By Priyanka Mathai
If there has been a staple of my mostly urban life, it’s been this: the autorickshaw ride. Whether it was with other people or alone, getting somewhere meant finding an auto that would take me there.
Back when I had little to no “pocket money”, I spent most of it on autorickshaw rides. Instead of waiting at the bus stop for the dusty, vaguely nausea-inducing green of the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation, and then braving the half hour or one hour to wherever it is I needed to go, I would hop into an auto. This would exponentially reduce the money I had to spend; but I would rather eat a tomato sandwich for lunch for seven days straight than get on a bus. Bus rides inevitably made me dizzy and nauseous, but mostly I think it was because I was willing to pay an exorbitant price for a sense of protecting my personal space.
I never talked to the auto drivers beyond what was necessary: directions and negotiation of terms. While I couldn’t overcome the unnamed and non-interrogated hesitation I felt in initiating a verbal conversation, I soon became fascinated what the auto told me about the man driving it.
There were the old but cared for vehicles: faded faux leather red seats that nevertheless gleamed from being thoroughly cleaned, the ones with the seat practically falling off, and, when we went over a bump, debris fell from the back into my lap — an empty plastic bottle, a cardboard box. There were the ones that were decorated with religious symbols: rosaries, Ganesha, Hanuman, Salman. There were the ones that imparted pithy wisdom: “Love is pain”. It couldn’t have been more painful than the way my spinal cord was rearranging itself as the driver careened into every pothole possible, but it was a useful life lesson. There were the ones with the cheap speaker sets installed most conveniently right behind the passenger seat, their volume set to max. It was a musical dictatorship in these autos, so I learned by rote the lyrics to every song of the 1991 movie Saajan. On a good day, I might have even sung along.
But I never spoke to the auto drivers.
They never spoke to me.
This didn’t change even after I “grew up”, ostensibly transitioning into an independent, self-assured woman.
I am never more conscious of how bad a negotiator I am than when confronted with an auto rickshaw driver who will ask me for double — or triple — the normal fare. There’s probably something in my face or stance that tells them that I’m easy pickings, I think. Some days, I’ll engage, the haggling fairly good natured, the performance routine. Other days, I’ll refuse, everything in my face and body screaming dismissal. I feel a certain smugness on these occasions, the surprise on their faces soothing my sense of ill-usage. I often feel silly about how these tiny, inconsequential, everyday transactions can make or ruin my day; how the little power play can set the terms for who I am when I look in the mirror that day. On these days my silence feels like a weapon, my cultivated indifference a necessary barrier.
* * *
After she moved to Bangalore, my friend N would tell me about all these conversations she had with auto drivers in the city: interesting, peculiar, funny, tragic. But then, N talks to everyone, I would think, she’s indiscriminate like that. I’m just reserved.
I start talking to auto drivers, because they start talking to me.
The first time it happens, I’m at the junction of MG Road and Brigade Road in Bangalore. My driver is an elderly Muslim man, his beard almost fully white, eyes prominent behind thick lenses. He’s been a careful driver. The blinking red of the signal indicates that we have sixty seconds left. Cars, autos, bikes squeeze together and occasionally honk, as though it would make time move faster. A gleaming black Mercedes sedan draws up to our left, drawing gazes from the commuters around. The chauffeur jumps out, runs around to the other side to open the door so that a youngish man in a sharp business suit can emerge. From where I am, I can see the chauffeur execute a salute. My inner progressive does a spit take. My auto moves forward (the car is still stuck because the chauffeur needs to run back to his seat) and my driver says, in perfect posh-educated-accent English, “Some people have lucky lives”. My inner progressive is in a mild panic now, because my auto driver is talking to me in accents that I consider the province of people like me. “I don’t know why he couldn’t open the door himself,” I blurt. “Some people are like that,” he replies, a lot more stoic than I feel is warranted. I want to ask him: why do you speak such good English, but I can’t find a polite way to phrase that. Instead I ask, “How long have you been driving an auto?” hoping for a clue. “Forty years”, he tells me, adding, “Bangalore has changed so much.” We’ve reached the point where I need to alight, so there’s nothing to do but get off and pay him. As I turn away, I notice a copy of The Hindu tucked away between the handlebars, but he’s merging into the traffic before I can tell him, hey, that’s my newspaper too.
After that, I feel braver about initiating conversations.
When I reflect on it later, I’m not sure why that is: was it that glimpse of the newspaper, so mundane a detail, and yet so intimate in its information; or was it the surprise of having been addressed in my language by a person I wouldn’t have expected to know it?
A few months after that incident, I meet a graphics artist from Hassan. He had a job, he says, a contractor job with an IT company, but they laid him off after a few months, and he couldn’t get another. He hung around in the apartment he shared with five of his friends in Whitefield, and then someone told him that there’s good money in the auto business, and besides, nobody seemed to want his skills because his English is not very good, he tells me in a mix of English and Hindi. He tells me all this because for some reason, he’s fascinated by the framed art I’m transporting back home in his auto. Did you paint it, he asks me. No, no, I laugh in reply, it’s something I bought, a copy of a painting. It has nice colours, he says. I agree. Will you keep trying for a company job, I ask, curious. I don’t know, he says, let’s see, we don’t know the future.
