Of racism, rickshaws and mobile phones

A true story

I’m not a racist. I always tell people that. Of course, I have moments where I may have generalized a characteristic onto a whole community but who doesn’t do that? It’s just the way the human mind is designed to work – compartmentalization. We have to categorize to be sane. Categories reduce the load on our mind, they reduce the number of things we need to think about all the time; opinions, judgements, rules, principles – these are all methods invented by the human mind to form more and more categories. Once a category is formed that encompasses a hundred things, the number of things we need to think about gets reduced by ninety nine. So, it is only a healthy process of mental pacification.

Using races or castes in this system does not make one racist. I would not pick up a gun and shoot a man because of his caste or creed. I would not be unfair to a man in his occupation because of his religion. I hardly even know enough about my own to be able to rationalize against some other. The opinions I express as being applied to a whole community are just harmless rules that I would like to live by. So, I was sure that the fear I was feeling was not misplaced. Anybody in my place would’ve felt the doubts about the rickshaw driver that I was feeling. I mean, after all, here I was, standing at the end of a hidden route that led away from the airport and was being used only by cargo loaders so that the mess and noise of loading, unloading, strewn packaging material, blood red spits of the workers are all kept away from the sensitive, self-important airline travellers. My only assurance was that if I dashed back into the same route that led straight towards the front door of the airport, the total distance I’d need to cover would not be more than a couple of hundred feet.

I was waiting for the rickshaw driver to fetch his vehicle. He had suggested that I follow him to the vehicle but after the way I’d found him and the doubtful route through which he led me, I deemed it best that he fetch his vehicle to where I was standing. What could be different in the way one finds a rickshaw driver at the airport you ask? I see you’re still doubting my, well, doubts. Alright, here’s the little incident that happened:

I stepped out of the airport poised to get flocked by rickshaw drivers howling like wolves at their prey. To my surprise, none of that happened. I was out there on the foyer, an unprotected quarry ready to be devoured with apparently no hunter giving a damn about it. I suddenly realized I had never faced such a situation and so, I really did not know what to do next to get a rickshaw at an airport. They always come to you! So I walked on a little ahead, thinking that making some movement will get the attention of the predators. I reached the end of the foyer. Nothing.

“Kuthe zaanar sir?” (Where would you like to go, sir?) The cry of the predator, at last.

I turned to my left and saw a bulky, dark and rather intimidating man with a voice to suit his build gesturing at me to come to him. I wanted to go to Karve nagar and I was armed with the fore-warning that anything above 200 rupees is not acceptable as a fare for that distance. I was ready for the hunters. I replied in Marathi to him, telling my destination and countering with a question asking him how much he wanted for that ride. He was visibly disappointed to find out I knew Marathi. His question in Marathi was a test to find out whether or not I was a local, and as a result, to find out whether or not he could charge any absurd sum of money. I expected him to start at 400 and though I was tired from the early morning flight, I was prepared to trudge down the argument to get rid of the extra 200 rupees.

“250 rupees” He said.

Huh. Well, what do you know? It could have been the Marathi, although, that didn’t make complete sense. Lots of outsiders come to Pune these days and many of them know the language. At least enough of it to talk to rickshaw drivers. Anyway, I was not going to question my good luck – its hard to come by as it is. I was about to turn my stride towards the big guy (these exchanges were happening with the flow of my walk – one cannot stop and talk to rickshaw drivers, one has to keep on walking to appear aloof and hard-to-get, so to say) when I was stopped by the security guard at the airport.

“Don’t go with him, kid. Those rickshaw wallas there are dangerous.” He said. He had a husky voice, and a gun. It was hard not to believe him.

“What do you mean?”

“They ask for lesser fares and then they loot their passengers during the ride. Don’t go with them. Go with those people”, he pointed at a pack of hounds salivating on the right hand side, “those guys are safe.”

New as the situation was to me, it was really difficult to doubt this man. He was in uniform, and I did mention the husky voice and the gun right? So I controlled my leftward drift and began to go back on my original hard-to-get stride. The big dark guy began to panic.

