The art and urine of the taxi driver

If there is the smell of urine in some dry places,
That might be the trace of the taxi driver.


RIDING IN Jakarta is a way to torture yourself. No matter how vehemently the Jakartan urbanite complains, his ordeal will not be as tough as that of the taxi driver’s, because the taxi driver’s life exists precisely within the traffic jam. To survive, the taxi driver does his job with an art. The Jakartan urbanite needs air-conditioning in his cars so that his white shirt would not be drenched in sweat. Meanwhile for the taxi driver, air-conditioning is a torture and thus turned on only to serve the passenger. As soon as the passenger leaves, especially at night, the taxi driver switches the air-conditioning off and opens the window. When you wave down a cab and enter, do not be surprised if you feel that the air inside is still warm. This is certainly because our taxi driver has opened the windows and turned off the air-conditioning when there are no passengers inside. You see, driving a cab is indeed an art.

At a glance, the taxi driver seems to have it easy; sitting in front of a hotel or at the airport, and then a passenger approaches. On the face of it, his world revolves around air-conditioning and high class passengers. Such impression is obviously off the mark. How many drivers have been found dead with a knife impaled? It is the passenger who instigates such crime. Not to mention the frequency at which the taxi driver is deceived. “Just wait a moment, please, and keep the meter on,” a beautiful woman says before entering the bar. But then the woman never re-appears and, when sought, it turns out that she has disappeared into thin air, like a sublimed naphthalene ball. Good grief. When such thing happens, the taxi driver can only wallow in disappointments.

The most pitiable sight would be that of a drowsy taxi driver. I once had an accident because the sleepy driver sent his cab to kiss a bus. I, who was sitting at the front without using the seat belt, was thrown into the dashboard, dislocating thus my head of humerus. Yeah. I’m so done slinging my left arm for months on end. As a consequence, if I see that my taxi driver is drowsy, I at once volunteer to drive the cab. One morning, the driver immediately agreed. As soon as I got hold of the steering wheel, he set his seat down to a horizontal position, and started snoring. Well, because it looked like I was driving alone, people would think that the taxi was empty, and how was I confounded seeing people waving at me. Haha! As I got to the office, I woke him up, and took my wallet… to pay him! “Thank you,” he said, “you sure this is okay?” I was forced to act generous. Well, what else could I do?

Thus go the taxi drivers around the city, meeting a myriad of people. I have once read a report by a journalist posing as a driver, about a female passenger’s luring him into bed. Hmmm. How friendly.

Of course there is no lack of taxi drivers who are forced to gulp down their annoyance, when out-of-town passengers invite so many people into the cab, young and old all crowding in, a total of seventeen people in one car. Meanwhile, the taxi drivers who take the prostitutes home at dawn must be ready to face two things: body-heating sounds from French-kissing couples, or people vomiting. Loneliness is something familiar for taxi drivers. In rainy nights, they talk to their operator through their radio. It does not matter whether the operator is a man or woman; risqué remarks are invariably elicited to overcome the loneliness.

They are truly itinerants on the road, moving in and out the ephemeral days and nights in loneliness. If we think about the movie Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), we are reminded of how the city lights are reflected on the windscreen, resembling a river of lights and colors, where daydreams sail away. The taxi drivers surely have a lot of time to reflect and therefore become wise, due to their varying experiences. I once saw two different newspapers stored in the back pouch of the front seat—the popular Pos Kota and the more high-brow Kompas. “It depends on who the passengers are,” said our driver, who worked with such a spirit to serve.

Sitting perpetually on the car makes them prone to various ailments of the waist and kidney, such as kidney stone or God-knows-what. As a consequence, they have to drink a lot; they gulped down liters and liters of mineral water for no other reasons than to maintain their health. In the coldness of the car’s air-conditioning system, they must always wear thick jackets, but it is always difficult to restrain their urge to pee. Where can they pee? This sight is therefore familiar: taxi drivers’ peeing on the roadside, using their cab’s door as shelter, for a sense of propriety. Naturally. Where else can they pee? Jakarta has a terrible lack of public toilets, the ones that are not attached to the mosques, hotels, or malls. The self-standing toilets. Some say that one should not judge a house by its intricate parlor, but rather by its kitchen and toilet. Well, how about our house named Jakarta? It does not even have a toilet! The taxi drivers’ urine is thus every where, evaporating into the air to fall again as rains on our head. Haha!




Translated by Rani Elsanti




SENO GUMIRA AJIDARMA was born in Boston, June 19, 1958. He is an Indonesian writer-cum-photographer-cum-film critic. His short story Pelajaran Mengarang (Storytelling Lesson) was chosen by the national daily Kompas as the Best Short Story published in Kompas in 1993. He has written a number of short story collections, such as Manusia Kamar (The Man in Room, 1988), Penembak Misterius (Mystery Gunman, 1993), Saksi Mata (Eyewitness, 1994), Dilarang Menyanyi di Kamar Mandi (No Singing in the Bathroom, 1995), Sebuah Pertanyaan untuk Cinta (A Question for Love, 1996), Iblis Tidak Pernah Mati (The Devil Never Dies, 1999), and also several novels such as Matinya Seorang Penari Telanjang (The Death of a Stripper, 2000). In 1987, he received the Sea Write Award; while his short story Saksi Mata (Eyewitness) earned him the Dinny O’Hearn Prize for Literature, in 1997. He received Khatulistiwa Literary Award in 2005. Seno Gumira Ajidarma lives in Jakarta and teaches Media Studies at FFTV – IKJ and Film Studies at the Graduate School at Universitas Indonesia’s Faculty of Letters.



The essay has been published in the Djakarta! magazine and then again in a collection of other essays entitled Affair: Obrolan tentang Jakarta (Affair: Conversations on Jakarta; Yogyakarta: Penerbit Buku Baik, 2004). The re-publication of this essay is by courtesy of the author.