The Weight of Waiting: Suspended Mobility and Deferred Aspirations Amongst Cab Drivers in Hyderabad

Writing Worlds: A Note on Data and Methods

I write the rest of the article in an ethnographic mode, weaving in fieldnotes with interview data. The core of the data is drawn from long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted over several periods in Hyderabad between 2017 and 2021. I used unstructured and semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations as well as analysis of news media to understand how drivers of various social backgrounds understand the culture of driving in the city. I specifically interviewed drivers of app-based cab services such as Uber and Ola. Participants were recruited at random as well as by snowball sampling methods. For two-thirds of the interviews, I took long cab trips across the diagonal length of the city to interview a driver. This kind of an ‘on the move’ ethnography was necessitated to capture the experience of driving in the city—drivers often made insightful comments about road conditions, traffic, law-enforcement and other motor vehicles. These observational nuggets were critical in adding depth to their interview data. One-third of the interviews were done-off the road-at public places such as chai shops or transport union offices. All the interviews were recorded over a simple recording device and lasted 40 minutes on average. This brevity was partly because drivers often worked for 12–14 hours a day and did not have the time for longer interviews. To make up for this, I did follow-up interviews and relied significantly on observational fieldnotes.

While the larger project is based on data collected over interviews with more than 50 drivers, in this specific article, I only draw on interviews and conversational data with seven cab drivers. I do this because I adopt a longitudinal approach and trace the ways in which my respondents’ lives have changed in the years I have known them (O’Reilly, 2012; Saldaña, 2003). A longitudinal approach means that the number of respondents is less salient to the analysis compared to the richness of the data collected over time and the reflexivity that the ethnographer adopts in analysis. It allows me to track drivers’ self-understandings, before and after the critical event of a pandemic that fundamentally altered their working conditions. Not wanting to endanger my participants, I did not conduct in-person fieldwork in 2020 and instead relied on phone calls and WhatsApp texts.

The seven participants are all men. Five of them are migrants, having moved to Hyderabad in the past decade. The average age of the sample is 37 with the youngest driver being 22-years-old and the oldest, 46-years-old. Five of the drivers are married and four have children. Four of them are Hindu, two are Muslim and one is Christian. These interviews were all conducted, transcribed and coded by me, and almost all were conducted in a mix of Telugu, Hindi and Dakhni with a smattering of ‘Indian English’.

My positionality as an upper-class, upper-caste woman doing an advanced degree in the United States presumably shaped their perceptions of me. While my positionality mattered all along, it mattered most during the onslaught of COVID-19. For instance, I moved ‘up’ professionally, despite the pandemic, got very easy access to a leading vaccine and suffered no economic loss while my interlocutors suffered financially, materially and medically. This stark contrast underscores the inherently unequal dynamic of fieldwork and how no amount of a cursory accounting of one’s social position can quite grasp the enormity of the inequality.

City Time: Itinerant Aspirations and Amicable Interruptions Before the Pandemic

On a cloudy day in February 2019, I find myself interviewing Narayana, a Uber driver in his mid-30s. Narayana clicks his tongue, curses under his breath and honks with sharp frustration: beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeep! We have been stuck at the same spot for about 12 minutes now. Twelve minutes do not seem like a lot when one is moving, but being stuck in traffic makes each second stretch unto eternity. I comment on how unusual it is to be stuck like this—it is three in the afternoon, hardly the ‘peak hour’ that everyone dreads. Narayana shrugs and offers a theory: ‘It is probably the CM’s convoy. Or some other VIP. Whenever any big shot travels, they make us all wait’. The resentment in his voice is clear: ‘These politicians make everyone wait. Whether you have a BMW or a Tata Indica, everyone has to wait’. I code this in my mind as a critique of the political class and its capacity to exert power through making people wait. Being made to wait is, after all, a clear exercise of, and a reminder of, power (Auyero, 2012; Bourdieu, 2000; Schwartz, 1974). The honking, then, could be read as not just a ‘personal’ response to Narayana’s growing irritation at being made to wait but a sonorous political critique; it is a complaint.

