episode 23 mahadev singh

Kala Ghoda. The rains had disappeared. Eid had been celebrated. Dusserah also. There was a taxi and in it Mahadev Singh. When he left Jharkhand 20 years ago as a 20-year old youth, it was Bihar he left. He came with friends who were cooks in homes on Malabar Hill. He didn’t like cooking. He has been driving a taxi for 10 years. This is his story. Click on ‘mahadev singh podcast’ link below to stream or right click to download. (26 min 21 sec)

mahadev singh podcast

mahadev singh: idhar aye ek baar toh phir idhar se jaane ke dil nahin karta

What I heard, what came through, was the ambivalence experienced in the midst of change. A change to taxi driving, a city changing around him. Passengers picked the new vehicles to ride in. No one wants to ride in a fiat anymore. But as we spoke about the fiats, they became the desired, they have room for legs, room for luggage. Poised on the point of change, teetering between what was and what is becoming, what will be lost and what is being gained, Mahadev Singh spoke from both sides. We can contain these feelings, the simultaneous good and the simultaneous bad.

I spoke to my first Meru driver. It was his 4th day driving. He was an older man who had driven kaali-peeli all his life. He owned three taxis that he rents out. He said he wanted to see what it was like to drive this fleet taxi. But he didn’t hold much stock in it. He was going to give it a month test. He liked the A/C but he thought in the end he could make as much money driving less hours in his own taxi. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about kaali-peeli drivers attacking Meru drivers because of the competition and loss of business. Though I have never heard about it, I guess it has happened. Man does bite dog sometimes. But I have asked every driver about Meru and have never heard any hostility. They seem to feel that there are enough fares for everyone, that enough people won’t pay extra, or can’t pay extra for the comfort of A/C or the convenience of electronic meters.  I admit though, I haven’t asked the Meru drivers their side of the story.

Mahadev Singh lives in a flat, in Mahalakshmi, with running water and a bathroom . The rent is Rs3000/mo which is the price of the maintenance the owners have to pay. This is a flat in a new building erected on the site of demolished jopad-patti and his landlords are rehabilitated jopad-patti dwellers. I have another friend who lived in a run down broken room in a rundown broken building that got torn down by a builder and from that she was given a nice flat with a kitchen and a bathroom in a nice building full of supportive rehabilitated neighbors at a maintenance she can afford. These stories aren’t all bad. But there aren’t enough good ones. More people don’t get flats or though the flat are free, the maintenance is too high to afford or the flats are too far away to make it to work or they get trundled off to transit camps from where they never leave or they can’t prove they are eligible for a new flat, they can’t prove they exist. Lately Dharavi redevelopment land grab has been in the new daily here, here and here for instance.

This is the only outtake. Because traffic was light, because we took the sealink, the raw audio was much shorter than usual. I cut this out of the podcast mostly because it came at the end, and the ending is too abrupt. Nothing lingers. I knew the answer to this question, which is why I asked it. Patrilocality. The daughter leaves her home and belongs to another family elsewhere.  How can you give you daughter her inheritance of your land if she belongs to another family somewhere else? In its stead is dahej, rakhi, maamera/maayra/naanero, these cultural strategies for passing inheritance to daughters but end up devaluing their births. (34 sec)

outtake inheritance

My friend Kannu wants to put his son, Divesh, in a boarding school like Mahadev Singh has done with his son. Kannu lives in Bombay and makes his money as a maharaj, cooking for various families. His village is 45 kms from Udaipur on the Chittorgarh-Udaipur road. He himself is an 8th class fail. He says boy children are too difficult to discipline and the women in the household anyway are too busy. I think about all the fathers in distant cities and wonder about this migration where men leave their families and spend decades away earning the money that farming no longer provides.

I think Mahadev Singh is right about the sealink. Rs30 is just about the right price where people would take it instead of inching along and jockeying for position amidst the pollution and honking in the Cadell Rd/LJ Rd traffic. Rs50 is just over that amount that most people will pay. People who have cars that is, people who are used to paying for petrol. I have only taken the sealink in taxis to augment this blog with more photos and videos and scenes of Bombay from out in the water, the city from a distance.

