Jasmine for the Ride

VaahanGo Driver · New trip request · 02:38
Pickup: Gate 3, Vertex Techno Park Phase II, Sholinganallur
Rider: Anjali Murugesan · 4.9 ★
Drop: Thoraipakkam (see map)

Selvam accepts it because it is on his way home and because at that hour you take what comes. The night had been thin. Two Infosys drops, one boy from a bank in Siruseri who vomited a little into a Haldiram’s packet and apologised all the way to Velachery. It was one more ride and then sleep.

Phase II of Vertex Techno Park is glass up to the fourth floor and then nothing, just grey concrete ribs going up into the dark with green safety netting flapping off them like washing. He has driven past it maybe five hundred times. The gate is lit by a single sodium lamp and she is standing right under it, so the light makes her yellow. Office lanyard. Black churidar. Her hair is in a long plait, very neat, as if she had done it fresh before a shift instead of after one.

She gets in the back and says, “Anna, Thoraipakkam signal, there’s one flower stall. Stop there one minute. I want malli.”

“Now, madam? It’s three o’clock.”

“She’ll be open,” she says, and she is right.

Kannamma’s stall is a wooden plank under a blue tarpaulin, two buckets, a tube light running off a car battery. At this hour she is stringing for the morning, the jasmine coming in from Koyambedu in wet sacks. Selvam knows her by face. Everybody does. She looks up when the car stops and puts down her thread.

“One muzham,” the rider says from the back, and then, to Selvam, “Anna, can you pay? I don’t have change. Add it in the fare.”

He pays forty rupees. Kannamma measures the jasmine along her forearm, elbow to fingertip, and cuts it with her teeth, and passes it to Selvam through his window, and he passes it back over his shoulder without looking. When he does look, in the mirror, the rider is pinning it into her plait with two black clips. The car fills with the smell. Sweet and thick, like a wedding hall.

The drop is not at an address. It is a pin on the map at the end of a mud road past the last apartments, where Pallikaranai marsh starts and the street lights stop.

“Here is fine,” she says.

“Here? There’s nothing here, madam.”

“Here is fine, anna,” she says, and gets out, and he watches her in the headlights for a few steps, the white of the jasmine swinging against her back, and then he has to reverse because there’s no place to turn.

Trip cancelled by rider · 02:57
Cancellation fee: ₹0
Earnings for this trip: ₹0

You received a new rating! ★★★★★

He looks at it for a while at the signal. Then he raises a ticket.

VaahanGo Support · Hi Selvam! I’m Vaani, your virtual assistant. 😊 I understand there may be an issue with your trip. Please choose an option below.

None of the options are She rode the full trip and the app says she cancelled and also she owes me forty rupees for jasmine. He chooses Other and Vaani tells him a team member will contact him within 72 hours.

* * *

The next night, at 02:38, the same request.

He thinks about rejecting it. A cancelled trip costs him nothing but time, and the forty rupees. But the acceptance rate matters for the weekly incentive, and he is three rides short of the thousand-rupee bonus, and she had been polite. Most of them are not polite at three in the morning.

Same gate. Same yellow light. Same plait. She gets in.

“Anna, Thoraipakkam, the flower stall.”

“Madam, yesterday the app showed cancelled. I didn’t get the fare.”

“Aiyo, sorry, anna,” she says. “It’s the network. Today it’ll come.”

At the stall Kannamma is sitting on an upturned crate. She stands up when she sees the car. Selvam holds out forty rupees. Kannamma takes the money, but she doesn’t measure the jasmine at once. She is looking past him, at the back seat, with a little line between her eyebrows.

“Who is it for?” she says.

“Madam wants.”

Kannamma bends and looks right into the back of the car. She looks for a long moment. Then she measures the jasmine, cuts it with her teeth and hands it in, and she does not take her eyes off the back seat the whole time.

Trip cancelled by rider · 03:01
You received a new rating! ★★★★★
Congratulations! Your rating went up to 4.88. Keep it up, Selvam! 🚗

* * *

By the fourth night he can smell jasmine in the car in the daytime.

His wife smells it first, when he drives her to her sister’s place in Tambaram on Sunday. She doesn’t say anything. She sniffs once, very obviously, and looks out of her window, and he says, “A passenger had flowers,” and she says, “Hm,” which costs him four hundred rupees in mutton later to fix.