We wait in silence. I had already been interviewing Narayana and my recorder is still recording our conversation, but neither of us is saying anything anymore. I reason with myself that asking questions when Narayana is clearly irritated is not necessary; if anything, the silence of this long pause in the interview says a lot about how being in motion provides an affective atmosphere that keeps our conversation moving. We are physically and conversationally stuck.

Narayana begins to fiddle with his phone, quietly showing me pictures of his family—a wife, two young children, an aged mother and a younger brother. They all live in Mahbubnagar, not too far from Hyderabad, while Narayana lives in one of the many single rooms at the edges of the city, often leased out to migrants like him. In 2017, he decided to stop working as a car mechanic in Mahbubnagar and moved to Hyderabad, took out a loan to purchase a car to drive for Uber and began leading a ‘split life’. On most weeks, he drives for about 14 hours a day for four or five days at a stretch and then goes to his family for the weekend. His week is structured around how much money ‘the app lets him make’ (his words), which, in turn, determines how much time he can spend with his family.

As the traffic eases up and the vehicles begin to restlessly move forward, I comment that I am in awe of drivers like him since traffic jams are so regular Hyderabad: ‘I would get too restless’. I say it with a sense of pity—a pity that reeks of my own bias towards the neoliberal allure of the mirage of an ‘instant life’—one that is characterised by speed, seamlessness and mobility (Bissell, 2007). He smiles kindly and says, ‘What to do, madam? Not like I have a choice’. After a momentary pause, Narayana goes on:

But being a driver means being ready to wait. Waiting ¹ for a customer, waiting for incentive, ² waiting for traffic to clear … that is the job. That is life! Waiting is not always a bad thing. Waiting means that I am going somewhere, that there is something to do. Waiting means that something is going to happen. It may take time, but something will happen. Waiting is not like stopping. Stopping is different. Aagi podam. And waiting is different. Eduru choodadam. I do not mind waiting. Even if it takes time, one is bound to reach the destination.

Waiting, in fact, is most of his job. Still, I ask him what he means by how waiting is all about ‘something’ that is going to happen, and he rattles off a list of moments in the day when he waits: waiting to be matched with a potential commuter; waiting for the traffic to clear; waiting for a commuter; waiting to time his meals in a way that he does not lose out on potential rides; waiting to do enough rides for the ‘incentive’; waiting to make more than he spends on diesel; waiting to stretch out and give his tired body and his aching back a rest; waiting to go see his children once every week or so; waiting to do a video call with his family at night. Sometimes, distance is measured in time.

Thinking through the labour of taxi driving, Sharma (2014) argues that how, when and why taxi drivers speed up, and how, when and why they wait needs to be understood in relation to the temporal lives of their customers. Drawing on examples of drivers managing their daily routines keeping in mind the rhythms of the paying customer, Sharma notes that drivers engage in ‘temporal labour’ in working within a temporal infrastructure while being cast outside it. Their day is structured around the demands of customers who are often living or trying to live the life of instant, seamless, comfortable and convenient mobility. This is certainly true of Narayana. He wakes up at 4 am every day and heads straight to Gachibowli, the heart of the IT sector, so that he can drive airport-bound persons (who often tell him to ‘overspeed’ on the expressway). And he certainly eats dinner much after the emergent Hyderabadi nightlife in the posh neighbourhood of Jubilee Hills has been adequately milked.

