The persistent blaring of a car horn drew my attention, and I saw Prabaker waving to me from his taxi. I got into the cab and asked him to drive me to my evening meeting with Khaled, near Chowpatty Beach. One of the first things I'd done with the first real money I'd made in Khaderbhai's service was pay for Prabaker's taxi licence. The cost of the licence had always been prohibitive for Prabaker, and it had eluded his sub-miniature talent for thrift.
He drove occasional shifts in his cousin Shantu's taxi without the required licence, but ran considerable risks in doing it.
With his own licence, he was free to approach any of the taxi lords who owned fleets of cabs and hired them out to licensed taxi drivers.
Prabaker was a hard worker and an honest man; but, more than that, he was the most likable man that most of those who knew him ever met. Even the hard-nosed taxi lords weren't immune to his sanguine charm. Within a month he had a semi-permanent lease' on a taxi, which he cared for as if it was his own. On the dashboard he'd installed a plastic shrine to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. The gold, pink, and green plastic figure of the goddess blazed an alarmingly fierce expression through the bulbs in her red eyes whenever he hit the brakes of the car. From time to time he reached over, with a showman's flourish, to squeeze a rubber tube at the base of the figure. That action sprayed, through what appeared to be a valve in the navel of the goddess, a potent and disquietingly industrial mix of chemical perfumes onto the shirt and trousers of his passenger. Every squeeze of the spray was followed by a reflexive, polishing rub of his brass taxi driver's identification badge, which he wore with swaggering pride. Only one thing, in the whole city, rivalled the affection he felt for the black-and-yellow Fiat taxi.
"Parvati. Parvati. Parvati..." he said, as we sped past Churchgate Station towards Marine Drive. He was drunk on the music of her name. "I love her too much, Lin! Is love, yes, when a terrible feeling makes you happy? When you worry about a girl, more even than you worry about your taxi? That's a love, isn't it? A great love, isn't it? My God! Parvati. Parvati. Parvati..."
"It's love, Prabu."
"And Johnny has it too much love for Sita, my Parvati her sister.
Too much love."
"I'm happy for you. And for Johnny. He's a good man. You're both good men."
"Oh, yes!" Prabaker agreed, slapping his hand on the horn a few times for emphasis. "We are fine fellows! And tonight we are going out for a triple dates, with the sisters. It will be too much fun."
"There's another sister?"
"Another?"
"Yeah-you said a triple date. Are there three sisters? I thought there were only two."
"Yes, Lin, absolutely only two sisters."
"Well, don't you mean a double date?"
"No, Lin. Parvati and Sita, they always bring their mummy, the wife of Kumar, Mrs. Patak. The girls, they are sitting on one side only, and Mrs. Nandita Patak, she is sitting in middle, and Johnny Cigar is with me, sitting on the other side. It is a triple date."
"It sounds... like... a lotta fun."
"Yes, fun! Of course fun! So much of fun! And when we offer it some foods and some drinks to Mrs. Patak, we can look at the girls, and they can look at us also. This is our system. This is how we smile at the girls and give them big winks with our eyes.
We are having such good luck that Mrs. Patak, she has a happy appetites, and she will eat, without stopping, for three hours in a movie. So there is a very constant passing of foods, and plenty of looking at the girls. And Mrs. Patak-thanks to the God, it is impossible to fill up that woman in one movie only."
"Hey, slow down... that looks like a... a riot."
A mob of people, hundreds, thousands, streamed around a corner and onto wide Marine Drive, some three hundred metres in front of us. They advanced toward us across the whole width of the street.
"Not a riots, Linbaba," Prabaker replied, slowing the cab to a stop. "Riot nahin, morcha hain." It's not a riot, it's a demonstration. It was clear that the people were passionately angry. The men and the women shook their fists in time with their furious chanting.
Their anguished faces stiffened on necks and shoulders made rigid with their rage. They chanted about Indira Gandhi, and about revenge, and about the punishments they wanted to visit upon the Sikhs. I tensed as they neared us, but the human torrent parted for the cab, and then swept around and beyond us without so much as the scrape of a sleeve against the side of the car.
Nevertheless, the eyes that looked in upon us were hate-stricken and cruel. I knew that if I were a Sikh, if I'd been wearing a Sikh turban or Sardarji scarf, the door would've been wrenched open.
As the crowd passed us and the road ahead became clear, I turned to see that Prabaker was wiping tears from his eyes. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, dragging a huge, red-checked sheet out at last, and dabbing at his eyes with it.