* * *
The thing with auto rides, much like life, in general, is that you never know what — or whom — you’re going to get.
There was the day I met Batman.
Bulldozing his way through traffic, maintaining almost a straight line through it, we’re flying over the speed-breakers and swinging around that one Jaguar, and it’s like he’s a bat out of hell, or a very determined man, and I think, maybe this is his life: full tilt, without pause, without fear of consequence, perhaps too tired to care.
I could die, I think, right now, this little steel bucket could overturn, I’d be thrown on the kerb, my skull cracking open and all my stupid poetry and anger and loss oozing onto the pavement until someone cleans it up tomorrow and throws it in the trash.
Or I could live to tell the tale.
Because Batman has just decided to stop outside the petrol bunk near Forum, and mumbles something about a wire and gears and basically tells me that the ride is over.
* * *
Just once, I get to sit in the driver’s seat.
This is because when the skies opened up just after I got in the auto, he says: you’ll get wet, let me lower the sheets. He pulls over, makes me sit in the driver’s seat while he carefully rolls down plastic “curtains” on both sides of the passenger seat that he ties to the frames, perfect little knots of red plastic. “You have to take care of these things” he says, as he ties them, “Otherwise passengers will not want to sit in your vehicle. Why should they, if it’s not neat and clean?” He’s incredibly chatty, this man. He was from Bombay, he said, he’s only been here a few months. Bombay is a bad place, he says, lots of gangs. I’ve seen things, he says, and then I needed to get out. So I went to Muscat. Then after a few months, I came to Hyderabad, and now Bangalore.
I am convinced I’m talking to an ex gangster.
Suddenly we’re talking about the love life of one woman whom he regularly ferries around: she’s seeing the wrong man, he says, darkly. I read her stars and told her so. He’s bad for her, I keep telling her that. You know astrology, I ask. I believe in the divine, he replies. Turns out, he sees visions: Shiva, Mary. He’s Muslim, but he thinks God is everywhere. And speaking, especially and directly, to him. I can tell you your future, he says. Uh huh, I say, trying for diplomatic, and not ‘freaked out’. “You’ll get married soon,” he assures me, “it will happen”. I stop him a little way away from my house. “You don’t want to take me to your house” he says, sadly, “You’re afraid”. “No,” I hedge, “I just need to buy something and I want to walk. The rain has made everything beautiful.”
* * *
It takes me months before I realise this: I know their names, but they don’t know mine.
First, there’s the little infographic at the back of the driver’s seat that tells you his name, address, license number, blood group.
Even if he didn’t want to tell me, I’d know.
But I nearly always ask anyway, these days, if I’m having a conversation with them. They tell me, but never ask for mine.
I take, but I don’t have to give.
I do it anyway, and I note their reaction: surprise, even gratitude. They open up more.
It makes me uncomfortable. I’m trying to put them on an equal footing, I tell my friend N. She gives me a look and says, dry, “It’s not made equal because you tell them your name.”
* * *
I try explaining to another friend why I find autos safer than cabs. “Don’t be silly,” he says, “they’re pretty unstable. And most of these drivers are rash. And it’s noisy.”
“Locked cab doors make me nervous,” I say, “With autos I keep thinking I can just jump out if anything happens”.
He is unconvinced. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he says, “you know it doesn’t. Cars are safer, period.”
I want to point out to him that our threat perceptions come from different places: he’s thinking accidents, I’m thinking assault.
But I don’t say it; anyway, these days I’m taking more cabs than autos, mostly because it involves less bargaining. I don’t have conversations with the cab drivers, though I’m not sure why.
* * *
So get this, Ram actually has a brother named Lakshman. He laughs as he tells me this. He drives an auto on the weekends: 6 am to 10 pm, he says — if he can make around a thousand rupees one day, it’s enough. He actually has a job at BEML, but what can you do these days with ten thousand rupees. He has two children. A little extra goes a long way. It’s only been a few months though, since he got the auto. The loan was relatively easy because he had a regular job. Does your wife work, I ask. She used to do domestic work, but it was hard, with the two children, and she was always tired. Now with the extra money from the auto, she can stay at home. I told her, no need. I don’t have a license yet, he says, when I ask whether he had thought of tying up with Ola. They insist on the paperwork. You should probably get on that, I suggest, cops will harass you. I will, he says.
I didn’t want her to work anymore, he says, suddenly, perhaps because something in my tone had suggested disapproval. Because it was hard for her. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, he says, I don’t know how I would have managed without her. When I get off, he shows me a picture of his family: a thin, sari clad woman, with her arms around her two young children, both under ten. None of them are smiling. It’s very sweet, I tell him, and hope you have a nice day. He smiles, another passenger is already getting in, and then he’s gone.
* * *
How long have you been driving an auto, I ask, because this has become my standard opening salvo. Forty-six years, he says, forty-six, he repeats, softer. Another elderly Muslim man with a long beard, he speaks to me in Hindi. “It looked like it would rain,” he says, “but then the clouds went away. At least, it’s become cooler these days.”
“It’s been raining in the nights these days, “ I say, “it’ll probably rain tonight.”
“Only Allah knows,” he says, “only Allah can tell. But at least it’s not so hot anymore.”
As I pay him for the ride — he gives me exact change — it starts to rain.