But in the case of migrants like Narayana, these temporal logics need also be understood in relation to the emotional and logistical demands of long-distance intimacies, the futurity of aspiration and hope. After all, he is also waiting in other ways that are more abstract or removed from the immediacy of his work. That Narayana clubbed together the various moments of waiting and, in doing so, traversed the personal and the professional with little regard to some conceptual boundary separating the two belies the perceived ubiquity of waiting as a practice, as a habit. Waiting also framed his aspirations. For instance, he says that he is waiting to repay the loan on his car, waiting to make enough money to ‘secure’ his son’s college education and his daughter’s ‘wedding fund’, waiting to move his family to the city and waiting for the promise of upward mobility to launch people like him into financial stability. In Narayana’s words, he needs to wait in traffic now so that in a future time he does not wait forever to realise his life goals. Narayana understands, or at least, articulates, that the different textures of time and the weighted distributions of waiting are in relation to one another. Theorising the sociology of time, Pierre Bourdieu (2000) makes a useful distinction between an ‘abstract future’—a body of time existing at a remove from daily life that one thinks of or fantasises about—and ‘the forthcoming’—the mundane and immediate consequences of routinised actions. Narayana’s articulation of time, however, reveals how when it comes to the labour of driving, these two conceptions of time coexist and depend on one another. The ‘abstract future’ keeps Narayana going and keeps him waiting daily. Do we read Narayana’s rather candid and somewhat philosophical approach to waiting as endurance, fortitude or blasé resignation? I argue that Narayana views it as an inevitability, but this is not the same as resignation. Waiting, to Narayana, is inevitable, but it is not an issue and neither is Narayana blasé about it. The sharp and irate honking certainly debunks any notion of cynical resignation. But to him, waiting is not residual or lost time (see Jeffrey, 2008).

Of course, not everyone shared Narayana’s relatively nonchalant view on waiting. For instance, Prakash, who moved to Hyderabad from a village near Jagtial, theorises the relationship between time and social mobility in a slightly different register. Twenty-three years old, Prakash did not drive his own car for Uber. He instead had an arrangement that is common in the city: he drove for Uber on a rented car; he paid Ramesh (who owned several cars and leased them out) ₹400 every day. Whatever he made over and above that was his to keep. Prakash made this arrangement because he did not have any money to invest in a new car. His plan was to make enough money over the next decade to eventually move back to his village, invest the money in a small business and ‘settle down’. This sort of a ‘low investment’ and flexible model of app-based driving worked particularly well for young men like Prakash who came to the city with no assets in hand (unlike others, like Shankar, who were able to sell farmland to buy a car to drive for Uber). For Prakash, earning money in Hyderabad was not just an aspirational desire for him alone; it was also a means to marry the girl he has been in love with. Sumana, his childhood sweetheart, belongs to a relatively higher caste and class context than him. In Prakash’s words, the only way he could impress her family was by making enough money to assure them that she would have a good life.

But unlike Narayana, Prakash talked about speed—restless in his driving, he would honk a lot and take shortcuts to avoid crowded roads and even break traffic rules to get to his destination quicker. He hardly took breaks in his workday and often lurked around busy neighbourhoods for quick rides. An agile young man, he drove for close to 14–16 hours a day—far more than other drivers I spoke with. In his words,

I love driving but I am very restless. I want to finish as many rides as possible and make as much money as I can. If not now, then when? I start early in the day, take a break in the afternoon, and drive again until late. Some days, I drive so much that when I go home, my body still feels like it is in the car.

To Prakash, the pace of his day was very closely linked with how quickly he could climb the economic ladder. In a sense, he was the ideal subject for companies like Uber that hinge on making work more like a game; he responded eagerly and enthusiastically to the dangling carrot of incentives. Prakash viewed waiting and traffic jams as a waste of time, as disruptive and irritating. However, he also admitted that it was just a part of his work and that to become a driver, he simply had to learn to wait. Coming from a village, he was just not used to the temporal rhythms of a big city, but once he understood the ebbs and flows of traffic and once his body got used to the constant need to pause and the overuse of the clutch, he did not even pay attention to it. His increasing capacity to wait, he said, had made him a ‘city driver’.

His personal story of migration (with all the markings of a Telugu film) was revealed to me when I noticed how often Prakash’s phone rang during our cab interview. Prakash explained that Sumana messages him and calls him all the time. In between pickups and drop-offs and in the empty time between rides, he talked to Sumana. Sometimes, he even got scolded by customers for talking on the phone while driving. But driving was also one of the few professions in which he could pull off this constant communication, and Prakash knew that. He had never wanted to work in a place where his time would be owned by the employer, and neither did he have the educational profile that would have landed him a well-paying office job to please his future in-laws. He had to pursue money-making avenues that not only privileged his practical skills like driving, but also his desire to ‘be his own boss’. According to him, if it were not for Uber (or Ola), he would have found it hard to get a job—one where he could have autonomy over his time. And he was able to do timepass maatalu (casual conversations, sweet nothings) with his sweetheart in the interstices of his rides. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed being an Uber driver. In a very real sense, Uber and Ola had provided Prakash a concrete pathway to aspire.