“Tumhi kiti denar, bola!” (Tell me how much you’ll pay?). I told him the price I was told to tell. He actually seemed open to the argument, which meant he would’ve probably come down to my price. But I was already in the hearing range of the other pack and they had started throwing their sound-nooses over me, asking me where I wanted to go. I told them the same as I told Mr Big Dark.

“450, sir” shouted one from the ‘safe’ pack. The sun suddenly shone upon the whole situation for me. It’s funny how one’s capability to comprehend a situation is tied more closely to the tugs one feels at his wallet than those that he may feel at his good sense. Anyhow, I swirled around on my heels and went to Big Dark.

“200” I said, with a firm voice.

“Ok. Chacha, this one’s yours!” He shouted to someone. I was already standing at the mouth of the hidden route for cargo loaders now. From the crowd of workers, I spotted an old guy emerge – he sported a long, grey beard that went down till his chest. He had no moustache, and was wearing a long, flowing brownish grey kurta-pyjama. He asked me to follow him to his vehicle and that was how we went through the lane of doubts that I mentioned before.

So, see? Its not racism. I had good reasons to have doubts. After all, how could I be sure that the security guard was being paid by the Right-wing of Hounds? He had a uniform and a gun. He could have been telling the truth, no? Add to that, this secretive way in which I was being carefully hidden from the public eye as I was led to the rickshaw. Why would the Chacha take me from this route instead of the normal way out of the airport? I was feeling good about my decision to stand waiting at the point where the lane of doubts met the main road. I was not so gullible as to follow him further away from the main road.

After the few minutes of wait during which these thoughts streamed through my head, Chacha came with his rickshaw and halted in front of me. He waited as I hauled my bag in, and then climbed in myself.

“Karve nagar, correct?”

“Yes, near the Vitthal Mandir” I added the extra nibble of information just to indirectly stress on the fact that I was a local and would notice anything out of the ordinary. Of course, I wasn’t a local and unless the out of the ordinary incidents (read: unexpected turns and roads) happened within two kilometres from my relatives’ apartment, I was going to notice zilch.

He raised the accelerator and we were on our way. Roads around the airport are always good and so, when we left the over-developed area surrounding the road, I received a small surprise. We directly entered into an area of Pune that I’d best qualify as a village. The roads were so narrow that only one four-wheeled vehicle could pass at a time. On both sides of the road, tiny, dingy shops lined the edges and people walking alongside would come so close to the rickshaw that I felt they could even hear my thoughts. It had begun to rain and the traffic had slowed down considerably. A few feet ahead, the road led out of the village. At the edge of the village though, there was a three storey office building on the right of the road and an open ground with a barbed-wire fence covered with bushes on the left. Until now, even if the road was narrow, vehicles passed each other by slightly going off the road but that small passage between the building and the fence was a bottleneck. It was already clogged with oncoming traffic and I could spot a tempo some more distance away. I sighed and began to look past the dripping water, idly noting what people were doing. In the back of my mind there were still doubts running amuck but now that I knew nothing of the road we were to travel on, I couldn’t do much about those doubts.

Their presence in my mind, however, became apparent again when I automatically felt a whiff of warmth in spotting a policeman standing under the shelter of a closed shop, talking on his phone. At least this was an area covered physically by the law. Was it for this reason or for some other, I don’t know, but my eyes stayed riveted on the law enforcer as our rickshaw inched at a snail’s pace towards him. I was staring intently at him when a jarring high pitched note pierced my ear and shattered my attention. It was the Chacha’s ringtone. Chacha gave a rude whisk to his steering bar which caused the auto to swivel onto the side of the road with a radius of turning so minimal that it would’ve baffled most automobile engineers. With the auto balanced on the undulated terrain, he pulled out an old phone with a monochromatic blue display and started talking. I sat back in my seat and waited for the conversation to get over.

