I HAVE become a better person since the arrival of app cabs in the city. I am happy to report that I am yet to encounter a really rude or indecent driver. On my part, I think I make a pretty decent passenger, for inside an app cab, I am not the belligerent, confrontational, insecure Calcutta commuter that I used to be, wearing the haunted look that comes from years of waiting in the streets for a cab, waving at every approaching one, being refused and eventually taking an auto. Instead, I am now smiling all the time and taking selfies left, right and centre.
I can't get over the fact that in this city of steadfast refusals, I book a cab and it turns up at my doorstep in minutes. It is a strange feeling to get used to. The car is nice and white to boot. I feel empowered, in control and understood. Grateful, I lower myself into the cab, gently, and I hope, elegantly.
The AC does no harm. I enjoy air-conditioning and I would rather settle for a cold blast to avoid the blistering heat outside. Besides, it keeps me insulated from the rain and the vapours and the noise and an unmediated view of the eyesores that pierce the sky calling themselves luxury apartments. Beauty is as beauty does. The AC also helps to keep the make-up on. I feel protected.
What charms me the most, though, is the courtesy extended to me by the drivers. I am often greeted with a polite "Good morning", and asked where I am going and which route should be followed. (I know all this should be on the cab's system, but by asking me, the driver, in time-honoured Indian tradition, is telling me, deferentially, my opinion, and somehow, my class, matters.) And when I am getting down, he actually says "Thank you" - and returns the change. What more can I ask for? I am so overwhelmed, I feel like bursting into tears.
Yet, yet, there is one little thing that troubles me. I don't know if it happens only to me.
However charming my driver is, there often arises a moment of difficulty that I yet don't know how to resolve. I blame it on the weather.
In this city of coughs and colds and an all-pervasive dampness, the driver is often afflicted with cough himself. But no code of etiquette in this country tells a man to do anything about his cough. No code, usually, tells a man to not express himself, or his cough, phlegm and spittle.
So the AC is on and we are chatting about the lack of industry in Bengal and the FM is playing inane songs. Suddenly my perfect, contained world is disrupted by a blast of a cough from the driver. And it goes on for some time, till he clears his throat and apo-logises, saying driving a car all day in this wretched city makes one ill, especially because the AC is switched on and off.
I feel sorry to think of the poor young man driving the whole day, the congestion in his chest growing as he keeps making polite small talk. At the same time my middle-class soul has begun to squirm at the thought of all the germs now circulating in the enclosed space. It is worse if the driver belches. Belching is even less inhibited - and sometimes I feel that I can detect from the powerful smells of his forceful discharge all the individual items he has eaten in his meal. The smells hang overhead and refuse to go away.
Am I being a despicable representative of the limitations of my own class? But the thought does not go away either. What if I catch an infection from my wonderful cab?
Is it a class thing? Yes and no, because the same problem arises if I am travelling in a pool cab with male co-passengers. But there is no way I can talk about this. How do I tell a man to cover his mouth while he coughs? Sometimes I feel I am the right gender but the wrong class. At other times, the right class but the wrong gender. At my worst moments, I feel just plain wrong.
In the ensuing melee, status quo prevails. AC cannot eliminate inequalities.
I do the only thing left to do. I tell the driver that the AC is suffocating me, roll down the window and demolish my own beautiful world.
Chandrima S. Bhattacharya