Professional Drivers in India

When we left the friendly confines of the USA, we had tried to figure out which types of drugs and treatments we should bring along. Certain prescription drugs seemed to make sense to pack, but when it came to OTC treatments, we (mistakenly) assumed you could buy most of the same brand names here. I was disabused of that earlier when I tried to find Tums and Metamusil. I got second-rate alternatives to Tums and some heinous fiber powder that made me gag every time I tried to mix it with water and drink it, pretty much dooming the whole jar to the dustbin. Having awakened sick on Wednesday - the old head cold/sinus infection double whammy that appears to be my ailment of choice - we were still hopeful we could find Nyquil and Dayquil here, but no such luck. We were offered, instead, medications for colds that contained phenylpropanolamine, a substance that the FDA has essentially banned in the USA.

When I say we were offered, I mean to say that you cannot walk into any type of store here and browse the OTC drugs aisles. Those stores do not exist. Anything that is any kind of treatment at all has to be bought at a Chemist shop and every Chemist shop we have seen so far has been a small shop with a counter. You walk up to the counter, tell the druggist what you want, he or she rummages around in shelves and drawers and pulls out whatever they think is either closest or the best thing for you. Even things that do not require a prescription here have to be bought this way. Furthermore, I’ve been told more than once that things that do require a prescription can pretty much be had without, but only by having an agent at the Chemist store get it off the shelf for you.

In the evening I started reading the novel called “The White Tiger” by an Indian author named Aravind Adiga. It’s a strong condemnation of the corruption and unfairness so rampant in India and it won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2008.

Thursday morning Peggy joined me in the sniffles brigade so ending the extra sympathy I was banking on to help get me through my cold/sinus infection/rash.

That night I made Aloo Mutter, a heavily spiced dish of potatoes, peas and gravy served over rice. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Alan Sherman song “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” so now every time I think of that dish the annoying words to that song (which for some foolish reason I memorized many years ago) keep swirling around my brain.

Friday – we’re both feeling pretty punk. Peggy decides to stay home from the office. Ashraf calls to ask when he should pick up “Peggy Ma’am”, as he calls her, but when I tell him she isn’t going to work because she feels sick and that he can have a day off, he works really hard to convince me that I should go somewhere, so I finally agree to have him take me to Dorabjee’s to pick up the supplies that we were in need of.

And that’s how I learned more about how the driver system works here. Our “contract” with Excell Cars, for whom Ashraf works, costs us $25 per day for an 8 hour day and up to 80 Km of driving. The eight hour days starts when we need the driver and ends at the later of when we don’t need him any more or 8 hours have elapsed. If, however, we don’t need the driver and we inform Excell of that fact in the morning, we are not charged for that day, BUT the driver has to report to the office to be assigned some apparently heinous task (based on Ashraf’s aversion to this outcome). If, on the other hand, we need Ashraf to drive Peggy to work in the morning, his duty for the rest of the day is to hang out in Magarpatta City to see if we need him to take us anywhere else. This means he can sleep, listen to the radio, read etc., just so long as he comes quickly when we call. And this is why it was so important to Ashraf that we ask him to pick us up on Friday…, and Saturday…, and Sunday.

On Saturday morning my state of health had deteriorated further, so I took the opportunity to play doctor, something I hadn’t done since I was very young. Playing doctor in this case meant diagnosing a sinus infection (of which I’ve had plenty and know the symptoms very well) and then prescribing a course of Amoxycillin. Lucky for me, my local pharmacy (i.e.my medicine chest) just happened to have a supply of Amoxycillin, fortuitously packed by yours truly in anticipation of just this type of event.

Later that morning I went to the gym for a lifting and stationary bike session. Like gyms worldwide (except possibly in the tribal areas of Pakistan), this one plays thumping music at all times to help energize you to take that next step on the treadmill or finish that last rep on the weight bench. While riding the bike, a Hindi song came on that sounded very 80s British – sort of “Life In a Northern Town”-like. It was hypnotic and I really wanted to know what the name of it was, but I didn’t want to hail one of the trainer-wallahs over just to ask that question, so I turned to a young Indian woman who was just preparing to get on the recumbent stationary bike next to me and said “Excuse me”. Now, I have a pretty deep voice and when I have a sinus infection I sound like God trying to impersonate Barry White, so she had this look of fear on her face when she turned to see what in the world the big, goofy white guy was going to demand from her.

When I asked if she knew the name of the song playing, her face creased into a huge smile. Yes, she did know. It was “Tum Mile” (toom millay) from a recent Bollywood film of the same name. I had her spell it for me and remarked how much I liked it and that seemed to make her very happy.

The song ended, to be replaced by the typical, clanking, quasi-rap crap that most gyms (with the possible exception of those in the tribal areas of Pakistan) insist on playing. But midway through, that song stopped. I looked up to see that one of the attendants was fiddling with the audio system. The next thing I knew, “Tum Mile” was playing again. The attendant and the young woman whom I had queried were pretending not to look at me, but I could see they were sneaking a peek. I gave them big grins of acknowledgement. It was humbling and exceedingly sweet that they went to the trouble of playing that song again just for my benefit.

Later in the day Ashraf proudly bought us each a squeezed sugar cane drink. It came as an unappealing looking brown/green liquid on ice, but it tasted pretty good. The best I could tell it was just sugar, water and ice, but the raw nature of the just-squeezed sugar cane gave it a very light fruity taste. The drink is made by running a stalk of sugar cane through a set of rollers that squeezes the be-Mohammed out of the stalks, sending a slurry of sticky liquid down a trough into the glass. Whatever was on those stalks and the vendor’s fingers before the squeezing started ended up in our glass along with the sugar cane juice.

