Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  While auto drivers have an uncanny ability to ferret out the bumpiest shortcut in any neighborhood—indeed, they seemed proud to apply their knowledge of the back streets—that doesn’t mean they had an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. And while every driver assured us that he positively knew our destination, there were many times when they did not know how to get there at all.

  But they always got us there anyway. That’s because Delhiites have developed an amazing method for locating places they don’t know how to find: they ask other people who also don’t know how to find it.

  Here’s how it works. On any given stretch of road, one can always find a passer-by who knows his immediate area perfectly and whose knowledge of the geography beyond diminishes in direct proportion to distance. The omelettewallah standing outside Hauz Khas market, for instance, could give us an exact route to Hauz Khas A Block (just a hundred meters north) and a good nudge towards Hauz Khas B Block (on the other side of the market). He could give us a general route to Green Park, the neighborhood to the west, but he’d have no insight into finding Green Park E Block. For that, we’d just follow his gesture towards Green Park and then find someone who knew the immediate area over there to ask again.

  And that’s how a Delhi driver does it: he asks a succession of people with no knowledge of the destination until we’re collectively guided right to it.

  We first experienced this system on our second day in Gurgaon, when we hired a taxi to take us to a very specific location: Building 6 of the India Habitat Center, Lodhi Road, Delhi. Our driver, who had assured us on the phone that he knew exactly where to go, immediately pulled up to a passer-by just outside of our building after he’d picked us up. We couldn’t understand the conversation, but we heard enough key words to get the gist. “Do you know where Building 6 of the India Habitat Center is?” the driver asked.

  “No, bhai.”

  “Do you know where the India Habitat Center is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where Lodhi Road is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where Delhi is?”

  “That way, bhai,” the passer-by said, gesturing towards a certain road.

  And off we went towards Delhi, driving up M.G. Road until we found ourselves at a major crossroads. Our driver pulled over and asked somebody else. “Do you know where Building 6 of the India Habitat Center is?”

  “No, bhai.”

  “Do you know where the India Habitat Center is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where Lodhi Road is?”

  “That way, bhai,” the passer-by said, gesturing towards a certain road.

  And so it went, until we found Lodhi Road and then found the India Habitat Center; and it continued even after we got out of the car, as the guard pointed us in the rough direction of Building 6 and a final passer-by finally pointed us to its main entrance.

  If we’d have drawn concentric circles around each of the passers-by we’d asked, we’d have found their geographic knowledge decreasing as the circles got bigger; but by overlapping their circles, we created a series of points that led us exactly from our home to our destination, in spite of the fact that nobody but the final passer-by knew where our destination was.

  So we never worried that a driver wouldn’t be able to find our destination when we got into his auto. We knew the collective knowledge of Delhi was always pointing the way.

  In fact, our only real worry when we got into autos (aside from a truck imprinting the Ashok Leyland logo into the side of our head) was whether or not our driver would have change. Because every so often, a driver would pretend he didn’t have any. And far more regularly, the driver genuinely wouldn’t. If we suspected the former, we’d simply stay seated in his auto until he realized we weren’t going anywhere, at which point he’d discover three overlooked tens in his breast pocket. If it were the latter, he’d walk around the area soliciting nearby vendors and passers-by until he found someone willing to break a big bill. We’d watch from the back of the auto, sympathizing as he went from person to person asking for change. We knew what he was going through: nobody in Delhi wants to give away his or her small bills.

  We suspect that there was once a time in Delhi when small bills were genuinely hard to come by. Today, we think, change hoarding is perpetuated by habitual inertia rather than currency shortages. In autos and at stores, we’d get groans when we’d present a 500-rupee note and flat refusals when we’d present a 1,000. We learned to cherish fifty-rupee notes, which are the easiest to get people to break. One day, early in our time in India, Jenny grew frustrated with hoarding and pleading, and convinced a bank to exchange five thousand rupees into fifties; the joy we felt holding that bundle of small bills was matched in intensity only by our unwillingness to part with even a single one.

