« It really is rather warm, mother | Main | Phew, what a scorcher etc »

March 20, 2006

Crazy Taxi

The man sat opposite me at breakfast today said that I should avoid using the taxis that parked up outside the hotel. “They are a rip off”, he told me. “Walk down the street a hundred yards and hail one. They will be much cheaper”. “But the ones outside the hotel are cheap”, I protested. “Yesterday’s only cost me 25 rupees to the ground”. “The ones a hundred yards away will be cheaper”.

And so it was that we (my friend Olly and I) ignored the vacant taxi outside the hotel and walked a hundred yards down the road and hailed another one. We got in and asked to go to the ground. “50 rupees” he said, and so we got out. Really they should use the meter. We hailed another cab, and this one agreed to use the meter.

Five minutes down the road, Olly realised that he had left his ticket in the room, and asked if we go back to the hotel to get it. The driver dutifully performed a sort of W-turn and we returned to the hotel. “Do you need anything from the hotel?” asked Olly, as he got out. “Yes”, I said, “perhaps you could bring down a dunce’s hat for you to wear for the rest of the day.”

As I waited for the fool, our taxi with its open windows parked outside India’s most expensive hotel began to attract a crowd. A girl put her hand through the window, and ordered me to give her money. I said I would give her some when my friend came back, otherwise I’d be handing out money until he came back. The front passenger door opened and another man got in. He called himself a traveller and said that I would also need to give him some money, purely because he was a traveller you see, and that meant that in a way I sort of owed it to him. I told him to wait until Olly returned also, so that the car didn’t fill with other people that it turned out I owed money to.

The man peppered me with questions. What hotel was I staying at? What was my name? What was my friend’s name? I lied for every reply, hoping to fill in the time.

When Olly finally returned I gave the girl and the man a hundred rupees each. The girl immediately called a friend over who appeared at the window immediately. I now had no money left. The cab driver drove off again, but we still had our traveller friend in the front with us; our friend who also turned out to be a little economic with the actualité.

“Where are you going?” he wanted to know. “The ground”, we told him. And where was he going. Also to the ground, because our taxi driver turned out not to know where it was, and so our traveller friend was helpfully going to navigate for us, and all we had to do was remunerate him a little further. It sounded like an excellent deal, although he was already earning more than the cab driver who had had nothing to do with any of the discussions up until this point.

Suddenly they were deep in discussion. The traveller turned round and asked us how many rupees to the pound there are. “I don’t know” I lied. “Seventy five” he said, “and so what is two pounds?” I told him it would be one hundred and fifty. “So what would four pounds be?” Three hundred. “Yes”, he said, “that is how much the driver says this journey will cost you”. We told him that that was not going to happen, and they accepted this philosophically. (They were from the shruggist school, so they just shrugged).

“I was a New York taxi driver for two years” the traveller told us, although without specifying in which life. I asked him if he had ever driven to the Statue Of Liberty. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “I was there for two years. I must have driven to it about a million times”. I found it delightful that even within the context of a lie he found room for exaggeration. “New York taxi drivers must be magical” I said. “Oh we were” he said. “Not like the ones here in Mumbai. They just try and rip everybody off!”. He laughed loudly at this. Olly and I laughed loudly at this. It was explained to the cab driver and he also laughed loudly.

So there we all were, strangers laughing together about lies we had told each other. A traveller who had never been anywhere was giving directions to a man who already knew the way.

Acording to the meter and the conversion chart we owed fifty rupees. The whole journey did in fact cost three hundred rupees once we had paid our fare, the waiting charge, travellers tips and money that other people deserved more. The cab driver had in fact been spot on in his prediction. And the man opposite me at breakfast had been the biggest liar of all.

Posted by Miles.Jupp at March 20, 2006 2:02 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://cricketwallah.welshblogs.co.uk/cgi-bin/mt42/mt-tb.cgi/51