drivers

I quit the office at 4:30, exit the building. I approach the taxi’s passenger door. The driver asks my name through the part-open window. Yes, that’s me, I say, plonk my airport bag on the back seat, open the front door, slide my laptop bag between my calves and the seat.

“I thought you will be Asian,” he says, shows the docket with Lee on it. “How you spell?” I give him the English spelling of my name. He pulls out and we make for the airport through early peak hour traffic. I ask every taxi driver where he hails from. Italy.

As his story unfolds I calculate he’s my age, though he looks years older, belly bigger, jowls, blotched skin. He came here in 1969 to avoid the army, married a German to his family’s chagrin. I tell him my own story of rejecting conscription, my day in court as a pacifist. We agree that politicians should fight each other hand to hand, not send boys to war.

He’s from Abruzzo, a mountainous region east of Rome on the Adriatic. At 16 he leapt up a rocky mountain like a goat, got himself stranded, no way down. Out of the blue a shepherd he can’t see yells at him, tells him he’s a silly cunt to get stuck like that. He must trust the shepherd’s guiding voice: where to put his feet, when and in which direction to jump. We laugh.

He drops me at Qantas’s door. I wish him luck.

My driver in Adelaide is Raja. I ask if he is Indian as we pull out of the terminal. Pakistani, he says. So you hate Indians, I venture. Yes, indeed, he does. I ask about the Pakistan cricket team. He doesn’t like them either: too many players are cheats and bribe-takers. He likes Australian cricketers: they’re honest. I tell him I don’t like them: honest, sure, but they bully opponents.

I ask why India and Pakistan can’t produce decent soccer teams with a billion people to choose from. He gives me ten minutes of demographics, sporting and cultural history, mentions of doctors and engineers. Mercy: the trip is short.

My driver back to the airport three days later is Thanh, middle-aged Vietnamese, long greying pony-tail, sharp as cut glass, a finger at six o’clock on the wheel his only movement. Viv and I debrief after our three-day national project officers’ meeting. Thanh listens, laughs, comments in precise unaccented English.

My driver from Tulla to Croydon is Indian. I sit silent as he races through the suburbs, Olympics on the radio. My curiosity has limits.

Rock on.