Writing about the experience of time in transit, David Bissell observes that, ‘when focusing on the corporeal engagement with generic anticipation over larger temporal periods, the body itself is of course engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms during the course of this waiting’ (Bissell, 2007, p. 282). The everyday waiting in transit, in traffic, in between rides, and so on—the suspension that one might read as a waste of time—is hardly passive. It is an active production—of aspiration, of socialites and of intimacies, all critically linked to social mobility. But that this interrelationship would be complicated by a pandemic that would induce a sense of chronic waiting all over the world was unexpected. What did the lockdown do to these previously held conceptions of time? What did it do the aspirational fuel that drove Narayana and Prakash forward? What became of their incomes, and also, equally importantly, of their capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004)?

Lockdown Time: Suspense, Suspension, Suspicion

It is mid-May 2020. Narayana is back in Mahbubnagar. On the phone, he tells me that he is bleeding money; he has no income and he is dipping into the savings he had built painstakingly. As soon as the national lockdown was announced, he drove his Swift Dzire back to Mahbubnagar precisely because he anticipated getting stuck in Hyderabad. He says that he is happy being with his family and not stranded in Hyderabad, like some of the other drivers he knows, but I sense his irritation about being stuck in Mahbubnagar. Waiting, as he had put it, is not the same as stopping, but this situation of going back to where he came from, without a ‘return ticket’ so to speak, felt a lot like stopping. His work had, for all practical purposes, stopped. He tells me that he is hoping for some leniency in repaying his car loan (which he does eventually and thankfully manages to get) while lamenting: ‘God knows when everything will be normal again. God knows when I will be back in Hyderabad. God knows when I will drive again. God knows when I will make money again’. The uncertainty he articulates is reminiscent of Shankar’s, whose fearful questions I started this article with. I remark that the government should have handled this better. He does not offer anything of a critique in response. Instead, he says the following:

Everything feels upside down. From when you visited last in 2019, even Uber started giving more rides and incentives. I thought that finally things would be taking off. Now it feels like whatever I had planned in my life, all of that will get delayed.

In Mahbubnagar, Narayana is not waiting alone. His unmarried brothers live with him, all waiting with a sense of fear and vanishing savings. Both his brothers have small businesses in Mahbubnagar that are shut. As the highest earning member of his family, he tells me that the number of mouths he must feed has only gone up. I ask how they were passing time. I can only imagine that his wife’s work at home has increased during this prolonged suspension. He tells me that he has been watching spiritual–religious discourses by a local baba. He would always make time to watch these discourses on his phone even while driving, but now he is able to watch more. ‘Sometimes I think this situation all over the world is God testing all of us. Our scriptures mention Kaliyuga. ³ This is it!’, he says. My mind travels to when he had talked about ‘waiting’ in a starkly different register—and for good reason. Waiting with a vague horizon of possibility is very different from waiting in the face of something (seemingly) incalculable in its scale and scope. This waiting—enacted or institutionalised by the state—feels like an act of God. The ‘on the move’ waiting that was part of driving work and the ‘abstract’ and long-term waiting that characterised their quest for financial security had been displaced by a waiting that seemed divinely ordained. After all, waiting for a promise to be fulfilled is very different from waiting to be let out of a cage.

