Three drivers.
I met three taxi drivers in a city made of light and sand.
She was new to Dubai. You can always tell. In pink mini vans from the airport. On a call with a loved one miles away, waiting for the next fare. Clutching threads, connections to the life she left behind. All the reasons why she was in the driver’s seat. All the reasons why she needed to stay.
I couldn’t place the dialect she was speaking. The enunciation wasn’t local. Chirpy, alive, with a bounce to it. Not subdued and understated. The excitement from the day she had landed hadn’t died down. She didn’t know the city was slowly getting to her, eating her up from the inside. But it hadn’t breached her core.
She had a pulse. Hope and dreams alive in the eyes. The tell? The anger at minor doses of injustices. The new ones are flushed with it. Easy triggers, small explosions. Even when they know they need to keep it in check, it bleeds into the van.
“I can’t go any faster in the fast lane. Look at the limit.”
The speed is locked at 120. Stop flashing lights at me.”
“I have rights too, you know. The right to drive in this lane.”
“We have the same skin, but just because you have a fast car...”
“Give way, you have no right to be here.”
The old, learn to lock it away.
All languages have a different tone for love, for sweet nothings, for anger. You don’t have to speak them to identify the flavor.
Later the same evening, I run into Amer. A different shade of a call.
He is in an intense conversation with a trouble shooter back home. A cousin or a sibling. If I interrupt, I am afraid, he may shoot me.
I don’t speak Pashto but I catch snippets. Like the whiff, a hint of what is for dinner when I step inside the door, back home.
I have been up since four am in the morning in a different time zone. It’s 8 pm here in Dubai. My step counter is at 15,000 for the day but I feel I have been sleep walking for ever. I had planned a power nap in the car, but the exchange shoo aways the tendrils of my sleep.
He is from Dir. He is upset. He is the third upset taxi driver I have met today. I think it is a trend.
The dispute appears to be about a pizza. Not the one from the English language. Because it cost one hundred and thirty three thousand rupees. Zareef is the person who ordered it. And in doing so brought disrepute or shame to the family and the tribe. Maybe both given how angry this conversation is.
A moment of silence followed by another round of rapid fire Pushto. Twenty minutes of raining hell fire and brimstones on Dir has helped Amer calm down as we get closer to the end of the ride. He is listening more and talking less. But I can feel the heat radiate in the backseat as I watch city lights and our exit flash by.
Amer missed it.
Hello, hello! Lost connection or the other side just hung up as we both realize it at the same time. He sheepishly asks where is it that I am going. It doesn’t matter since we are now stuck trying to navigate how to escape the traffic light clog at City Walk and get to my destination in Jumeirah 2.
Zareef and his 133,000 pizza is going to get me late to my dinner meeting. But it is a smaller problem to have, compared to the nuclear device Amer has remotely dismantled on the phone in less than twenty minutes, with me as a witness.
It’s 5:45 am in Dubai Investment Park, the next morning. I need to get to Kite beach for a morning walk appointment with my mentor. Shaheer is the first taxi driver I have met in two days who is not on the phone. Perhaps because at this ungodly hour in Dubai, everyone back home is still asleep.
He is from the generation in the middle. A uncle bought him over on a visa 13 years ago. My soft spoken driver returned the favor by getting his younger brother over, post Covid. Three generations, the same dreams, the same story.
Perhaps not. Because the brother doesn’t drive a cab.
He rides a bike and runs an online store for another cousin’s abaya shop in Sharjah. The first person in the family in five decades who doesn’t really work for the system, drive a taxi or work as a runner or store keeper in a local shop.
The abayas now have customized patterns hand stitched by another tailor, get delivered across Dubai with the online store his brother built himself. He may ride a bike but he has billion dollar ideas in his head. And he can make them work in this land far, far away from home. Store sales have more than tripled in three years, gross margins by 2x. With his share of profits, the family has a new home in Chittagong. And a wedding planned for the star in the summer. For the young dreamer who runs a business from his bike in the city made of light and sand.
Shaheer isn’t angry. He is content, quiet and understated. The city never got to him. He never gave it the satisfaction. But his brother did. Got back to the city, that is. Enough for everyone who didn’t.
I am going to count this as a win.
Talk to your taxi drivers, the next time you are in Dubai. Ask them how long they have been driving in the city? Who they are and where is home? How their shift is going so far? If you can, leave them with a tip, for the burdens they carry, are heavier than yours and mine combined.
