They have shocked us, got us lost and taken us on crazy roller-coaster rides around town to bump up the fare. Yet recently my experiences with the city’s taxi drivers haven’t been all bad. True, I’ve very nearly been involved in full-fledged fist fights with some, but I’ve also exited many a cab with a broad smile on my face. And I assure you it has nothing to do with my usual tendency to talk and giggle to myself in a sinister manner.
Over the past few months, cabs have afforded me the opportunity to encounter, in a brief space of time, such wonderful characters and those quirks of human nature that we rarely notice. For a writer, these are valuable experiences. Picture this: on a morning that I’m running very late for work, a kindly Egyptian brother promises he’ll get me in on time and then turns to ask if I have ‘a brave heart’. ‘Eh?!’ I respond. So he repeats the question without elaboration and orders me to fasten my seat belt, after which I’m subjected to the maddest driving and the most outlandish route known to anyone who’d ever shared my destination. This man not only keeps his word (a near impossible feat), he also manages to use a tooth-pick, make a phone call and tell me about the history that Egypt shares with Turkey in the process.
Then there’s the driver that educates me about the geography of Pakistan and has me feeling nostalgic for a land I’ve never seen, as he describes, with bitter-sweet sighs, the fresh mountain water of his home country.
Yet another calls me ‘sister’ for the duration of the ride, because I offered him a stick of gum, and tells me about how things have changed in Abu Dhabi over the 15 years that he’s been driving people around its streets.
Without warning, a Bengali gentleman spews forth a tirade about world politics and the general state of things. He says, in so many words, that the world is going to the dogs, and that we’ve all brought this mess on ourselves with our greed and whatnot. I sigh and nod. Sigh and nod. And who can forget the ‘secret agent’ driver who let it slip who he was – because who would believe me if I told anyone?
I’m not the kind of person who strikes up a conversation with strangers. I wish I was (particularly on that one flight where the cute guy sitting next to me was also reading Murakami), but frankly, I’m just not built that way. I can, however, keep a conversation going (it’s probably my face). And most recently, my favourite conversations have been happening in cabs. I remember something one of my friends always used to say, about how taxi drivers are the best people to talk to in any city. She knew what she was talking about.
