Original Message-----
>From: amkumar@vassar.edu
>Sent: Aug 26, 2010 11:13 AM
>To: Robin Khundkar
>Subject: Re:
>
>Boss - I have a piece on Vanity Fair.com on the stabbing of the Bangla taxi-driver. Please circulate.
>Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
The Venerable, Vulnerable Taxi Drivers of New York
by Amitava Kumar
August 26, 2010
VANITY FAIR
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/08/the-venerable-vulnerable-taxi-drivers-of-new-york.html
Amitava Kumar is the author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb published this month by Duke University Press.
Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition. And yet, there is no one more adept than him at mapping our streets and cities. He is not an alien. The cabbie has made familiar, though not without faltering, nor without arduous, repeated labor, all that was strange and forbidding. Perhaps amongst us he is most American.
This is the hour of the immigrant worker—after the milkman and just before the dustman. I read that in a book somewhere and imagined a pink dawn at the end of an empty city street, as in a picture postcard and already belonging to the past.
But the present looks different. It accommodates throngs of patient maids, hidden restaurant workers, and, at all hours of the day and night, in their pale blue uniforms, armies of quiet hospital staff.
It is always the taxi driver who, in the bright yellow cab, is the most visible of them all. He is also the most vulnerable. The U.S. Department of Labor reports taxi drivers to be thirty times more likely to be killed on the job than other workers.
On August 24 in New York City, around 6 p.m., a driver named Ahmed H. Sharif picked up a fare at East 24th Street and Second Avenue. The passenger was 21-year-old Michael Enright, who asked the cabbie a question that has now been heard around the world: "Are you a Muslim?" When the driver said yes, the passenger first greeted him in Arabic and then said, "Consider this a checkpoint." Enright pulled out a knife and, in the words of an assistant district attorney, slashed the cabbie's "neck open halfway across his throat." Sharif managed to lock his attacker in the car, but he soon escaped. Enright was later arrested; both he and his victim were taken to the same hospital.
Later, Sharif released a statement via the New York Taxi Workers Alliance: "I feel very sad. I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before," said Mr. Sharif. "Right now, the public sentiment is very serious (because of the Ground Zero Mosque debate). All drivers should be more careful."
We might wish to make allowance for the role of the N.Y.T.W.A. in injecting the correct dose of political context, as in the critical parenthetical insertion in the remark quoted above; nevertheless, an event like this, especially in New York City, cannot be insulated from the vicious rhetoric that has swirled around us in recent weeks. The blogosphere is already alight with accusations that Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have blood on their hands.
Tempting as it may be to repeat this analysis, I don't wish to discount another factor: the sense of power, and even the false intimacy with the Other, that Enright would have experienced in Afghanistan. His behavior inside the cab also goes to show how embedded he is in the narrative of the U.S. military adventure. Are only Palin and Gingrich to be blamed for it?
Several years ago, I spent a summer in New York City with taxi drivers. These were men from the Indian subcontinent, trying to find a footing in this country. This is what I remember most about their life. Each day, they would pick up their vehicle after paying for the daily lease. It would cost a little over $100 at that time. The cabbie was also responsible for the cost of gas. In an eight-, or ten-, or most likely, twelve-hour shift, there was first a mountain to cross. This was the payment that the driver had already made for the lease on the cab and gas. It was possible, on a bad day, that the cabbie would actually lose money. Hours passed, the men drove in desperation, stopping after several hours, if at all, for a quick meal at a Punjabi dhaba on the East side. You drove hard, searched on the streets for a passenger, tried to get a larger tip when you were asked to help make a meeting on time, and this didn't prevent you from getting a $200 ticket.
I'd be riding shotgun and on occasion try to engage a passenger in conversation. The people I saw in the backseat were polite sometimes, hard-headed pragmatists most of the time, and, every now and then, unbelievably mean and contemptuous assholes. What amazed me most was the way in which the taxi drivers retained their equanimity: I wondered what motivated their behavior, whether it was professionalism of a sort, or powerlessness, or a mixture of greed and need.
A decade later, I was sitting in my home, drinking coffee in the morning, when I saw a letter in the newspaper. It described a trip made by the letter-writer from La Guardia Airport to her home in the Bronx. As I read it, my heart was touched with a certain sweetness. I was recalling my time with my cabbie friends in New York City but I was also touched by the letter-writer's sensitivity to not only the work the cabbie was doing but also his precious, fragmented life:
As we moved slowly through the traffic, I heard a woman's voice in the front seat of the cab. The driver told me that he had recently returned from Pakistan, where he had gotten married, and this was his bride calling from Pakistan on his cellphone. He said he was doing the paperwork so that she could come here in about six months.
I could hear her voice and his as they began to sing a duet. He would sing a line from the cab creeping along in the traffic not far from Yankee Stadium, and she would sing a line in response from Pakistan. I could not understand the language of their song, but he told me she was thinking of him so much that she could not sleep.
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