“Vale kum as-salam, bhai. Everything’s great here due to Allah’s grace ..... They’re all doing fine .... Yes, she’s not in Pune now. Gone to study .... Yes, my brother told me about it .... See, bhai, you know I’d help you out in every way that I could but believe me, we’re finding it difficult to find space for ourselves here. Pune is not as affordable as it used to be. Even a single kholi (room) now cant be afforded by people like us ..... Yes, I know. I asked around. None of my friends has rooms .... Ok bhai. Yes, yes bhai. You know I’ve never said no to you. Any time. It is your own house ..... Khuda hafiz”

He thrust the phone back into the deep pocket of his kurta and was about to bend down to yank the lever that started the rickshaw when he spotted the policeman, who also had finished his phone call by now.

“Hey, is everything alright?” Chacha cried out happily. The policeman’s mouth split up in a wide smile and he nodded in a manner that showed he’d been anticipating a friendly greeting ever since the rickshaw came close enough for him to notice who was driving it.

“I heard you are the Thanedar now! Very nice, very nice. Keep working honestly and you will go a long way!” Chacha gave his blessings. The policeman shouted something back that I could not make out but apparently made Chacha smile back to him.

“Alright. I will move on then. Come home some time.” Chacha bid adieu to the policeman and yanked the rickshaw into life and slowly waddled it back onto the tarred road.

“You’re from around here it seems” I said.

Curiosity had overcome all doubts by now –silly or otherwise. Being someone whose job is to talk to strangers for long times at a stretch (User Research, as we like to ostentatiously call our work), it had become an occupational hazard to have a slippery tongue that started wagging with strangers before I myself knew it.

“Yes, yes. I have always lived here.” Chacha replied. We had switched from Hind to Marathi by now, as a result of the fluent Marathi spoken by Chacha while greeting the policeman. Having been brought up entirely outside of Maharashtra, I had come to regard my ability to speak Marathi as a hidden power that I could use to encrypt my words in front of strangers in situations such as speaking on the phone with relatives and expressing my opinion about those strangers who are actually right there and could hear what I was saying. The greetings between Chacha and Policeman had compromised this power and so, there was no need to use Hindi to communicate anymore.

We had reached the start of the bottleneck and I prepared myself for another wait. The Chacha seemed to have different ideas. He leaned out of his rickshaw and began shouting orders.

“You there! Move it. Move, brother. Yes yes move. Don’t worry. Oh it will go, trust me. Just take it to the right. More. Little more. Thats enough! Move now. Good. You now! Move! Hey you!! Wait! Come on we’re all in a hurry. Chalo, move move!”

With wild hand gestures and his surprisingly powerful voice, he had steered the big tempo out of the bottleneck in half the time that I expected it would require – all without even stepping out of the rickshaw. It was impressive, I must admit.

“This thanedar, I know him since he was a little kid running around naked on these streets. He started out as a mere constable and see how much he has progressed now.” Chacha seemed to be genuinely proud of the guy.

“Yeah. Thats nice. So where are you originally from? As in, your earlier generations and all?” In hindsight, this question seems intrusive but thankfully, Chacha did not seem to mind.

“Oh I don’t remember, son. My grandfather lived and died here. My father also spent his entire life here and so have I. Now my children are growing up here. Two of my children recently moved out of the city. They went to Bombay to study. It’s good. They will see the world. The story of my life begins and ends in this same place.”

“Oh. Ok. It seems to me you are more of a Maharashtrian than I am. I am a Marathi but I was brought up in Ahmedabad. I only come here when I have to visit my relatives.” Making my peace with the fact that the illusion of being a local was not going to be much of a deterrent for any malicious acts that may have been planned, I decided to drop the act and tell the truth. The conversation was mildly interesting and I was prepared to let these bits of secrets out if the talk continued in the bargain.

“I suppose I am then. People don’t think that way though. They will always treat people like me as outsiders. There is too much suspicion you know. I have to be careful.”

I didn’t know, in fact. I realized there would be different treatment, but I always assumed it would happen around a time when something has happened to arouse that sort of a reaction. Sensing my quietude, Chacha continued.