As with Narayana, even within this period of utter uncertainty and limbo, there were articulations of resilience amongst my other interlocutors. Senthil, a driver in his mid-40s would often send me WhatsApp forwards of motivational Biblical verses such as, ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer’ and ‘Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you’. Often accompanied by a string of emojis, these messages could be read simply as the digital clutter of WhatsApp forwards. I do not mean to overstate the importance of, or analyse, the semantic content of these messages. My point is that the feeling of being in limbo was met with frustration and agony and produced these digital traces of endurance, resilience and inspiration. Senthil even articulated that while he was getting quite restless for the lockdown to end, he was trying to not get bogged down or ‘too negative’ as that would make the waiting a more acute form of suffering. And the ‘pep talk’ offered by the nuggets that he forwarded to me was one way to make sense of the endless waiting. Narayana, too, talked about finding comfort in spirituality. For Senthil and Narayana, waiting—and waiting patiently—seemed to be the only way to deal with a sense of loss, immobility and suspension. ‘Lockdown time’ exacted a different kind of waiting: one that had less to do with the temporal rhythms of their customers, of the city and more to do with a sense of suspense. According to Procupez (2015), patience is a practice of waiting that is tending towards a future. With the lockdown and coronavirus spreading through the world, the very concept of futurity itself was a matter of contention.

Yet my interlocutors also very subtly articulated that patience can exist alongside simmering frustration and genuine despair, and in doing so, they turned waiting less into an erosion of the present and more into a site of possibility and self-making (Simone, 2007). They were by no means mere consumers of motivational or spiritual content around positivity and patience. Both Narayana and Senthil, as well as Prakash and Saleem—the president of the cab drivers’ association—turned the period of waiting into one of mobilising social networks to procure financial relief for cab drivers like themselves. The energy and synergy of mobilising efforts cannot be understated. Narayana, for example, ended our phone call by telling me how he is trying to ensure that the poorer families in his neighbourhood have enough food. As he put it, ‘[a]ll we can do is help one another, that is all’. As Jocelyn Chua observes in a study of anti-suicidal self-making efforts in Kerala:

Contrary to the social agent who avidly propels himself into the forthcoming as an expectant and anticipating subject, the cultivation of skilful waiting proffers psychological fortitude and balance as responsible insurance against the ontological insecurities of everyday life. What is at stake in learning to wait, then, is no less than the rightful attachments individuals ought to have to their everyday worlds as an unfolding of social and material possibility. (Chua, 2011, p. 127)

Craig Jeffrey (2008) contends that waiting can sometimes be interpreted through the lens of heightened suspense. Through his own fieldwork amongst unemployed young men in Uttar Pradesh, Jeffrey notes that due to protracted waiting, the object of longing—a government job—came to dominate the thoughts and actions of his interlocutors. The suspense of the possibility of getting the government job fuelled fantastical attachments to it and eventually led to eroding a sense of the present. The wait was ad infinitum in the hope of that an eventual sweet victory embodied by a sarkari naukri (government employment) (Marwah, 2021). But this experience of suspense was different for my interlocutors. First, neither Senthil nor Narayana are unemployed. But neither are they salaried and nor could they put their skills to use. During the lockdown, for all practical purposes, they were out of a job. They experienced a sense of suspension in their lives, and the heightened suspense about their futures was less about attaining a distant desire and more about going back to a normal that they were used to. The suspense was less about what is to come and more about when they could go back to being big city drivers. As migrants, the return to their place of origin ‘without’ fulfilling the aspirations they had set out with was itself a source of tension (Govinda, 2020; Gray, 2011). Would they return to the city? What would they be returning to?

The ‘New Normal’: Deferred Aspirations and Tense Futures

It is January 2021; I am back home with my parents in Hyderabad. My father is less agile now. Heightened weakness, flailing lung capacity and a subtle toll on his mental health—some after-effects of COVID-19 in October 2020. Things in Hyderabad seem ‘normal’. People are moving on. Friends are meeting at cafes and bars; my interlocutors in the traffic police department are asking me to visit; Uber and Ola have been back in action since June 2020. It is almost as if I could continue with my fieldwork. As if no critical or chronic event has created a paradigm shift. But this is just an illusion that some can afford to indulge and an illusion that is shattered in a few weeks when the second wave hits the unprepared shores of a long decrepit public health infrastructure.