  On one of our last days in Delhi, Jenny and I found ourselves in the opposite of our normal role: an auto driver was asking us for change. We were just leaving Humayun’s Tomb, a sight I hadn’t seen in all my time in Delhi (Jenny had visited without me eighteen months earlier). We’d walked briskly past the tourist-hunting drivers who were demanding 150 rupees in their clipped British English and Cliff Huxtable sweaters to take us forty rupees down the road, knowing that foreigners can never win the negotiating game if it’s played in front of a tourist attraction. So we were nearing the main street to find a fairer playing field when an auto driver in a regulation colorless blue uniform approached with a 500-rupee note outstretched before him.

  We could see his auto parked outside the parking lot, far away from the Huxtable clique, with a family of Indians standing next to it. They were tourists just like us, anxious to get out of the sun and into the sight, waiting while their driver sought change for their fare. Jenny and I had never in our entire time in Delhi successfully gotten an auto driver to break a 500; and from the trouble this driver was having—each of the assembled Cosbys had already rejected him—we knew it might be an impossible task.

  The driver spoke no English, but we were veteran enough to recognize the pleading look on his face. With our countdown to Singapore at T-minus forty-eight hours, we were relaxing our iron grip on our small bills. I found change, and I gave it to him, and his face showed immense gratitude and relief. We followed him back to his auto and then, with the Cosbys glaring, negotiated a trip to our destination for a reasonable forty rupees. Then, once we arrived, I handed him the 500-rupee note he had given me and asked for change.

  His jaw dropped, his eye bugged, and he began to groan in protest—until he saw my face, and we shared laughter and backslaps all around.

  This particular experience raises an important point: this particular experience was not unique. We had as many moments of delight with auto drivers as we had bad experiences with them. Many drivers were good for friendly conversations about American politics, in which they invariably praised Bill Clinton for his visit to Delhi in 2000 while offering less kind words about George W. Bush. In one unforgettable case, the auto driver who took Jenny’s mother home from a museum began with an obligatory offer to take her to his “uncle’s” factory; when she gently rebuffed it, the driver switched to a conversation about her life in America that was apparently so interesting that he offered to share his lunch with her when they arrived so they could keep talking.

  By and large, auto drivers are good people. A number of them graciously helped us unload shopping bags, or pointed out sights as we drove by, or, in one case, helped me stuff two rolled-up mattresses into the back of his auto so I could return them to my colleague Dipankar’s house. I sat up front and shared his seat, my arm around him for balance, chatting the entire way to C.R. Park.

  In the best cases, our driver/passenger relationship morphed into genuine teamwork. His Hindi would shoo away aggressive street children and our skin color would deter bribe-seeking cops. We’d both shoot our hands out of the auto to signify imminent turns. Both the driver and I would hang our heads out of the auto and shout curses at
some particularly egregious traffic offender, laughing together at the gape-mouthed stare of whomever had wronged us.

  Our good auto experiences more than balanced out the bad. But the bulk of the bell curve consisted of unremarkable episodes of negotiation and transaction that bookended journeys of mundane terror: the usual close calls, the typical religious supplication, the average amount of whiplash. While my parents still describe their harrowing auto journeys as their “favorite part of our visit,” for us it was just another day in the city.

  Delhi is said to have 5.5 million registered vehicles6—one for every two-and-a-half people, and ten percent of India’s total.7 And it seemed to me like they were all on M.G. Road headed to Gurgaon every morning. Many of my co-workers encouraged me to get a motorcycle, telling me they were cheaper than cars and more nimble in heavy traffic. But few thoughts terrify me more than driving a motorcycle on a Delhi road, especially after my friend Nishant gave me a ride home on the back of his bike following dinner with friends. The journey from the restaurant in South Extension to my home in Hauz Khas was a mere two miles, but I spent the entire ride gripping the seat so tightly I feared I’d tear the handles off (which made me more frightened, given how counterproductive that would have been to my goal of not smashing onto the pavement). The potholes that seemed so mundane in the back of an auto loomed like chasms in front of us.