The intro music in the podcast is the song Boombai Nagari from the movie Taxi 9211, sung by Bappa Lahiri, Merriene , Nisha and Vishal Dadlani.

Music by Vishal Dadlani and Shekar, lyrics by Vishal Dadlani and Dev Kohli

episode 19 rafiq

I was in Fort at the Paper Mart on Cawasji Patel St. buying printer ink, which meant I went to Yazdani for chai and brun-maska which meant I went to Strand.  It was late afternoon, just before the office goers spring free and the taxis were lined up along DN Rd. I saw an Omni kaali-peeli taxi parked in the line of waiting taxis along the curb, a driver gazing out.  It was Rafiq and he has lived in in Jijamata Nagar, Worli his whole life. His taxi had been cancelled because it was 25 years old. He has had this new one for a month. He says it is more comfortable to drive and he doesn’t get as tired but he describes the loan as atyachar, taxi ka atyachar, and Bombay as a confuse nagari. Click on ‘rafiq podcast’ link below to stream or right click to download. (26 min 15 sec)

rafiq podcast

rafiq: chelti jab tak chelana ka. ankh band hogaya tho anari

I apologise for the sound quality. I had forgotten to set the mic sense to uni-directional so I’ve picked up all the ambient sound in full. Plus, the back seat of the Omni is so far back, I had to sit on the hump on the floor behind the front seats and stick my arm through the opening between the driver and passenger seats. I kept sliding off the hump and my arm kept getting lower and lower as I got tired of holding it up. Though it did help create an intimacy in the shared hardship, I prefer the fiat, and the unbroken backseat to hang over.

More and more new kaali-peeli taxis catch the eye, moving through the montage of Bombay streets. The kaali-peeli blends into the known but the shape, the size, that difference, registers. The cityscape will slowly change as each month, each year, a few more new taxis appear in small increments within the total. Visually measuring the difference is like visually measuring the growth of a tree, until one day you realise the tree is big and there are no more fiats on the road. But the atyachar continues for the drivers. (57 sec)

outtake aur atyachar kya hai

New vehicle sightings:

Worli. Kalbadevi. Bombay Central. Mahim. I think if I were ever gone from here, hearing the names of the city spaces would make me teary. Nostalgia for that which I haven’t left, yearning for where I already am. In this outtake Rafiq tells me where today’s dhandha has taken him. Mapping the city in the naming of places, reciting Bombay. (1 min 48 sec)

outtake aaj ka dhandha

Rafiq must pay Rs. 5,000/mo to the bank or they tow away his livelihood. That is Rs 2,500 for interest and Rs 2,500 on the capital. Or they tow away his livelihood.  He can’t be more than 2 weeks late on the payment. Or they tow away his livelihood. He can’t go home until he has earned Rs. 700. And yet he keeps his children in fee-based English medium schools. And postpones the day he can stop renting and buy his own room in Nallasopara until he pays of his loan. In 5 years. 60 weeks. I asked him about his day off. (52 sec)

outtake no chutti

Rafiq is an SSC pass. Maybe 17 years ago, an SSC pass could hope to get a job. He hoped, but no job. For two months after his old fiat was cancelled, he was anari, doing a bit of refrigerator work, working contract at Jet Airways for Rs 5,000/mo. I asked him if he ever considered becoming a Meru Taxi driver, riding around in AC. From his answers, I wonder who they do find to drive for them. (1 min 19 sec)

outtake meru ka naukri

Rafiq had many stories, especially about taking people in emergencies to hospitals. The Navi Nagar story is a favourite. But underlying it is the story of the service that taxi drivers do for us, rickshaw drivers do for us, that in our expectations, our  class bias perhaps, or in our panic, we might not notice. The family didn’t have the neighbors help carry the woman down to the taxi. They yelled down 9 stories – hey taxiwala bhaiya, give us a hand. The Kamathipura story is also a hospital story. The third story is about returning things left in the taxi. Rafiq says of all these things, upaarwala barkat se achha.

outtake navynagar story (55 sec)

outtake kamathipura story (32 sec)

outtake returning samaan left in taxi (2 min 1 sec)

The litte beeps you hear in the podcast? Its the electronic meter. Each new vehicle has an electronic meter that shows the actual amount you have to pay. No more 13x multipliers. No more fare cards. No more reaching out the passenger side window to rotate the meter down, or up. And no more photos of decorated meters. Plus an added feature. In the front of the taxi, facing the street is will be a red light that shines if the taxi is available, the virtual meter up. (or is it the other way?)

