- NAME :. P.N ROY
- AGE : 27
- PROFESSION : TAXI DRIVER
- LOCATION : Cab ride from Deshapriya Park to Tollygaunge
- ETHNICITY : U.P.
Vote is over and Narendra Modi has been appointed our Hon'ble Prime Minister. Politics and vote fever seem to have died down from the papers but it is still quite fresh in my memory. Apart from the meetings and the morchas and the verbal fights on t.v. and every other vote centre the heated debates, one feature that marked this year votes for me is the acute lack of public transport. As it is the cab drivers in Kolkata derive some sort of a sarcastic pleasure in refusing passengers. And just before the vote even the few cabs which would have considered not refusing seemed to be all booked for vote duty.
One such harrowing hot and humid May late evening I got down at DeshaPriya Park hoping to catch an auto and could not find anything. I saw this cab coming towards me and although it had "ON VOTE DUTY" written on the front shield I hailed. I was tired and desperate. He told me he will only go if I am going towards Ranikuthi. I climbed in gratefully. For some reason he took a liking to me and started talking.
He is originally from U.P. and like million others heard that Kolkata would give him an opportunity to survive and came over to try his luck about 4 months back. He did not have a choice other than leaving U.P. because he fell in love with a girl there he was not supposed to and if he did not flee he would have been dead. As soon as he got this assignment of driving one of his boss's three cabs his cab got stamped for vote duty. So every morning at around 6 he has to go down to some government official's house in Alipore and has to mandatorily stay there till 6 PM. This particular official hardly ever gets out of the house. The cab is instead used by the wife and the teenage daughter as their personal car. The routine is that around noon everyday the wife and daughter goes out somewhere or the other and comes back home after 8 PM. That however does not mean that he can report late or he is getting paid more than his promised stripend. He was telling me that he knows that he is just starting and that he can barely afford his meals but at the end of the day he knows that he does his job well.I actually asked him why do you guys keep on refusing passengers.And he said that he never does. Only when he is really tired. He knows that other cab drivers do and he thinks no better of them than the government official to whom he is working for now. He made that very clear in quite expletive terms, because these cabbies give honest cab drivers like him a bad name, or that is what he feels.
It was a little difficult understanding his heavily accented Hindi, but it was nice and friendly contrary to most other cab rides where I always stay on the guard and keep a finger on speed dial.
After paying him and before getting down, I asked him if I could take his picture and told him I will share it on the internet. He was taken aback, but he was still talkative and then asked if he would become famous. I told him, I hardly think so.
And then I asked him what happened to the girl ? The one he was in love with. For the first time he went quiet and said "I hope to God, she killed herself." Then he drove away.
