Book Review: Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns

This bold 21st century literary update of the movie Taxi Driver features a queer brown heroine who drives for a ride share service, worrying over making ends meet even as her fears, justified or otherwise, seem to suffocate her. 

Damani lives in a major city with her ailing Amma, who worries when she’s not at home. This is in large part due to Damani’s refusal to be anything other than vague about her whereabouts, and not just to her own mother:

I never tell people where exactly I am and I won’t tell you which city I live in either. In our current times, a city is a place, is a space, is the same everywhere minus the design of buildings, the demographics and the weather. Cities have all been structured the same. Right now, a few people have a lot, some are just fine, most are struggling. As long as I’m alive, does it really matter where I am? Besides, if the wrong people know my location, they’d find me, fine me, put me in prison for something that wasn’t my fault. Am I just paranoid?

This lack of urban specificity does double duty, linking Damani to Travis Bickle, her fictional forebear, while very much grounding the proceedings in both the everywhere and the now. Damani has to cope with corporate exploitation, making less money even as she drives more and more hours in increasingly unsafe situations. Complicating matters is the fact that her city is currently being rocked by protests against all manner of social injustices, so many that they all begin to blur together to her.

It’s near one of these protests that she literally runs into Jolene, the beautiful white activist whom she’s immediately smitten with. Damani, for all her bluster and obsession with working out, is a big old softie at heart. She can barely believe it when Jolene returns her interest, as the two embark on a torrid affair that seems like everything she ever wanted.

This changes when she makes the mistake of bringing Jolene to a minority-dominated environment to meet her friends. A strange transferal happens: Damani becomes more relaxed, while the usually soigné Jolene starts flinching at shadows. Things come to a head when the man Damani considers a brother attempts to explain to Jolene his ideas for ride-share drivers to fight back against exploitation. Jolene’s response is sub-optimal:

Shereef’s dark, majestic eyes looked at his lover’s and then at mine and I knew it in my heart, but I couldn’t accept it. Jolene and I had connected and clearly she was imperfect but I could teach her, I could change her! It wasn’t over, though. Shereef was a careful man, a chess player with his actions and words. But I was worried about what he was going to say. One wrong inflection could crush Jolene into pieces that I wouldn’t know how to put back together.

After everything goes wrong, a distraught Damani throws herself into her work. Fatigue and emotional unrest soon have her embarking on a series of poorly thought-out excursions, culminating in an act of violence that will finally shock her out of her fog. Will the city rise up to protect her in response, or will it destroy her and her Amma for good?

So I freely admit that while I still haven’t watched Taxi Driver, I did catch up with its main themes, arcs and beats via the Internet. With this limited knowledge, I was wholly impressed with the way Priya Guns reimagines the tale for our current global circumstances. Some of the scenes that made it from the movie to this book continue to resonate, even as the subtle tribute to the film’s main character made this feel like even more of a love letter than it already was.

Even more importantly, Your Driver Is Waiting is a well-considered indictment of modern capitalism, of a system that consistently fails the people who work the longest and hardest to survive. Its scathing attitude towards the privileged who talk a good game but would rather “raise awareness” instead of putting concrete plans into motion will likely alienate some, but will hopefully motivate others to reconsider whether they’re being allies in order to make themselves feel better or in order to truly create a more just world. Like the movie that came before it, it champions the underdog in a way that’s far more realistic than any feel-good story, in circumstances of continuing relevance for contemporary readers.