Taking a cab

After a very long time, this morning I had to take a cab to work, because my idiot driver did not turn up when he was supposed to and was completely non-contactable. A cab was found and I hopped – still rather one-legged – into it, and directed the driver where I needed to be taken to. And then I sat back and faded into my own mind, vaguely resentful that I should have a perfectly good car but be unable to go anywhere in it. When we were almost at my destination, the cab driver suddenly decided to get chatty. And what he said showed me just how much I did not know about my own city and its familiar, well-known black and yellow taxis.

He called them ‘kaali-peeli’, which is only logical, since they are black (kaali) and yellow (peeli). But it took me a moment to figure that one out, since in Mumbaiyya Hindi, khaali-peeli, said with a little more spit and less polish, is a way of saying that something is unnecessary, be it an argument or a rule of any kind. These are, in a way, a dying breed, the driver explained, a car that will soon be defunct on the streets of this city. Because, as an old and discontinued model of Fiat, spare parts are not available any longer; in fact, if repairs need to be made, they are done by cannibalising parts from older vehicles that have long passed their use-by date. The factory has been shut down, the company has moved out of the country and the land it once owned has been sold, the man said with a touch of regretful nostalgia.

Today the kaali-peeli is fast being overtaken by more comfortable, faster and efficient taxis. There are mint-green cabs and golden-yellow cabs and even violet cabs meant only for women, driven only by women. And most of these are the call-on-demand kind, which come to your door when you phone for them and convey you to your destination in air-conditioned comfort. At a price, of course. As my taxi man elaborated, these are good, these are nice to sit in, these are fancy, but these are not always available. They need to be called; they are not allowed to park at street corners (neither are the kaali-peelis, to be absolutely correct) or at taxi stands and they need special permits to ply the usual routes.

My cab driver had ambitions. He had enough saved, he said, to buy a new car. And he knew exactly which one he wanted. The problem was that he had a taxi permit for the ordinary kaali-peeli kind of cab, not for an air-conditioned ‘Cool Cab’, as it is known here. But almost all new cars came with a built-in air-conditioning system that disallowed it from being an ordinary black-and-yellow taxi. Which meant that either he had to spend more time than he wanted to explaining to prospective customers that a ride in his cab would cost the same as in any other kaali-peeli, or else he would be restricted to being a Cool Cab, which he did not want since that would be more expensive to run, cost his customers more and reduce his client base. It all made good business sense.

Taking a cab is no longer a matter of getting from one place to another for me. I have become spoiled by the luxury of having my own car to transport me from hither to yon, putting me in the self-indulgent position of not needing to find my way from anywhere to anywhere else at the mercy of strangers. I do not need to dig in my purse for change, nor do I have to search for a taxi that looks as respectable as its driver. But on days like today, I feel battered, bruised and bent by circumstance…and a set of stairs that just invited me to fall up them.