January 25th, 2010
Taxi driver…
I’m not someone who normally talks to the taxi drivers who shuttle me to and from the airport. I’m not rude – it’s just that I don’t initiate the conversation but, if they do, I’m happy to chat. It was like that the other day coming back from JFK.
“Do you have any children?” the driver asked.
I told him I had two, a girl and a boy, 24 and 20 years old.
“Ah, I thought you might have younger children. My wife is having a baby.”
Turns out, he wanted to know what I thought about him preserving his wife’s core blood with a company charging him $2,000 out of pocket, along with a yearly storage fee. I told him that I thought it was unlikely he’d ever need it but that, if he did, he’d be glad he spent the money. I also told him I was surprised how aggressively companies were marketing such a service since nothing like it existed when my wife and I had our children.
This led to a general conversation about his life and why he’d come to this country 16 years before which must have been when he was a boy.
“My father was afraid of all the terrorism in our country and sent all his children to America.”
“There was terrorism in India 16 years ago?” I asked.
He assured me there was, mainly by what he called “religious fanatics.”
He and his siblings have a good life in this country but he thought often about moving back home to take over his father’s business holdings which he assured me would fall into the wrong hands if a family member did not take charge.
“So tell me about your wife. I assume you have an arranged marriage?” I asked.
He did but he told me that he had rejected at least eight women before settling on his wife. He said Indians always choose wives from the same caste and try to find people from the same area of the country since, he said, that India has many languages.
“Dialects, you mean?”
“No, different languages,” he said. “If I meet someone from another part of India and they don’t speak the national language (Hindi) then I can’t understand a single word they are saying.”
I had no idea. He continued speaking about his arranged marriage. “And her family, they checked me out as well. They want to make sure I’m a good guy, that she will be well-provided for.”
“How do they do that? Do you show them your bank account?”
“No,” he said, “they just ask around. People know.”
He said because he owns a house in Queens as well as India, he passed the test. He continued telling me about his wife’s pregnancy and how Indians pick out names for their children. He said he and his wife have to go to “the temple” and a holy man would at random pick a letter from A thru Z from a book. Whatever letter he picked, that was the letter the baby’s name would have to begin with.
“So we have to pick out 26 names,” he said with a chuckle.
“Don’t you mean 52? Boy and girls names?”
“No, we know it’s a girl so we’ll all prepared with 26 possible names.”
Huh, go figure?
I have to admit that this conversation, which taught me a think or two I didn’t know, made me wonder if I should talk to taxi drivers more often. I mean, that’s the great thing about NYC, right? We have all these different cultures right in front of us all day long.