The transition of a woman cab driver in the novel comes as a fresh take on the politics of cross-dressing; through this, Padmanabhan raises critical concerns of gender dysphoria
In Manjula Padmanabhan’s latest novel Taxi (Hachette), we follow a woman who provides private cab services to other women in the wee hours of the night. Madam Sen, also known as Maddy, has left her life in the US to return to her home city, Delhi. She sees Delhi as an escape from the tragedy she left behind. She takes drunken, battered women to and from their homes. She tries to keep it professional, but every now and then, her silence is taken for granted. Her financial situation has worsened. She is three months behind on rent. Her landlady is harassing her day in and day out until she is finally evicted without any notice.
The novel’s setting is certainly appealing. It seems to deal with the underbelly of Delhi, but then it retracts and becomes about something else altogether. Padmanabhan surprises her readers by giving a very interesting character study of a woman who is intent on not settling down. From the beginning, the chaos of Maddy’s life is let loose. She feels concerned for her ‘night-shifter’ young girls seeing them bruised. And in the next moment, she is barging into their houses, screaming hoarsely for their dues. She smokes cigarettes lying in her cramped apartment in one minute. In the next, she is having to battle her landlady. But her life takes a shocking turn when she receives a call from a lawyer.
Transition as a plot device
Maddy is being evicted. The only option the lawyer has for her is an offer of a job. She hears him out and then is taken to a secluded villa on the outskirts of Delhi. She has to be a chauffeur to a white British woman — Verity. The job places another demand. She has to dress up as a man and be a chauffeur to a much older man from the same villa, too.
Maddy is bedazzled by the offer. She is aware she is not thinking straight anymore. And yet she cannot help indulging in the jitters the idea of cosplaying provides to her. Soon, Maddy is no more Madam Sen only. She is transitioning from Maddy to Madan Lal Singh when duty demands.
Padmanabhan’s use of transition as a plot device has been an overused trope in Bollywood for years on end. No wonder the idea of the novel had occurred to the writer in the mid-1990s, as she writes in the acknowledgment. I was initially quite weary of it, wondering if this would not be another Bollywood melodrama.
Admittedly, Padmanabhan was more sensitive to it than what Bollywood has manufactured. Unlike the hilarity and banality of Bollywood actor’s male impersonation, Maddy’s transition comes as a fresh take on the politics of cross-dressing. Padmanabhan raises critical concerns of gender dysphoria through Maddy’s transition into Madan. The author fleshes out Maddy’s panic about being Madan, encountering everyday life through his eyes, being gazed at as Madan.
It discombobulates her. She pees on the road as Madan. She enjoys the freedom it provides: to be able to pee in public without having to squat. She walks down the night streets of Delhi feeling nonplussed by the fear had she still been Maddy. Things come to a boiling point when she is approached by a fellow driver sexually as a man.
The lines between what separated her from Maddy begins to blur as she finds herself being one with both. The author’s astute observation of such details really brings the character’s authenticity to light. Despite its melodramatic tone at various instances, the story is swiftly picked through its plots and driven to its unprecedented destination.
The transition
The transition, Maddy realises, is only one part of the job. The other demands keep sprouting out as she resumes her duty while driving her bosses around. She is let into their private life without a warning. She does not know what to do with Verity’s doubts on the man’s loyalty to her. She remains silent at the man’s confession to her about his weaknesses for Verity.
She doubts whether it was intentionally told to her with some ulterior motives. Or was it truly their loneliness that drove them to make candid confessions to a driver. Soon, she starts unravelling too with her employers as her duty takes her further into the lurch of being a driver who is in perpetual movement.
Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger has been hailed as that one Indian book of a driver serving his rich clientele in Delhi. It became a global bestseller for providing a searing analysis of the Indian class struggle amidst caste, gender, and the urban-rural dynamics.
Padmanabhan’s book is written in the same vein but it does it with more humour, more entertainment, and less unnecessary rage bolstering the male ego. The presence of a female protagonist who is looking for something new and feels unsettled changes the usual narrative where a lower working-class man is in a state of constant rage, bearing the weight of his aspirations.
The story of a woman has an entirely different effect on the paper and the author has done that rather well. Maddy is not Balram Halwai because she speaks English. She is educated in an American university. She wears FabIndia clothes and drinks coffee without sugar. She is tall, slim and beautiful even as a man. The deadpan humour interspersing the social commentary makes Maddy’s story more real.
However, the book can read like fascination-with-the-other in many instances. The ‘hunger’ Maddy feels when she was sexually approached by a fellow driver as a man and not a woman. The poverty she has to see and embody. The peace she hopes to find in an apparently dystopic Indian city, unlike her American life. They otherize characters, cultures, modes of identity. Often, I was left unanswered as to whether these were truly the author’s intentions, or if they did not appear as the author had imagined them.
The breathless cadence
While on the gender plane, the fascination can move in the direction of hyperbole. At the level of class, it lies between being faintly unassuming, or overdone. Padmanabhan’s story may not be the running narrative of a lower caste, male, uneducated driver in India, but it surely hits the core of what could be if the gender, class and caste identities were reversed.
Certainly, Maddy is not a character one can easily forget as one has not forgotten Balram from Adiga’s novel so many years since its publication. There is definitely something to writing about characters who are in constant motion — both socially and spatially. The uncertainty of their lives flares open a saga of events moving in unexpected directions. The immediacy of their departure and arrival streamlines a set of characters who may be vastly different and yet agree to come together in the object of the driver’s control.
Taxi is a plot-heavy novel driven by Maddy Madam Sen alone. It is a book that will keep you on the edge of your seat, eager to know what is to come next. Padmanabhan’s writing is enjoyable. It is in tune with her characters and their moods. It gets rich and detailed between symbolic pauses. And it propels itself through scenes with a breathless cadence, deftly using the rush to tell the story of a cab driver who wants to remain scattered, like the city through which she navigates diverse destinations.
