The last taxi ride kcls.org full#

He was still a cadet at the Military Academy in Chandigarh, and on one stifling hot Sunday he wandered into a cinema, bought a ticket, and sank down into a seat, enjoying the air- conditioning. The woman in the white dress is looking out of the window, lost in thought, biting down on her plump lower lip.Ī memory floods through him. The taxi is caught in the seething, rumbling flow of traffic and Ranjit feels an equivalent disturbance inside himself. After two long years of driving a cab here, the city’s streets are burned into his brain. He nods in acknowledgement and pulls out onto Lower Broadway, thinking of the quickest route: right onto Prince, swing over onto West Houston, cut through the Village on Sixth Avenue, and then a straight shot through Midtown to Central Park West. I know this woman, he thinks, then corrects himself. Her voice is low and modulated, but there are Indian undertones to it, as familiar as the voice of a long-forgotten lover. “Seventy-second and Central Park West, please.” Her crisp white dress reveals bare brown shoulders, her face is obscured by large oval sunglasses, and her glossy black hair cascades to her shoulders. One long leg enters the cab, wearing a white wedge-heeled sandal, each toenail painted a perfect crimson. The crazies, of course, want to talk and talk.

The last taxi ride kcls.org full#

Seasoned New Yorkers barely even notice Ranjit’s red turban and full beard, but out-of-towners gape at him, reassured only by the hack license posted on the plexiglass partition. Ranjit watches the woman get into the cab, the same way he watches all his passengers, looking for signs of trouble. It clicks open and the cool air-conditioning leaks out, replaced by the smell of hot asphalt, sweat, and the faint, pungent odor of melting bubble gum. Horns blare and a bicycle messenger shouts Asshole! as he screeches to a stop.Ī bare brown arm reaches for the door handle.

Ranjit Singh sees the woman in the white dress waving at him from the other side of Broadway and swerves his yellow cab across a lane of traffic. The place is a ghost town, thirteen thousand cabs desperately roaming the streets in search of a fare.