I am a bit hesitant to move around too much, I worry of infecting—and being infected by—my interlocutors. On a pleasant January afternoon, however, I call Narayana. I learn that he contracted COVID-19 in November. His whole family did. All of them, except a distant uncle, survived it. While he has recovered, he cannot drive like before. He takes breaks now. He feels tired all the time, and yet he must work more now. He is dangerously out of money, so he needs to drive more and drive longer. But he tells me that his body is applying automatic brakes on his capacity. He now plans to go home to Mahbubnagar only once every two months. He has decided to look for extra work on weekends. Someday, he tells me, he will be able to bring his family to Hyderabad. His plan was to bring them here this year, but it has been derailed. He thought he would have paid off his car loan by now. His aspirations of being unencumbered by financial burdens are deferred. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

Starting June 2020, India witnessed a gradual ‘unlocking’—fairly decentralised with different states and cities making decisions depending on the local situation. While COVID-19 continued to surge, the wider consensus seemed to be that a reopening of the country was needed to focus on economic revival. The nation, political leaders surmised, simply could not afford to continue with the lockdown. Yet the question of what this gradual reopening would mean for cab drivers persisted. While the resumption of movement within cities was a colossal relief to my interlocutors, they were still sceptical of what this could mean for the business itself.

In October 2020, Ali, in his late 20s, who had just started driving for Uber a few months before the lockdown, told me as follows:

Auto rickshaws are being preferred because they are open, so people are less afraid of the virus …. I even put a plastic screen in between the passenger seat and my seat. But there is still a lot of hesitation. Plus, there is no Uber Pool or Ola Share, so customers who would take those options because they are cheap, do not anymore.

For most cab drivers, the biggest fear is the shallow customer base during COVID-19. ‘Business is down’ was the refrain all around. Truth be told, since my fieldwork in 2018, business has always been ‘down’—a phrase that is scattered across my fieldnotes. According to drivers, Uber and Ola have systematically created a condition where cab drivers make disproportionately low money for the hours they put in, and there have been several strikes and campaigns in India protesting this. ⁴ But this time around, cab drivers suggested that it is not just Uber or Ola that are to be blamed. There was just an overall lack of demand for local trips. Prakash, for instance, mentioned that IT workers were continuing to work from home and this meant that demand, especially during what used to be considered ‘peak hour’ traffic, was low. And members of the avidly consuming ‘new middle class’ (Fernandes, 2006) were quite simply ‘not’ going out. In other words, the paying customers whose temporal rhythms the drivers had to sync with were spending most of their week at home. Gachibowli and HITEC City, the famed IT corridor in Hyderabad, were eerily empty.

By February 2021, Prakash was back to driving the rental car for Uber, and business was slowly picking up. Yet, as one newspaper article reported, it was now ‘more work, less money’ (Bhattacharya, 2021). People were beginning to go to malls and restaurants. And Prakash had made some money on outstation trips. But he still seemed a bit glum. Explaining how the pandemic had changed the city’s vehicular landscape, he said the following:

In Gachibowli, before the pandemic, there were always a lot of traffic jams. In fact, from Gachibowli to all the way around Madhapur, Jubilee Hills … I used to hate driving there back then, but it would also mean lots of potential rides. Right now, that part of Hyderabad is just buildings and very few people, so [though there are] no traffic jam now, there are no customers also, Traffic jams mean that people are coming out more … a good thing for drivers like me. Waiting in traffic jams is better than waiting for rides.

When I started fieldwork in 2017, I never thought I would hear a positive framing of traffic jams, particularly from Prakash who had always lamented the time wasted in traffic jams. One need not take his valuation at face value, but what matters here is just what the traffic jam indicates. It indicates to Prakash a return to the normal, to a familiar certainty. Prakash was one of the cab drivers who had not moved back to Jagtial during the lockdown. He stayed on, doing sundry work like delivering medicines and food on a borrowed motorcycle. While Prakash had managed to be nimble-footed during the lockdown, he too had suffered in that he had to recalibrate how quickly he could make money. He had to slow down.

