My Uber Driver Knew My Ex
Four kilometers of traffic and an unsolicited character reference.
Fourteen minutes into the ride, somewhere in the great parked river that is Bangalore traffic, my driver adjusted his mirror, found my eyes in it, and asked if I was still with the gentleman from Indiranagar.
Everyone has awkward rideshare stories. Mine has a plot twist and a character witness.
It was a Saturday evening in December, and I was going from my flat in Koramangala to a friend's engagement across the city, wearing uncomfortable shoes and carrying a gift I had wrapped in the elevator. The driver's name on the app was Manjunath, 4.9 stars, white sedan, a small plastic jasmine garland looped around the phone mount. He took one look at my building as I got in and nodded at it like an old colleague.
"Madam, I have picked up from this building many times."
"Small world," I said, in the tone you use to close a conversation.
"Every Thursday," he said, pulling into traffic. "One year, almost. Rohan sir. Very punctual man."
My hands went still on top of the gift.
Rohan... Two years together, eight months since it ended. Thursdays were his standing day at my place, the day he came over with vegetables and complaints about his manager, the day that had a shape to it the way only repeated days do. I had somehow never once wondered how he got there.
"You know Rohan," I said. It came out as a statement because my voice could not afford the question mark.
"I drove him every Thursday, madam. Same time, same route. He always sat in the front seat. Exact change, every time. Very decent man." A pause. The mirror again. "You are the madam with the terrace plants, correct? He mentioned."
He mentioned.
There is no etiquette for this situation. The app said forty-seven minutes to my destination. I was sealed inside a white sedan with jasmine on the phone mount and a man who had enjoyed a full year of unsupervised access to my ex, and the traffic ahead was not so much moving as breathing.
So I did what any dignified adult would do. I interrogated him casually for half an hour.
The portrait assembled itself in fragments between signals. Rohan talked about my plants, apparently, and knew the tomato one by name. Rohan once made Manjunath stop so he could buy mangoes from a cart because, quote, madam is particular about the good ones. And once, at a red light near Domlur, Rohan had held up his phone and made Manjunath read a poem on the screen.
"A poem," I said.
"On his phone, madam. He said, my girlfriend wrote this. He was very proud. The light was red for a long time. I read the whole thing. I gave it thumbs up."
I knew exactly which poem it was. A small thing I had put up on a community wall for poets, never imagining that anyone I actually knew read it, let alone read it aloud at a traffic signal to a captive audience of one auto-rickshaw's width away from the ITPL flyover.
Rohan had never told me he had seen it. He had just apparently carried it around, showing it to drivers like a photograph of a child.
Then Manjunath went quiet for a kilometer, which from him was an essay, and said, "Madam. Can I tell you one thing."
"You have told me eleven things."
"In November I dropped him to the airport. Night flight."
November... The month after it ended, when he took the Hyderabad transfer he had once turned down for me. I knew the fact of the flight the way you know a country's capital... information without weather.
"He was okay?" I asked, and hated myself for asking... and asked anyway.
Manjunath considered this with the care of a man under oath. "Madam, I have driven this car six years. People think the back seat is invisible. He sat in the front, that day also. He did not talk. No phone, nothing. Then at the flyover he asked me to take the long way." He caught my eyes in the mirror. "Nobody asks for the long way to the airport, madam. Nobody."
The long way from Indiranagar to the airport, if you let it be long, runs down 100 Feet Road, past the bakery with the terrible coffee where Rohan and I had sat every Sunday for two years, arguing about whether the coffee was terrible.
"He asked me to go slow near one bakery," Manjunath said. "He did not get down. We just went slow. Then airport."
I looked out the window at the brake lights strung across the dark like a festival nobody wanted, and I did some quiet arithmetic about the story I had been telling for eight months.
In my version, he left cleanly. In my version, he was unbothered, efficient, already elsewhere. I had built that version carefully, because it is easier to close a door on someone who never looks back at it.
And now the character witness in the mirror had perjured my whole account in second gear.
Grief takes any exit it can find, even a stranger's sedan idling in second gear.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked, finally.
Manjunath shrugged with one shoulder, the other loyal to the wheel. "Madam, Thursday customers I have many. Most I forget. He was decent. You also seem decent. Decent people should have full information." He handed a water bottle back over his shoulder without being asked, the way fathers do. "Traffic will clear after Marathahalli," he added, as if that too were part of the same reassurance. It somehow was.
I went to the engagement. I hugged my friend, ate too much, danced badly in the uncomfortable shoes. But the ride sat inside the whole evening like a stone in a pocket.
That night I went home and wrote for three hours, the first honest thing I had written about him since the end. For months I had been avoiding poems about love the way you avoid a street where you used to live. That night I walked straight down it. What came out was not a love poem, in the end. It kept bending toward forgiveness, which I had always treated as a destination and which turned out to be a route. The long way. Past the bakery. No stopping.
I gave Manjunath five stars and a tip that must have confused the app. Under the rating, in the little comment box, I wrote, "Full information," and I hope to God he understood.
In February I flew out for a wedding, my first flight since everything. The driver who came was young, chewing gum, in a hurry. At the flyover I heard myself say it.
"Take the long way."
"Longer, madam?" He looked at me in the mirror like I had asked him to drive to the moon.
"Longer."
We went slow past the bakery... I did not get down. The lights were on inside, and somebody was laughing at one of the back tables, and the coffee, I am certain, was terrible. Then the airport.
Nobody asks for the long way to the airport. Almost nobody.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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