Buddha in the traffic ~ second chances

  

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Speaking the local language helps when you hail rides in Bengaluru — drivers open up faster, and the conversation goes somewhere real. Pre-covid, the city was running at full tilt, everyone impatient, and the drivers were earning just a little more than they would the following year when everything ground to a halt.
It was one of those rare rides where the driver called ahead to confirm I'd pay digitally. Of course, I said — that's always my preference, with cash tips on the side. The car pulled up and out stepped a brash young man, barely in his twenties. I asked about the payment preference and he didn't hesitate. As a teenager, he'd stumbled into offline gambling and made decent money for a while — five hundred, seven hundred rupees a day — until the whole thing caved in on him. Six figures in debt, loan sharks at the door. His mother, a tough woman raising him alone, walked straight into that mess and faced the sharks herself. She negotiated, she promised, and she pulled her son out. Then she paid for his driving lessons, got him his license, and handed him one condition: full transparency, every bank account accessible on her phone. Twenty-five months on, his life had a simple rhythm — drive, eat three meals, let the money flow to where it needed to go. He was almost clear of the debt. Things, he said, were looking up.
Another driver, a proud man, had a sticker on his rear windshield that read “farmer.” Very early in the day, a pleasant morning, I chose conversation over binge-watching and asked him the “farmer” sticker. What followed was a story of stubborn love for the land. A second-generation farmer with a degree in agriculture, he'd watched two consecutive crops fail and refused — absolutely refused — to sell his land to some warehousing corporation. The debt piled up, the bank circled, and he was nearly done when he over-heard about the rideshare business in some random conversation in a tea-stall. This was year three of Uber in Bengaluru, so the earnings were generous. He started by driving someone else's car, and in eleven months, with the incentives that existed back then, he'd paid off a quarter of his loan. The same bank then helped him finance his own vehicle. Slowly, the agricultural loans started shrinking. His confidence grew. He'd get back to farming eventually — he was certain of it. The sticker wasn't decoration. It was a reminder, so the city wouldn't swallow him whole.
Second chances don't always look the same. This one arrived in the shape of a spotless car with a MacBook charging in the front seat. The driver, a senior citizen, asked politely if he should move it. I was more worried about my shoes dirtying his immaculate interior. He drove from eleven to four, six days a week, entirely unbothered by targets. He just wanted to be home before six.
He'd recently lost his wife of thirty years. The silence she left behind was vast. His children had settled abroad and wanted him to come live with them, but two weeks was about all he could manage before he started missing his neighbourhood dosa and filter coffee. So he drove. Met people, talked when they wanted to talk, and watched films when parked for long stretches. It gave his days a shape. He had no financial pressure — the house was paid off and enough savings to not worry about expenses — so this was never about money. It was about not sitting alone with too many hours and too little noise. When I mentioned Bengaluru's punishing traffic, he smiled. Behind the wheel, he said, he was the one in control. The gridlock outside was just the world going about its business. He was just watching it, occasionally a part of it, and then going home.