On Sunday Peggy got to play doctor. My body rash had worsened. She diagnosed it as “Prickly Heat”, basically hives brought on by the sweaty folds in the body rubbing against each other and causing some type of allergic reaction. I wasn’t convinced, but her course of action, which consisted of liberal sprinkling of baby powder and some type of Zen state to try to avoid reacting to the powerful itching sensations, seemed benign enough.

We had lunch with Dana at Ram Krishna, a totally Veg, completely local establishment. We were the only white faces in the entire place, and we were naturally escorted to the A/C portion of the establishment. We deduced that the outer room, which had no air conditioning, served exactly the same food as the A/C rooms, but due to the lack of cooling amenities, the prices were cheaper there. Even in the high rent room lunch for three, including a lime soda and a strawberry shake, came to a Maharajaly 389 Rs ($8). Everything is relative, though. Ashraf asked why we wanted to go to such a fancy, expensive place, whereas we thought the meal had been dirt cheap.

On Monday I went to meet the office manager for Excell Cars, from whom we are contracting Ashraf and our car. We had received our bill a few days prior and I was a bit surprised to see the cost for our trip to Aurangabad - $281.00. Now this was not as cheap as most things seemed to be in India, and certainly exceeded any notion that we were paying $25/day for our car and driver.

And so I met Prakash Bhandari, Business Head for Excell Cars, a man exceedingly well dressed (nicely pressed shirt and beautiful tie), not to mention charming, connected and probably a little bit sly. We exchanged a few pleasantries then got down to business. The bottom line is this. For trips outside of Pune, the standard rate for the car we normally tootle around in (an intermediate Mitsubishi sedan) was 12 Rs per kilometer for a minimum of 250 Ks, plus 150 Rs per day for the driver, plus 200 Rs per night for keeping the driver away from home. Our trip to Aurangabad had taken place in a Toyota Innova, an SUV that is considered an upgrade from the Mitsi. For that vehicle, our tariff went up to 13 Rs per Km for a minimum of 300 Ks per day. Now I better understood why Ashraf had been, and continued to be, so persistent in trying to jawbone us into taking weekend trips outside of Pune. When we do so, his company makes a lot of extra money and so does he.

I paid Prakash in cash, then asked him about the proper accommodations for the driver on an overnight trip. He started by telling me that the driver could fend for himself, but then went on to say , “If you are on a budget, the driver can take care of himself. Remember the driver takes care of you, so sometimes it’s good for you to take care of your driver.”
This pretty much mirrored the dance I had done with Ashraf during our Aurangabad excursion, so I felt pretty sanguine about how I had handled it.

Next we talked about Cricket. Like everyone in India, Prakash is a fan of cricket, but that’s kind of like saying that everyone in the US is a fan of baseball. Being a fan doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re knowledgeable. Prakash said something that should have been obvious, but had eluded my somewhat meager cognition powers up to now. Cricket in India may very well be fixed. In this country, corruption is the lubricant that seems to make this dysfunctional system work. If corruption is so endemic in the rest of the country, why would Cricket be any different? Prakash seemed to be coming from this point of view, and when I asked Ashraf later whether he thought Cricket matches were ever fixed, he gave me that strange Indian side-to-side head bob that means either “yes”, “maybe”, “OK” or “why not” depending on the situation. Finally, like a Norwegian slap to the forehead, I got it. Big (although illegal) money is bet on Cricket matches here, very much like the big dollars that go to the underground bookie network in the USA every weekend of the football season. Combine lots of money with a culture in which the giving and receiving of bribes is extremely commonplace and it’s not hard to imagine that the national sport would be part of the normal way of conducting business here.

This revelation helped put into focus a brief conversation I’d had with an Indian man at dinner a few nights earlier. Peggy and I went to dinner at Curves, an upscale restaurant that caters mainly to the youth of Pune. While sipping on an awful martini (Indian gin and the arcane 1/3 dry vermouth recipe make an uninspiring cocktail) I was musing about the possibility of bringing Cricket to the US. This same gentleman, sitting at the table next to ours and put off by his dinner partner’s insistence that a cell phone was a more interesting dinner companion than a real human being, seemed to be intrigued by this line of lunacy. We asked him to speculate on the possibility, and he predicted unequivocally that Cricket would take the USA by storm within 3 years. Shocked, I asked why. He said the combination of the 2020 form of Cricket (which has reduced games from a very tedious 5 days to about 3 hours, complete with sexy cheerleaders and exuberant crowds) and the gambling money available in the USA made it inevitable.

He, of course, is dead wrong, but his unstated belief (which I now understand better) that Cricket, gambling and fixing go hand in hand, gave him the clear vision of how unavoidable this outcome will be.

Having pried open the door of corruption, Prakash went on to tell me that he might be able to help with any problems I encountered while in India. “I’m a congressman”, he said by way of explanation. At first I thought he meant he served in either the national or state parliament, and I was prepared to be duly impressed, but just as he began his explanation of what being a congressman meant, I figured it out. The biggest, longest serving and most popular political party in India is the Indian National Congress party, the party of Ghandi and Nehru commonly known simply as “Congress”. He didn’t bother to paint any pictures in black and white, but I got the impression that a “congressman” like him was connected and could solve a variety of problems, most likely only requiring appropriate amounts of grease to be applied to the appropriate squeaks.

Knowing that my visit could have a certain impact on Ashraf, I lauded his abilities and attention to us to Prakash, and, even though he was not present in the room, Ashraf seemed to sense that I’d given him a big thumb’s up, because he was positively ebullient on the drive home, stopping at a street vendor’s stand to buy us each a Vada Pao, a spicy fried lentil and potato patty stuffed into a bun.