Bombay auto drivers have always been outstanding at giving exact change, never rounding off the total, which is quite something given auto fares are usually odd numbers
Illustration/Uday Mohite
The city has naturally changed a lot since I came three-and-a-half decades ago. But the fact that women can travel alone at all times has remained a constant. The thing that has changed is the business of change.
Bombay auto drivers have always been outstanding at giving exact change, never rounding off the total, which is quite something given auto fares are usually odd numbers. This was true even through that one phase in the 1990s when there was a change shortage. At the time, it became common for shopkeepers to give you a toffee in lieu of the lacking coins, so that a kismi toffee was routinely to be found melting to gunk in my change purse. I knew one shopkeeper who gave us bus tickets to make up the amount. Which seems to be part of the golden age of public transport in Bombay’s history.
This business of exact change was in essence a facet of Mumbai’s professional self-image — attending to all the elements of one’s dhanda — and a certain egalitarianism at the city’s core. That said, I still have PTSD from the toffee currency days and a fear of being without change, laced with demonetisation terror. Specifically, I hoard twenty-rupee coins and fifty rupee notes, but perhaps all this is TMI.
Each night, when I get home, I ask the same question: “Bhaiya, do you have change for a 500 rupee note?” So I know that there are now two types of auto drivers. Those, who in that particular urban Mumbai way turn their gaze inward to assess if they do and say, “Haan ho jayega” and give you change with confidence. And those who are triggered by the very suggestion. Aggrieved they will say, “scanner maar do na” and you can hear the echo of those other voices, of people (young?) who make doing their job sound like a massive favour done to you.
The former category — let us call them change-makers — I find more collegial. They have the rich and rumbling amusement of city dwellers, that warm-sharp analog ability to make lateral connections. They appreciate irony and you share in your observations of street sights and people’s nutty behaviour as co-dwellers of the city. They are up for a chat. I have given up the habit of listening to music while travelling, it being the one time when you can space out- because you know the auto driver knows the way, is not driving like this is a video game, or listening to motivational lectures on his phone.
Handing over cash, and getting change, marks our brief sojourn, our short exchange, our thank you and welcome at the end of this fleeting urban intimacy. The digital — convenient, efficient and terse — has no requirement or provision for discussing how 20 rupee coins are kind of cool, of laughing at yourself alongside a stranger, of a moment for life and not only business in the business of living.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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