“You know that phone call I just got? It was from the son of a friend. We have to stick close to each other in our community. People call upon help from each other at any given time, with any amount of liberty there is. This kid wants to come to Pune and stay here for a while and he wanted me to find him a place to stay. Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve loved to help. But I have to be careful, you know. I don’t know why he suddenly wants to come here. What if he’s involved in something dangerous? I will get roped in for no fault of mine. You see, he works at a grocery store back in Surat. You would know Surat right? Ever been there?”

“Umm. No. I’ve passed it several times on my way here though.”

“So he works there. Now tell me, how can a guy from our community working in a grocery store manage to buy an airplane ticket and come all the way to Pune?”

“He’s flying down here?”

“Yes. And he wont even tell me why! Something’s fishy, I tell you. I don’t want to get involved in these things. So I just told him I cannot afford it anymore. It isn’t entirely a lie either. Things have become expensive around the neighbourhood.”

“Ok.” Some silence followed. I didn’t know if I could ask questions and take this topic any forward than this. It was sensitive, after all. But then, Chacha continued.

“See, son, I’ve seen things. I don’t make bad assumptions about people. We used to own a couple of stores around here a few years back. One of those, I’d put on my daughter’s name. It’s good security for the girl. Now she rented it out to some person from our community. It was alright, she’d asked me if she could do it. I saw no harm in it. It was good money. You said you’re from Ahmedabad. Did you hear about that encounter 2-3 years ago? The one where they killed a boy who they suspected had bad links? That boy was the one who had taken our store on rent. The next day there were policemen at my doorstep. I was dragged to the police station and kept there for interrogation for hours, son. It is not a good memory. The only reason they did that was because they found a call that had been placed from the boy’s phone to mine three days before the encounter. The boy had just called my phone to tell my daughter that he will be paying the rent a little late this time. For this, we had to face so much embarrassment!”

“Oh that is very bad. I cannot imagine how it must’ve felt.”

“Yes. That’s why I’m telling you. No matter how long one lives anywhere, one is always a stranger. I have no other home if I leave Pune and these people will treat me like that. This Thackeray boy – what does he know? I was sweating it out here way before he was even born. Now he’s coming and telling us that we cannot live here anymore. Who does he think he is?”

“Oh even I’d agree to that, Chacha. Their doings are bringing us a bad name too. You know, when I was studying in Bombay, there were these incidents against people from Bihar right? I used to get stern stares from people hailing from north India – stares that said ‘these are your people who are acting crazy!’. I hated it. As if that wasn’t enough, the friends who were from north India would ask me, ‘why do your people want to drive us out?’ We would be scared to go out and have dinner – it was something we’d otherwise taken for granted. Freedom suddenly seemed so fickle.”

“Yes. I know. Things were worse here. We were scared to move a limb out here.”

“One of my friends was saying, ‘these politicians want to drive out non-marathis. Tell me, if Gujaratis leave Bombay, what will happen of the city? The biggest centre for trade will shut down within a day!’ I had nothing to say against that.”

“Arey that is what even I’d say. What do these Marathis know? We are the ones working. We don’t laze around.”

Whoa. Hold the regional horses there, I thought. I mean, sure. I had some neutral opinions but it is not easy to shove such talk down oneself about one’s own community – even if one has hardly been a part of it. I felt a pang of anger. I decided against saying anything and just kept quiet. It was best that this topic end here. I had begun to appreciate the Chacha – he seemed like a people-person. I didn’t want to have reasons to dislike him.

We had rolled into the city by now. It was pouring outside and the air felt fresh and cold. I began to look out the rickshaw again. We had just passed a major junction with a traffic signal and had turned left heading towards another one. This was the best I could do to understand exactly where we were going since I had no real idea what each place was. Sometimes I’d try and read addresses on the shops to see which street I was on. More than to familiarize myself with the path, this exercise would help me describe the way I was taken on to my relatives should they deem the price I paid to the rickshaw driver to be too high.

