out of his wits molested his child? Is he some sort of pedophile? My thoughts are spinning and I’m so intrigued by the drama that I can barely contain myself. I have to take notes. I pop out my phone, open the notes app and begin to type.
Just as I begin to type, a man sitting three seat rows ahead of me gets up, walks to the frightened old man — who seems to be paralysed because he hasn’t moved away from the angry man — and takes him to the back of the bus with him. He tells the old man that he will be fine and that he shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of behaviour. Of course, the angry man sees this and becomes even more furious, claiming that he will “knulla” the kind man “upp och ner”. After this, the angry man and the kind man who helped get into a fight, ending with the angry man stepping outside of the bus, provoking the man who helped to step outside and settle it “like a man”. Now that the angry man is outside, the man who helped shouts to the bus driver to close the doors and drive, which she does. Before we drive off, the angry man slams his fist into the window and runs away.
Now. What hit me was that everyone on the bus took a distance, obviously, from the angry man because he was going berserk; however, how can we be certain that the cute little old man didn’t in fact molest the angry man’s child? I mean, he didn’t protest when the angry man accused him of molesting his child… I just sensed a lot of prejudice seeing as no one on the bus tried to understand the angry man, but simply chose to victimize the old man and take his side by giving the angry man the stinkeye. It simply seems plausible that the angry man with trackies and a fur hood, looking Eastern European, and using quite bad language would lose the sympathy votes to the cute little old man in this situation. But this is wrong! No one on that bus knew the true story, hence we have no right to jump to conclusions. That cute little old man could in fact be a molester, or not. And the angry man could have had his child molested, or he was simply high on drugs, as I heard the kind man who helped say in the beginning. Besides, where was the angry man’s son? Because the boy wasn’t with him when he came on the bus. So many questions. So few answers…
Nonetheless, my point is that one should never judge a book by its cover. I don’t know the whole story behind the event on the bus ride. Neither do the people that sat on the bus with me. All that is somewhat safe to say is that I might, just might have taken a bus ride with an alleged molester. Creepy.