  Strangely, all I could think about during that ride was what my parents told me they saw from their tour bus window somewhere in Rajasthan: a cow in a field got spooked, ran across the road, cut in front of their bus, jumped the median, and landed on top of a car coming from the opposite direction. And there on Nishant’s motorcycle, as buses brushed our shoulders and bugs splattered in my face, my long list of terrors was absurdly headlined with the fear that a cow would fall out of the sky and land on us.

  Nishant once said, “You can live more in five minutes on a motorcycle than most live in a lifetime.” I couldn’t agree more. Multiple lifetimes flashed before my eyes during that ride.

  So why didn’t I have a private car like so many other lucky expats? Because hours after Jenny and I got off the plane in Delhi, we discovered that my boss-to-be’s promise of company-provided transportation had evaporated like paan spit on a hot Delhi street. We were left with a bitter red reality: we were not going to live the life of the lucky expat, lounging in a service apartment and training our driver to cook us Kraft macaroni and cheese. So once we found our own flat, I had to find my own ride.

  A motorcycle was obviously not in my cards. And while I could have leased a car and hired a driver, I was daunted by the expectation of overwhelming bureaucracy necessary to acquire the car and unwanted responsibility of maintaining it. I also knew I could have called Radio Cabs or Easy Cabs or any of the other corporate taxi companies rapidly multiplying in the city, but their increased reliability is matched by their higher fares. So I decided to see if I could work out a deal with the local taxi stand.

  We walked up to the large canvas tent next to Aurobindo Place market, just across Aurobindo Marg from Hauz Khas. The boss’s name was Birender, and his fleet consisted of black-and-yellow Hindustan Ambassadors that doubled as mosquito-breeding grounds, neutrally colored Tata Indicas that always seemed to have one wet seat, and a couple hulking SUV-like Toyota Innovas for driving tourists around Rajasthan or taking more discriminating customers home from the mall. Birender’s roster of drivers was staffed accordingly: a few reckless young guys for the short trips, a couple of middle-aged men reliable to be less impatient and more safety-conscious, and one or two well-dressed, wellpaid English-speakers to ferry the tourists through the desert. Most of these guys were from Birender’s village in Rajasthan. Birender would employ them for a few months to drive around the big city, make a lot of money, buy some name-brand jeans, and return home with enough savings and status to attract a better class of wife.

  Birender himself was a large man with a prosperous businessman’s belly. He usually wore suit pants and neatly tucked button-down shirts. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a powerful square jaw and an expensive mobile phone that he would reverently place on the nearest surface to ensure it was noticed.

  “My god is Krishna,” he told us as Jenny and I shook hands with him for the first time. We were standing inside his office, which was a cramped wooden structure attached to the canvas tent in which his drivers lived. The drivers had leapt to their feet as we entered the tent and asked for the boss. Now, as we chatted, they walked in and out of the doorway to pick up this paper or that, pretending not to listen to our conversation.

  “Krishna,” Birender told us again, his eyes urgently searching our faces for a reaction to the significance of that statement. “My god is Krishna.”

  We eventually reached agreement on the terms. I would call Birender’s stand every morning I wanted a ride to work, and I’d pay 750 rupees to the driver when they dropped me off at home in the evening. “This is Mr. David,” I was to say when I called. “Pickup, please.” Birender would then dispatch a car and driver to drop me at my office and collect me again at the pre-determined time.

  What was unusual about our agreement was that the driver would not spend the day parked on the street waiting for me. This was less because I didn’t want to pay for the drivers to wait, and more because I just couldn’t bear the guilt of some poor guy sitting in his car all day, staring at the clouds, shifting in his seat, sometimes napping, sometimes twitching restlessly, his life trapped in boredom because it was shackled to my schedule. So Birender’s drivers would drop me off and fight traffic back to Delhi, where Birender would keep them busy until it was time to pick me up again.