The intro music in the podcast is the song Boombai Nagari from the movie Taxi 9211, sung by Bappa Lahiri, Merriene , Nisha and Vishal Dadlani.

Music by Vishal Dadlani and Shekar, lyrics by Vishal Dadlani and Dev Kohli

episode 10 sagir bhai

10 episodes. 10 stories. This story started one evening coming out of Bombay Hospital visiting a friend from Ujjain who was here for his second operation on a broken leg. There was a line of cabs and for some reason I kept walking to the one far down the road. It was Sagir Bhai. He is full of stories and full of a sense of belonging to this city. We rode through the night and I heard his story as a young 16 year old who just failed his 10th Board Exams, running away from home, to Bombay, without even a change of clothes or an address. Just the wisp of knowledge that between 7am and 8am at a place called Maratha Mandir, he might find his sagaawalas. He found them, and like Sevalal, became a tailor and a sampler at Saat-Raasta and then a taxi driver. And now 24 years after getting off the 66 bus from Dadar Terminus at the petrol pump across from Bombay Central, he speaks of Raj Thackeray, of 1992, of 26 July, of film shoots, of his life then and now and to come.

click here to stream podcast

or here –> sagir bhai podcast and here to download –> download podcast

sagir bhai: hum log ne kabhi yeh nahin sochha ke yeh shahar mera nahin hai.

The streets are dotted with Meru cabs. They stick out like pastel interlopers amidst the black and yellow taxis and in their blandness, catch my eyes. They seem to exist in the interstices of private and public vehicle. I have yet to talk to a Meru driver but often imagine what that conversation would be like, especially if accompanied by Sagir Bhai or Sevalal or, if I could find him again, Babu. How many kaali-peeli drivers have gone over to Meru? According to this outtake, probably not many because of the required papers needed for submission. Have you ever tried to shift a ration card from your native place to Bombay? But also according to this outtake, perhaps many drivers, like many passengers, would like to drive around in an air-conditioned taxi in April, in May, in the rains or in that hot October month. Yet what will happen to kaali-peeli? And what will it mean to roji-roti if they are made to disappear. Perhaps its more than we think. This is a long outtake but wonderful.(4 min 3 sec)

click here for outtake —-> Meeru taxi and kaali-peeli

Everyone told Sagir Bhai not to drive a taxi but he didn’t listen. He wanted to drive. So 11 years of taxi driving later, what advice would he give a young man just arriving in Bombay? And would that young man listen? Do we heed advice? I didnt. No regrets. (1 min 22 sec)

click here for outtake —–> Taxi mat chelao

People ask me if drivers ever refuse to be recorded. No, none has refused but there were two drivers that were so reticent I didnt use the material. One was a Gujarati driver and the other was the 10th driver I recorded, an older Sion-Koliwada Sadarji, Ranbir Singh, born here in Bombay.

Actually, Hari Lal Yadav was my third conversation. My first was Shankar Jaiswal from Jaunpur, UP, done exactly one year ago. The traffic noise is overwhelming in parts of that conversation because I didn’t know to set the mic sense in the recorder from omni-directional to uni-direction. I am clearly nervous and thus over-animated. He is wonderfully forthcoming. Perhaps I can clean it up and post it some day. The second was with the Gujarati driver. He is so reticent your can hear the sweat forming on my upper lip as I try to engage.

One year. 10 lives shared. I love these stories, these accumulating histories of the drivers in the city around them, the city around us.

The intro music in the podcast is the song Boombai Nagari from the movie Taxi 9211, sung by Bappa Lahiri, Merriene , Nisha and Vishal Dadlani.

Music by Vishal Dadlani and Shekar, lyrics by Vishal Dadlani and Dev Kohli