Ramesh Bhai Solanki

Ramesh Bhai Solanki was born in a chawl behind the transport depot, the third of five children of a man who drove a municipal water tanker and considered the steering wheel a form of citizenship. From the age of nine Ramesh sat beside his father on the long tanker route, learning the city road by road, learning also that a horn, used with conviction, could settle arguments that words could not.

He left school after the ninth standard, not from any drama but because a cousin needed help with a borrowed rickshaw and the rent on the borrowed rickshaw was due on the fifteenth regardless of anybody's education. He drove other men's vehicles for nine years, on a fifty-fifty share that always seemed to work out to sixty-forty against him, before he had saved and borrowed enough — two loans, one from a cooperative society and one, more expensively, from a jeweller who financed such things on the side — to buy Permit No. 6-2231 and call it his own.

The rickshaw arrived a pale unpainted yellow-black and Ramesh had it fitted, within the month, with a small brass Ganesh on the dashboard, a string of jasmine renewed every second day by the flower seller near the depot, and a cassette player wired in by a mechanic friend who owed him a favour involving a puncture kit. The cassette player has, since 1994, played exactly one singer, and Ramesh maintains that this is not stubbornness but taste.

His stand is outside the railway station, third in the queue behind two older drivers who treat him as a younger brother requiring correction, which he receives loudly and rejects completely. He knows four genuine shortcuts through the old town, learned from his father's tanker days, and at least eleven others that save no time at all but express, in Ramesh's considered opinion, a superior understanding of the city that lesser drivers lack.

Every Sunday morning, before the day's passengers begin, he washes the rickshaw with the devotion other men reserve for temples — soap, chamois cloth, a toothbrush for the chrome around the headlamp — while his wife hangs the week's washing on the line behind him and remarks, as she has remarked for eleven years, that the vehicle is cleaner than the house. He does not dispute this.

There was the year of the fare revision agitation, when the union called a strike and Ramesh, against the advice of the two older drivers, kept his rickshaw at the stand anyway and argued with three separate policemen about the constitutional right to earn a living, a phrase he had picked up from a passenger who turned out to be a lawyer. He was neither arrested nor especially persuasive, but he came home that evening more pleased with himself than the day's earnings warranted.

His daughter, a bright, unhurried girl now in her second year of a commerce degree, occupies a curious place in his conversation — he mentions her to nearly every fourth passenger, always as though the subject had arrived by accident, always followed by a description of her marks that grows more precise with each retelling. He has never once told her this directly; she hears it, third-hand, from neighbours who have shared his rickshaw.

In the traffic, twelve hours a day, six days a week, he narrates the state of the nation to whoever occupies the back seat — the road department, the new drivers with no discipline, the meter inspector who once fined him for a matter Ramesh still describes as a misunderstanding of historic proportions. Passengers who ask a simple question about the fare frequently receive, instead, a full accounting of everything wrong with the city, delivered without malice and without any expectation of being believed.

The neighbourhood has grown used to the sound of him before the sight of him, the particular note of that horn turning the corner by the water tank, and grown used also to the fact that whatever trouble the day has brought him, he will have found, by evening, someone else entirely to blame for it. This, in a city that offers a man little enough credit for the hours he keeps, is perhaps the only inheritance a horn and a windscreen can be relied upon to provide.