  Even then, it gnawed at my conscience when a driver would arrive before I was ready to leave. On the all-too-frequent nights I’d find myself working later than I’d expected, I’d rush out to the car and give the driver money for dinner. “Khana kileyea,” I’d tell him in my broken Hindi, passing him fifty or a hundred rupees for dinner, depending on how long I expected to make him wait. The drivers surely preferred the days when I worked late.

  It took me some time to establish a routine with Birender. Calling the taxi stand in the morning those first months, I often had to explain who I was, where I lived and where I wanted to go; and when I’d send the driver back to Delhi after dropping me off, they often concluded I was canceling my pickup at night.

  But eventually our rhythm established itself. I learned to call as soon as I stepped out of the shower, knowing that the driver would then arrive just as I was finishing breakfast. “This is Mr. David,” I would whisper into my phone while Jenny slept in the next room. “Pickup, please.” But when I would whisper too softly—which usually happened twice a week—Jenny would wake to the sounds of me bellowing “This! Is! Mr. David!” over and over again until they finally understood. It was a much less pleasant wakeup call for her than the car horns or kabadiwallahs or pigeon sex on our metal air conditioner that would have roused her otherwise.

  Birender typically sent the same blue Indica to take me to work every day. I’d try to sleep or read on the way to work in the mornings, but the bumpiness of the road and the shoddiness of the shocks usually precluded both activities. Until my last six months in Delhi, Birender rarely sent me the same driver more than twice a week. I suppose that none of his guys wanted to drive to and from Gurgaon during rush hour, so the “Mr. David duty” was probably a rotating chore. Which meant I grew familiar with most of his employees.

  One of those drivers was Ajit. Square-jawed, terrifying behind the wheel, and with a perpetual snarl on his twenty-year-old face, Ajit spent his first day as my driver shouting gleefully at me the entire ride home. “Me you Hindi!” he hollered. “You me English! Straight! Seedha! Left! Bayain! Right! Dayain! You me request every day, me you Hindi you me English! You my only friend!”

  When we would reach a breakthrough in vocabulary—“Cow?” “Gaay!”—he would get excited and start dancing in his seat. He’d take both hands off the
wheel and point upwards to punctuate his hip thrusts, closing his eyes in ecstasy and throwing his head back but somehow managing to open his eyes and grab the wheel and slam on the brakes at exactly the right instant to avoid a herd of gaayain trotting casually down the road.

  The third time he drove me, bored at the pace of our vocabulary lessons, I got the bright idea to teach him English curse words. “Choothia? Bastard!” I told him. “Lund? Dick! Gaand meh le lo? Kiss my ass!” Ajit loved it. He laughed and howled and danced and screamed and repeated my words in shrieks, each new abuse eliciting an equally elaborate reaction from him.

  And then he grew quiet and contemplative. He turned to me, looking me directly in the eyes as I sat in the back seat and the car barreled down M.G. Road. “You, you wife. Lie . . . bed? Lie bed?”

  I knew what he was getting at. I also knew that he drove Jenny on errands from time to time, and I was uncomfortable with the idea of him glowering at her in the rear-view mirror with this prurient fact confirmed in his mind.

  I played dumb, hoping he’d get the hint. “Kya? Huh? I don’t understand. Tati? Shit!”

  Ajit refused to be drawn from his line of questioning. He screwed up his face in concentration, searching for a phrase he desperately wanted to find. “You, wife! Bed! Lie bed? You—” And then he made a gesture I didn’t recognize but immediately understood, pounding his fist into his hand with an unmistakable crudeness of rhythm. “You, wife?”

  What else could I say? “I suppose so, yes.”

  Ajit howled and danced his victory dance, honking and weaving and pointing his fingers towards the heavens in celebration of my good fortune.