He finds petals in the crease of the back seat, gone brown and soft. He hoovers it at the petrol bunk on OMR. He hangs a new air freshener, lemon, and sprays Odonil on the seat covers until his eyes water. The next morning, opening the car, the jasmine is the first thing that comes out, as if it had been waiting behind the door.

On the fifth night, after the drop, he goes back to Phase II. He doesn’t know why. He parks outside Gate 3 and the security guard comes out of his little cabin, an old man in a navy sweater with a lathi he uses to lean on.

“Nobody works here, sir,” the guard says. “Phase II is stopped. Two years back.”

“I’ve been picking up a madam from this gate. Night shift. Long hair.”

The guard doesn’t say anything for a bit. He looks at the gate, and at the lamp over it.

“There was one girl,” he says finally. “From the old company, the one that had the first two floors. She was waiting here for her cab. Late, after some release. She waited one hour, more. The cab app kept saying driver is coming, driver is coming. Then it said cancelled.” He shrugs. “Morning they found her near the marsh. That side.”

“What happened to her?”

“Who knows what happened. Police came, went.” He scratches his neck. “She had malli in her hair. The newspaper said that. I don’t know why they wrote it.”

* * *

The next time, Kannamma won’t sell to him.

He stops at the stall at five past three and she is already standing, with her bucket of water in both hands, and before he can say anything she steps forward and throws it at the car. Over the bonnet, against the windscreen, across the back window. The wipers come on by themselves, or he must have knocked them.

“Go,” she says. “Go, go. Don’t come here again with that.”

“Akka, what…”

“Every night you are buying for the back seat. Empty back seat.” She bangs the roof with her palm. “You think I’m blind? Don’t buy her malli. Once you give, she’ll keep coming to ask. They want it because it’s the last thing they had on. Mohini, that one. Go somewhere else and die.”

In the mirror, the rider is sitting very straight with her hands in her lap. Her plait is bare.

“It’s okay, anna,” she says gently. “Tomorrow you bring. You know the stall in Perungudi also.”

He drives her to the marsh. He doesn’t remember most of the drive. She gets out at the end of the mud road and walks into the dark beyond the headlights and he sits there with the engine running until his hands stop.

Trip cancelled by rider · 03:19
You received a new rating! ★★★★★

* * *

He decides on a Thursday.

He has done the arithmetic. If he goes offline at two every night he loses maybe three hundred a night, nine thousand a month, and the incentive. They will manage. His wife’s sister owes them. He will do days, airport runs, whatever.

At 2:20 he is at the Sholinganallur junction, at the red light, and he opens the app and slides the green button to go offline.

You are on a Night Streak! 🔥 Going offline now will reset your bonus progress. Are you sure?

He taps Go offline.

The button slides back to green.

He taps again. It slides back. He holds it down. He force-closes the app and opens it, and it opens straight to the map with his little car on it, online, and a banner across the top.

Auto-accept is ON. You’ll get trips automatically to keep your streak going.

He did not turn on auto-accept. He goes to settings, and the toggle is grey, and when he presses it nothing happens, and there is a line under it in small letters he has never seen: Managed by your rider.

He switches the phone off. He holds the power button until the screen goes black and the little vibration tells him it’s dead. He drops it in the glove box and slams it, and he turns left, away from OMR, away from Phase II, and drives home to Kannagi Nagar with the radio on loud, some late-night Ilaiyaraaja programme, all the windows down.

He parks in the lane outside his house. It is 3:05. Everything is quiet, a dog asleep under the neighbour’s Activa, the drain smell, a light on in someone’s bathroom. He sits for a minute because his legs are shaking. The radio is off. He doesn’t remember switching it off.

The car is full of jasmine.

Not a little. As thick as the first night, as if a whole bucket from Kannamma’s stall were in the back seat. He doesn’t look in the mirror. He sits with both hands on the wheel and looks straight ahead at the gate of his own house, and in the glove box, the phone he switched off begins to buzz.

He opens it. The screen is bright.

Trip completed · 02:40 – 03:04
Vertex Techno Park Phase II → Kannagi Nagar (rider changed drop)
Earnings for this trip: ₹0

You received a new rating! ★★★★★
Rider comment: Very safe driver anna 🙏 Thank you for bringing me home. No malli today, so I’ll take from your house. Your wife keeps it in the fridge, no?