I heard the roar of an engine slowly closing in on us from behind and something in my mind was telling me to pay attention to what was about to happen. By the time I ended one train of thought and paid attention to the ringing bells in my head, the car had already zipped by us and had done the damage – my bag, my clothes and my face were drenched in water. Dirty, brown, street water. When it would dry off, I will be able to count the brown oblong stains of droplets on my favourite black jacket. I was disgusted.

“Damn these bastards.” Chacha was drenched worse than me, I saw. And, he was wearing no jacket. He was going to have to carry the droplets on him for the whole day of work.

We rolled to a stop on another traffic signal. We were in the leftmost lane of the road. Chacha liked to drive a little slower than others it seemed. He was cruising through the whole way in a leisurely, laid back manner. I myself was not in any hurry so I more than welcomed the relatively safer way of reaching home.

“What kid, where are you pushing your cycle to?” The Chacha barked out to someone. I looked up and saw a tall, bone-thin teenager pushing a big, old cycle in the opposite direction on the footpath. He came to a halt next to us. He was completely drenched and I thought I saw him shiver a little bit.

“Nothing Chacha. Going back home.”

“Where are you coming from? You don’t have to go to school today?”

“I was going to go, Chacha. My cycle got punctured. So I got late. I thought I might as well go back.”

“Get it repaired! What’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t have money Chacha. Will do it tomorrow.”

“You roam around like this without money? Behenchod, if something happens, what will you do? You don’t have any sense or what?” Chacha thrust his hand into the breast pocket of his Kurta and pulled out whatever it could grab. I saw it was a twenty rupee note. Quite a generous amount for a five-rupee job, I thought.

“Take this, fool. Now go get it repaired. Don’t miss school like this.”

“Thanks Chacha.” The kid took the note and walked away happily. The cursing went unnoticed. Apparently, terms of endearment were quite different among them.

“Kids these days. This kid is bright, I tell you. He shouldn’t miss school like that. I’ll go tell his mother today.”

“Yeah. Education is important.” Cheesy. I know. What does one reply to this anyway?

We moved out of the traffic signal and headed further down our way. I got busy in watching other people on the road and on the sides of it. Street vendors had only just begun to set up their shops. Some had already started selling food for breakfast. Good that they had, for there were hungry, cold people on the street who had gratefully flocked around these shops to buy the hot food that was being sold. The weather felt very invigorating on my skin – the smell, the cool temperature and the freshness in the air that morning always brings with it were intoxicating. A sedan passed by from the right noiselessly. It had tinted glasses all around. A chauffer was probably driving it for the only other person in the car was in the back seat. It was a woman – she had a laptop open and was working, evidently impervious to all the nature’s freshness outside her tin can of artificial imprisonment.

I love travelling in rickshaws. I am proud of the fact that they are so abundantly used in India. Rickshaws are open. They are welcoming. They have the freedom of space of a two wheeler encompassed in the comfort of a four wheeler. You don’t straddle it but you still get the wind-in-your-hair feeling. They are not built on the principle of ‘uncover only where necessary’ like cars and their glassy windows and windshields. They are built on the principle of ‘cover only what is necessary’. If you’re sitting at the side and you look down at your feet, you can see the surface of the road zipping past them less than a foot away. It makes you confront the magic of being hurtled through the air slightly above the surface of the ground at a speed that your feet could never achieve. The complete magnitude of the joy of travelling in a vehicle is felt in that one moment of comparison between the stationary feet and the zipping tar. You’re travelling, but you’re still very close to the surrounding – very much in contact with the atmosphere.

I realized suddenly that we were in an area that roused a mild recognition in me. I spotted the circular ring on the centre of a tiny criss-crossing bridge that told me we had come to the Garware bridge. By now all the doubts had already started to seem laughable to me.

“Chacha, what was going on back at the airport? There was an airport security guard asking me not to go to your rickshaw. He said you guys will rob me.”

Chacha chuckled. “He gets Rs 50 as commission for every passenger that he directs towards those other rickshaw wallas. They pay him. We don’t. We don’t think it is correct. Those people will pay people like the guard and then get the compensation by overcharging the passenger. We’d rather charge the passenger what we’re supposed to.”

