It has always been a restless union, a gathering of men bound not just by trade but by tension. Long before now, it had earned a reputation that traveled faster than its buses. Where it went, stories followed of unrest, of muscle, of a certain lawlessness that hovered like heat over asphalt.
My understanding of that world was never abstract. It was personal. Sometime in 2007, tragedy walked into a house I knew too well. It was the home of my childhood friend, a place where I had spent nights, shared meals, and felt a kind of borrowed belonging. Then, one night, darkness arrived without warning. Armed men stormed the private storey building. They came looking for money, but they left with something far more permanent. They murdered my friend’s mother.
It was a cold, senseless act that tore through the fabric of that family and left a silence words could not mend. She was, by every measure, a good woman. Deeply religious, generous to a fault, and always willing to extend warmth to others. Her husband, an upright man and then a branch chairman of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, was preparing for Hajj. Just days away from a spiritual journey, he was forced instead into mourning.
Grief had barely settled when something even more unsettling happened. The following day, the state chairman of the union came to commiserate. But sympathy was not the only thing he brought. In a moment that still stings in memory, he asked the grieving man to remit funds in his custody. There was no pause, no restraint, no regard for the rawness of loss. It was as if tragedy itself was not reason enough to suspend demands.
