24 Restless Hours

When it was light, my father took his slippers from beneath his head and put them on his feet. Then we* got down from the hand
cart. My father said, "I wasn't able to sell potatoes yesterday. I still have more than half of them.”
“You should have gotten something else."
My father didn't say anything. He unlocked the padlock on the cart and took out two full bags and emptied them on the hand
cart. I lifted out the scale and weights and arranged them. Then we went on our way.
"We'll go eat some soup," said my father.
Every morning that my father said, "We'll go eat some soup," I knew he hadn't eaten dinner the night before.
The sweeper had streaked the sidewalk to the end of the street. We went in the direction of City Park. The old soup vendor was
sitting at the edge of the gutter as always, back towards the street and a caldron of soup simmering over a slow fire in front of
him. There customers, men and women, were sitting around eating their soup from aluminum bowls. There was a woman lottery
ticket vendor who wore a ragged veil like Zivar the lottery ticket vendor. She was crouched over and had put her bunch of lottery
tickets on her lap and covered her knees with her dirty veil.
My father greeted the old man and sat down. We gulped two small soups with some bread and got up again. My father gave me
two rials and said to me, "I'm going to make the rounds. Come back here at noon, and we'll eat lunch together."
The first person I saw was Zivar's boy. He had blocked a man's path and was repeating, "Sir, buy a ticket. You'll probably be a
winner. Come on, Sir, buy one."
The man forcefully freed himself from Zivar's boy and went on. Zivar's kid muttered several curses and was about to walk away
when I called out to him, "You weren't able to dump it on him!"
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