“That is very surprising. I mean, he’s airport security. What he’s doing could make him lose his job. You people should complain about it.”

Chacha chuckled again. “A lot of rickshaw wallas are paying up nowadays. Very few of us are left who wouldn’t give in. Most of us have stuck to each other because we’ve known each other for a long time. The person who first called you was my nephew. He’s sort of a leader-like guy. He can do things. He brings us passengers. We all have our areas and take people who need to go where our areas are.”

I had realized what he said as a reply had nothing to do with what I had said. I also understood why. I dropped the topic.

“So this is your area is it?” I asked instead.

“Yes. Not Karve nagar, but it’s close by. I never go back to the airport. I don’t like it there at all. I just go there to start my day off. It’s a good start, you see. The fare we get is pretty good. After that, I’m ok with taking small fares around the same area so that I don’t have to stress myself too much and drive around in the annoying traffic. Since I’ve already made quite a big part of my day’s earnings through this first fare, I am just alright with taking what I can do in leisure. I cannot push myself too hard these days.”

“That’s a good idea I must say”

“We’re in Karve nagar, son. Tell me where to go – should I take this next left or should I keep going straight?”

I looked around. Yes, we were in the familiar zone now. We’d made good time actually. Chacha seemed to have taken some special shortcuts to get here. Unfortunately, my body’s internal compass is always swirling worse than Jim Morrison’s head at any given time in his short life of 27 years. All I knew by looking around was that we were close. Very close. That was all.

“Ummm.. I don’t know. Take that left, I guess?” I asked more than told.

Chacha took the left, but he figured we needed a second opinion. He halted next to a street vendor selling Pan and asked about the address. A few words passed between the two and Chacha came back armed with directions. He gave me a smile, backed out of the left and took the straight road ahead, which directly took us to my destination within a few minutes, much to my embarrassment.

“I always get confused in these roads” I remarked.

“Yes. These things can get confusing.”

“Chalo then, Chacha. It was a nice ride. Thank you.” I said as I pulled out the money from my wallet.

“I had a nice chat too, son. You take care.”

I handed him the money just as an old couple walked up to us and waited for me to vacate the rickshaw.

“Arey what is this, son? You are giving me Rs 220. We agreed on Rs 200 only.”

“I know Chacha. Take it as a commission for a nice ride. Anyway you gave away twenty rupees to that kid. I know you wont have him pay you back.”

“Oh this is not necessary.”

“No I insist Chacha. Keep the money.”

Chacha smiled and gave in finally. “Thank you son.”

“Ok Chacha. Bye.”

I walked away, feeling warm inside. We all dream of doing good unto our fellow human beings. It is not very often, though, that we really do end up putting our thoughts into practice. Call it inaction, inability or indisposition. In any case, the result is the same. We fail to spread the warmth inside of us to others, making things around us colder. Then we complain about the chills that run through our spine when bad things happen. Ill-fate often strikes very close to us, and we complain about it without having the right to do so because we have not done anything to make things better ourselves. It does not mean we should all drop our lives and become Mahatmas. The least we could do is to not be an impediment in our own good sense. These inflated thoughts of philanthropy were broken by the Chacha’s voice.

“Son! Wait, Son!”

I turned around. Chacha had left his rickshaw and had followed me running into the colony.

“You dropped this in my rickshaw, son.” He held up my mobile phone. It had slipped out of my pocket at some time and the old couple had found it when they entered the rickshaw.

“See, son? You do some good and it always turns around and rewards you!” Chacha beamed at me.

“You’re right Chacha. Thank you so much!”

“Take care son.” Chacha said, and left.

As he walked away, I realized that what I had seen walking towards me at the airport was a beard and a flowing Kurta-Pyjama, but what I was seeing walk away now was an old, kind-hearted human being who was living the same life as I was – scared of bad things out of his control, looking out for the ones he loved and trying to do his best to make things good for himself and those around him.

My racism had reduced by one man. It was good enough I suppose. One man at a time is better than nothing.