The Bread Queue

Ali, my sister-in-law’s Mansoureh’s son, has sprained his little toe playing football with Yusef in the living room. His household duties of shopping in the nearby corner shop and queuing for bread thus suspended (he can’t even wear a slipper), I have volunteered to deputise.
It's 12 noon. The bakery at the end of our road is a tiny shop, the walls tiled in white. Two long queues stretch out onto the pavement, one of men, one of women. The Afghani woman ahead of me tells me another woman was in the queue behind her, but she’s gone off somewhere.
The long queues are for large orders (over three breads per customer), so those needing fewer than three breads form another two, faster-moving queues between the two long ones. The baker serves one large order, two small ones.
As I was about to give my order, the absent woman arrived and squeezed just ahead of me. I asked her what the rule of re-joining the queue is.
“How come you don’t know?” she asks. I explained that I am a foreigner and that I am collecting material for a book.
As long as the woman ahead of her knows she was behind, she can re-join the queue; she had also told Haj Mahmood, the baker, she would come back.
Addressing no-one in particular, the woman behind me said, “I was here when he was mixing the dough, so I thought I’d go and pick my child up from nursery and come back.” Did she expect me to offer her my place? Or would I appear silly if I did?
“When he isn’t busy,” the woman ahead said, “Haj Mahmood is all jolly and friendly, but at peak hours, like now, he becomes grumpy.”
“That’s natural,” I said, “he’s getting stressed.”
“No, that’s not the reason,” she said. “He does it deliberately so that nobody asks to jump the queue.”
One by one she tosses the flatbreads on to the wire rack to cool.
“Do you have bread like this there?” (‘There’ meaning anywhere other than here.)
“Not flat like this, but has more volume and…”
“It’s like our sandwich bread,” the woman behind me volunteers.
Feeling unequal to the task of explaining that there is a world of difference between steaming hot, fragrant Greek bread and what sometimes passes for French baguette in Iran, I let the comment pass.
“Is it nice there?” she asks. Before I have a chance to reply, she continues.
“There is no place like Iran; our country is so rich and beautiful, it’s got four seasons…”
“That was before global warming,” the woman behind says.
“Believe me, we are so ungrateful of what we’ve got, I don’t know why anybody would want to leave Iran for another place…”
Her order of twenty breads is complete, and with it her mini-sermon on the love of her homeland. She folds them individually in a pile, tidy and pat, just like her take on life. I wished I were like her, or Mansoureh, or my own sister Eleni back home, both still living in the same neighbourhood they grew up in, knowing where home is.