Your Ride Has Arrived
Description
He drove your city for nine years. He knew where the roads flood. He heard the engine before the engine knew it was failing. You sat in the back. You looked at your phone.
Raju Chauhan arrives in Mumbai from Rajkot, Gujarat, with a mechanic's training, a Maruti Ertiga on a ₹8,40,000 loan, and a precise plan: drive for nine years, save ₹14 lakhs, go home and open the workshop his whole life has been building toward.
The plan is rational. Mumbai has a different plan.
Your Ride Has Arrived follows Raju across nine years and fifteen rides - from the airport staging area with its broken chairs and absent chai stall, to the Bandra-Worli Sea Link at ₹75 per crossing (reimbursed at ₹37.50), to the Ghatkopar taxi stand where a four-word question asks a man who has driven Mumbai for eight years whether he belongs in it.
He encounters the Kali-Pili drivers whose territory he crosses every day - men like Ramesh Jadhav, twenty-three years in a black-and-yellow, who tells him at a broken signal: respect the road. And Waman Kale, whose Padmini breaks down on the WEH and whose solenoid wire Raju fixes with electrical tape because he is a mechanic first and a cab driver second.
He drives the monsoon. He drives the Eastern Freeway at four-thirty AM when Mumbai briefly becomes the road it was built to be. He sits in the airport queue at three AM one last time - specifically to sit in it.
His wife Hemlata fills the thermos with the correct proportion of cardamom and chai. She comes to Mumbai once and rides the Virar fast and sees the room and does not say it is small.
His son Vivek hears the pre-knock on his motorcycle. The mechanic's ear has been transmitted.
Your Ride Has Arrived is the second book in the Human Infrastructure Series - a cycle of literary novels documenting the working lives of the people who keep modern cities running. Built on field research with 247 Mumbai cab drivers, the novel tells the story of a city through the person who knows it best: the man in the front seat who has been listening for nine years.
The garage will be called Chauhan Auto Works. Three names on the board.