The many hues of a taxi driver

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot / And a big yellow taxi took away my old man. Joni Mitchell.

No one hails a taxi anymore. Shades of coming out of a cinema or concert hall, standing on the edge of a pavement and waving your hand frantically yelling ‘Taxi’ as another one whizzes past without bothering to stop. Those days are gone. Maybe the yellow cabs are still plying in good, old Calcutta, where I used to semaphore at taxi cabs frequently with little success. Calcutta takes its own time coming to grips with the dial-a-cab online generation and bully for it, say I. What you see in many cities, for the most part, is people milling around street corners, glued to their mobile phones, trying to call up one of a myriad number of cab hire services, whose vehicles are moving along at a leisurely pace or parked somewhere in the vicinity. You can even track them squiggling along on your mobile GPS. When the vehicle does arrive somewhere close, you and a dozen others rush to peer at the number plate to see if it is the cab you had booked. It can get quite frantic.

Nevertheless, once you are safely and comfortably ensconced in the back seat, or in the front if other members of the family are bringing up the rear, you can begin to strike up a conversation with the driver. As a rule, most drivers are not averse to a spot of chit-chat, particularly if the drive promises to be long with plenty of traffic jams along the way. Some of the drivers can be painfully garrulous. There are some drivers who are reticent and prefer to keep their own counsel. Which is fine so long as they are well-versed in the local topography, possess more than a rudimentary idea of where the short cuts are, not to mention the uncanny ability to avoid most of the one-way thoroughfares.

Incidentally, you want to be wary of the silent, brooding type of driver, probably nursing a secret grudge or sorrow. It could be the onset of manic depression. If you are still not with me, watch Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver on OTT. Spoiler alert: it is not for the faint hearted.

Then comes the interesting but not insurmountable challenge of which language to employ while conversing with the driver. If you take cities like, Delhi, Chennai or Calcutta, you can be reasonably sure that Hindi, Tamil or Bengali respectively will be the preferred tongue of choice though most of them can speak at least one other language. In Bangalore, where I live, a linguistic melting pot where people from all over the country converge looking for employment, the name of the driver alone does not definitively signify his mother tongue. A Venkat or a Raju can hail from any of the four (now five) southern states. Ditto a Joseph, a Karim or a Bashir. They could all be migrant itinerants from anywhere in a country like India where the peripatetic job-seeker is the rule rather than the exception.

A cheerful driver enlivens the drive and keeps you in good spirits. While such a one is unfailingly polite, he will not fight shy of letting his window down and discharging a volley of colourful oaths if a neighbouring car or two-wheeler attempted to cut across dangerously in front of him. Having got the invective in the chosen vernacular off his chest, he will roll up his window and profusely apologise for his intemperate language, particularly if there are ladies present in the car. ‘Sorry Sir, Madam, but that fellow was breaking traffic rules and might have caused an accident. This is the only language these fellows understand.’ The fact that we did not catch the return volley of abuse from his target was just as well. It is a well-founded truism that when it comes to road rage, the other fellow is always at fault.

Allow me to get a quick word in on car horns. I doubt if there is another country in the world where horns are employed so persistently and indiscriminately as in our own motherland. Most drivers have one palm semi-permanently placed on the horn. The resultant din is calculated to break all sound barrier laws, which in any case are observed strictly in the breach. For crying out loud, what do our drivers hope to achieve by blaring away at a large family of bovine creatures dreamily chewing cud and blocking the road? This is Bharat. Learn to live with it.

Matters don’t always have to be tense. On one occasion, I got talking cricket with one of my drivers. Always a safe subject to open a conversation with just about anyone in India, cabbies being no exception. ‘Tell me Raju (or it might have been Bashir), you must be a T20 fan. I am sure you have no time for the long-format, Test matches.’ Bashir (or Joseph) surprised me with his prompt response. ‘Sir, this T20 is masala cricket, just hitting every ball for six or four. No skill involved. I pity the bowlers who get to bowl only four overs and get slammed all over the park. Give me Test cricket any day. Five days of thinking, strategizing, two innings and the winner would have truly deserved it. Even a draw can be very exciting at times. Test match for me, Sir.’ I am, of course, translating and paraphrasing Venkat’s (or Karim’s) views loosely, but his mature and sophisticated take on the game took me by surprise. I felt abashed at thinking the less of him.

If it is election time, which is pretty much all the year round in India, who better than the all-knowing taxi driver to give us his seat-of-the-pants prediction on the likely results. With his uncanny pulse on current affairs, his predictions are usually right on the money! I will take his word against any jumped-up television psephologist.

Some drivers have the annoying habit of keeping the car’s music system on while driving, without so much as a by your leave. Whether the passenger is interested in the latest hits from Bollywood, Tollywood or Kollywood is of scant concern to them. One feels awkward to request them to shut the damn thing off, but needs must. You fish out your mobile and dial no one in particular, but it is enough of a broad hint to instruct the driver to stop Lata Mangeshkar’s high-pitched soprano or Kishore Kumar’s yodelling in mid-stride. After that, the driver himself is hesitant to turn the music on and you can then sit back in peace. One feels sorry to have to deprive the poor chap of his small joys, but there is a time for Lata or Kishore. A passenger at the back wrestling with his thoughts is not the right time.

Then your driver gets a call from home. He has to take it. He plugs in his ear piece. He looks at his passenger apologetically to indicate it’s his wife and he can cut the call only at his own peril. The next five or six minutes go by in listening to his better half and being at pains to explain to the apple of his eye that he cannot pick up the kids from school nor can he pick up the chicken biryani on the way home and could she rustle up something in the kitchen. At which point he removes the ear piece and holds it well away from his left ear as the good wife’s screams can be heard loud and clear. One’s heart goes out to the poor chap.

Oftentimes you call for the same driver multiple times because you have got to know him and he is familiar with all your usual haunts. GPS not required. At a pinch, he will even take your pet pooch out for walkies. By now the driver is almost a friend, if not quite a bosom pal and you encourage this association, unaware of a looming threat. Finally, it happens. He touches you for a not insubstantial loan. Sob story coming up. His father is going in for a bypass surgery. Tears well up in his eyes. He has managed to mop up most of the money but is short of 25k. By now you are choking up as well for your dear taxi driver friend and proceed to cough up the dough. He thanks you brokenly and promises the loan will be repaid with interest inside three months. You wave your hand grandly and waive the interest. You feel good about yourself for having done a noble deed. Dear reader, you know how this story ends. It ends badly. No sign of the blighter thereafter. Does not respond to your calls, probably changed his sim card. Bye, bye, 25k. Bypass surgery, eh? Pull the other one. Ah well, as P.T. Barnum famously said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’

Shakespeare, through his character Polonius in Hamlet, has this to say about treating friends: Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. If Shakespeare had been aware of them during his time, he would have made an exception and drawn the line at taxi drivers. Not all taxi drivers are devious, I grant you, but some of them are. If you are not on your guard, they can take you for a ride.