This time, however, he did not bring up Sumana. When I asked about her, he said she was fine and that she was waiting for him to visit. But he seemed a bit worried, not as eager to talk about Sumana or his plans of marrying her. He muttered about her parents actively looking for a more ‘suitable’ groom; the pandemic had not stalled the stifling of her agency. Meanwhile, Prakash’s mother had fallen sick, though not with COVID-19. He was now also looking for a second job for money for her medical expenses. He had managed to find work at a dairy farm, driving a commercial minivan every morning at 4 AM—ferrying gallons of milk. After doing that for about three hours, he would begin driving for Uber. The pay for this secondary gig, he told me, was very low, but with the pandemic affecting so many jobs, there were eager young men looking for jobs. He had to hustle. Prakash had gone from aspiring—imagining and working towards a future—to focussing much more on what he could control in the now. Similarly, Shankar drew a distinction between aspiring and working:

Earlier, I used to keep thinking about the future. I had many plans. During the lockdown, it became like ‘everyday thinking’. Everyone was feeling this way, I think. It is not about getting some disease and dying, it was more about whether things will become same again …. But what to do? As it is, there are no jobs. Income or no income, customer or no customer, at least we are moving.

While Narayana, Ali, Shankar and Prakash were back to driving, Senthil had stopped driving for Uber. He now worked as a chauffeur for an elite family which meant that he did other household chores, along with driving. In a sense, Senthil was back to a job that he had done prior to becoming an Uber driver. And since he had managed to pay off the loan on his car, he did not feel the sense of urgency felt by Narayana, Ali or Shankar. He decided to lease his somewhat rickety Tata Indica out to Afsar, his friend’s son, to drive for Uber and Ola. Like Prakash, Afsar now paid Senthil ₹300 a day, and whatever he made over and above it was his to keep. To Senthil, being a ‘family driver’ meant that he had a stable income, particularly at a time when there was still some hesitation around how COVID-19-safe, app-based cabs were. But his employers often asked him to work on weekends and so, unlike earlier, he was unable to go home to his family every other weekend. It was a compromise he willingly made, but he was not quite sure to what end he was hanging on to a life in the city. In a sense, he was waiting to see what was to come but unsure what he was aspiring towards anymore.

Pushing Back and Forth: Concluding Thoughts

The experience of waiting is calibrated and recalibrated through time and through movement across different situations, fundamentally altering drivers’ relationship to their work, to their aspirations and even to city traffic. Before the pandemic, the articulation of aspiration was oriented towards the future, anchored in imaginations and expectations of the city. With the pandemic, the lockdown and the consequent distortion of the very concept of a future, resilience amongst my interlocutors was communicated much more in terms of a focus on the day-to-day, the here and now. Underneath the economic losses, the will to aspire is what took a hit. Despite efforts at instilling optimism via the several spectacular events of banging thaalis or even the self-help mantras circulating in the digital space, aspiration cannot thrive on thin soil. After all, as Arjun Appadurai reminds us, the very fortification of the capacity to aspire requires a socio-economic and collective repertoire of practical experience in aspiring:

[the capacity to aspire] is a sort of metacapacity, and the relatively rich and powerful invariably have a more fully developed capacity to aspire …. It means that the better off you are (in terms of power, dignity, and material resources), the more likely you are to be conscious of the links between the more and less immediate objects of aspiration. Because the better off, by definition, have a more complex experience of the relation between a wide range of ends and means, because they have a bigger stock of available experiences of the relationship of aspirations and outcomes, because they are in a better position to explore and harvest diverse experiences of exploration and trial, because of their many opportunities to link material goods and immediate opportunities to more general and generic possibilities and options. (Appadurai, 2004, p. 68)

While Appadurai is focussed on the capacity to aspire amongst urban poor, I argue that thinking about aspiration amongst migrant cab drivers reveals how difficult upward mobility is, especially when beset by a pandemic. While the losses unleashed by the pandemic did span social classes, we may also probe how conceptions of time, waiting, hope and aspiration have evolved over time. Through providing a glimpse into how my interlocutors’ articulations, framings and expectations around time, waiting and aspiration are intertwined with hope, despair and anticipation, I have attempted to provide a picture of the effects of COVID-19 that defy attempts of quantification and calculability.