Message #30: The taxi driver and his family

(Message sent Tue, 19 Dec 2006 05:20:30 -0700)

On my last evening in Aurangabad, a taxi driver called Ashok whom I had employed a number of times invited me to have tea with his family. His house was tiny. It was basically a concrete box with a door and a tin roof, and the entire house would have fit twice, maybe three times into my hotel room. The space was divided into two rooms: a kitchen and an everything-else room. The everything-else room contained a single bed, a chest of drawers, a fridge, and a TV. A few shirts hung from pegs on the wall, and a cricket bat was propped in a corner. And that was it. In this tiny space Ashok, his wife, and their three teenage children live out their lives. There was no toilet and nowhere to wash (I assume they used communal facilities elsewhere), and the sole water supply was a concrete trough outside the door. I couldn't even work out where they all slept. With one person in the bed, the other four could probably all lie on the floor at once, but only just.

Ashok rents the place for a thousand rupees a month. He asked me about my house in NZ, in particular what the rent was. It works out at about 38,000 rupees a month. Frankly, given how vastly different the dwellings and the societies in which they are embedded are, I'm surprised that the difference is only a factor of 38.

Indians are not shy about asking questions like this about money, and it always makes me feel uncomfortable, simply because telling the truth gives the wrong impression. For example, my Keenes get a lot of comment. (For those without advanced shoe degrees, Keenes are a make of rugged walking sandal.) I often get asked how much they cost, and 6,600 rupees probably sounds like a ridiculous sum to someone wearing 20 rupee sandals. Similarly I get asked a lot how much my plane tickets to India cost. Sixty thousand rupees must seem a fortune in a land where a third of the people live on 50 rupees or less a day. And trying to point out that I'm not rich by the standards of my country as I only earn a million rupees a year would probably only make things worse.

Ashok told me a little about his life. He's the same age as me, and was married by arrangement at 20. He never even saw his wife until the wedding day. He considers himself progressive in that, when the time comes to find a husband for his 17 year old daughter, he will let her meet the candidate groom ahead of time, and will grant her the right of veto.

I don't know how he's managing it, but he's putting all three kids through university in the hope that degrees will be the keys to better lives for them.

Unfortunately I couldn't speak to the wife and kids as they know no English. Ashok himself only knows English through interacting with tourists.

Sure glad I only got to experience his life for an hour, rather than for a lifetime.

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